ZENY: Today, but how is this relevant? What are the

tasks where we can afford to ‘run’?

SOCART: For tasks in which false positives are associ-
ated with high risk, we should hedge our bets by
preregistering conservative hypotheses; for other
tasks, this sort of inhibition of is unfortunate.

ZENY: This is exactly why exploratory research still
has a place in a world with preregistration—
namely, for tasks where we can tolerate risk.

One may argue that risk mitigation is not what
preregistration is for. The purpose of institutional
review boards (IRBs) and ethics reviewing is to
ﬂag and prevent too risky studies (IRBs focus on
risk to human participants, while ethics reviewing
also addresses potential applications). We have
three reasons to think preregistration requirements
should depend on expected risk: (a) It is impossible
to review the implications of a study before you
have a solid study plan. If preregistration includes
risk assessment, this could provide input for IRBs
A Two-Sided Discussion of Preregistration of NLP Research