Ethics of Experimenting With People's Lives in Winter Backcountry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of the Avaluator Avalanche Accident Prevention Card, designed by Haegeli and McCammon (2006) and published by the Canadian Avalanche Association (CAA), was to reduce the number of avalanche accidents in Canada. Speaking to the ISSW 2006 audience, McCammon (October 3, 2006) announced an experiment on the Avaluator's effectiveness: “This is an experiment. This is an experiment with people's lives, with their loved ones.” Subsequently, we (Uttl et al., 2008a,b; 2009a,b,c,d) have shown that (1) the data behind the Avaluator are not available for inspection, (2) Haegeli and McCammon inappropriately excluded 1,148 avalanche records (82% of their sample) due to missing data, (3) the Obvious Clues prevention values in the Avaluator are grossly inflated, and (4) the number of accidents in Canada doubled following the introduction of the Avaluator. The two new disclaimers in the latest printing of the Avaluator (2009) advise that the Avaluator's Obvious Clues Method is not suitable for “any particular purpose” and that the Canadian Avalanche Center (CAC) is not responsible for any “injuries or death” or other damages caused by the Avaluator. Inexplicably, the CAA and CAC continue to claim that the Avaluator is “the best tool” and have not recalled it. We asked over 100 individuals how ethical various actions taken by the developers, CAA, and CAC (e.g., not recalling it) are. The participants rated the actions as nearly extremely unethical and believed that the developers, CAA and CAC should “tell the truth” and recall the Avaluator.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".