[HN Gopher] "Science must respect the dignity and rights of all ...
___________________________________________________________________
"Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans"
Author : alphabetting
Score : 141 points
Date : 2022-08-25 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| effingwewt wrote:
| Science must only be objective.
|
| Science should not care one whit about humans or what we
| want/think/feel.
|
| _We_ should respect people, there 's a huge difference.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, this is the final nail in the coffin for
| nature magazine or whatever they call themselves now.
|
| This entire blog post is them contradicting themselves
| repeatedly.
| PsySecGroup wrote:
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Science is only objective. But scientists are subjective and
| biased. The paper is not speaking about how people feel, they
| are speaking on the subjectiveness of scientists leading to the
| harm of minority people.
|
| What do you think happened in Nazi Germany?
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Politicians and populists pushed out false information, and
| then squashed anyone that tried to argue against the state as
| "radical", "harmful" and "against progress and science" at
| the point of a gun, refused to let people ask questions or
| have dissenting views which led them to the next step of
| being allowed to exterminate undesirables because no one was
| allowed to argue because "The Science was settled"
|
| We could of course also talk about how the centralized
| control of the science of genetics in the Soviet Union led to
| mass famines that killed millions and anyone who disagreed
| was put to death.
|
| It seems to me the problem isn't and never has been science,
| it is when a single institution, society, or government gets
| to dictate what "truth" is and "the science is settled" at
| the point of a gun, not that science gives us answers we
| don't like.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| >Politicians and populists pushed out false information,
| and then squashed anyone that tried to argue against the
| state as "radical", "harmful" and "against progress and
| science"
|
| I agree. This was a political problem which the article is
| actually trying to address.
|
| > It seems to me the problem isn't and never has been
| science, it is when a single institution, society, or
| government gets to dictate what "truth" is...
|
| This is not what the article is advocating.
|
| This seems very rational to me, for example:
|
| "Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute)
| and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances)
| carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms. "
| anon291 wrote:
| Certain lanes of inquiry that Nazi scientists engaged in were
| engaged in by many non-Nazi scientists. For example,
| craniometrics, despite it being now pretty conclusively shown
| to make no difference, was pursued as a science in both
| Germany and everywhere else. Just because its claims were
| untrue does not mean that those who honestly pursued it were
| not scientists. I mean, the hypothesis that head size affects
| brain size and thus intelligence makes intuitive sense. Those
| scientists who pursued such lines of inquiry and did so
| honestly and truthfully, and arrived at the proper
| conclusions based on the data (which many did), faithfully
| engaged in 'science'.
|
| Of course, manipulating data for political ends is wrong, and
| using any evidence you collect to advocate for the slaughter
| or imprisonment of innocent people is also wrong, but these
| are philosophical, ethical, moral, and religious questions,
| not scientific ones.
|
| There is a place for ethics in science... namely in the means
| in which one applies the scientific method (especially when
| experiments concern humans or animals). However, the data
| generated by the scientific method, if examined without bias,
| even if they're unpleasant, do not cause harm. The question
| of what to do with any unsavory facts is a question for
| ethics, philosophy, and religion.
|
| Facts don't kill people. People do.
| throwaway8582 wrote:
| > But scientists are subjective and biased
|
| Maybe, but how much does that matter? If the bias of these
| scientists is leading them to publish incorrect or low
| quality research, then Nature should reject it on the grounds
| that it's bad science. The fact that Nature feels the need to
| publish this is basically an admission that the political
| ideology of their leadership is not able to stand up to
| scientific scrutiny.
|
| > What do you think happened in Nazi Germany?
|
| Probably something a lot like this: Powerful institutions
| sacrificing objectivity to push propaganda and ideology
| falcrist wrote:
| Human-created science carries human biases and so does
| engineering and even math which is supposed to be pure and
| objective.
|
| James Burke presented this idea really well in episode 10 of
| The Day The Universe Changed. Biases sneak in when you decide
| what you're studying, how you're studying it, how you collect
| data, how you interpret the data, etc.
|
| The process itself might be unbiased, but that doesn't mean
| the application of that process is devoid of bias. Anyone
| remember the stanford prison experiment, the machine learning
| chatbot that 4chan turned to racism, or however many AIs
| people have designed that have looked at data and drawn
| racist conclusions?
|
| Are these things racist because racial stereotypes are
| objective immutable facts, or because the bots don't
| understand the context of those stereotypes?
|
| It's probably prudent to figure out the answer to that
| question before publishing. At least present a few hypotheses
| to explain the results.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If something will be destroyed by the truth, perhaps it should
| be.
| jmull wrote:
| - is it desirable for science be beneficial to people? - if so,
| doesn't that judgement need to be made? - in respect to whether
| or not to publish a paper or article, who should make the
| judgement as to whether the science is beneficial or not, if not
| the publisher?
|
| I think if you're going to object to this, you need to do so on
| the substance of the guidelines. Otherwise you're just
| substituting your own editorial judgement for that of the
| publisher, in effect claiming the authority of what is fit to
| publish for yourself.
| anon31337 wrote:
| jaywalk wrote:
| _People_ must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.
|
| _Science_ must be free from this nonsense, and just be science.
| What a joke.
| mmmpop wrote:
| Science is (and should continue to be) cold and unfeeling.
| That's why it's science. Science!
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| The scientific method is a process. There is no need to
| anthropomorphize it. What exactly are you trying to say?
| dcow wrote:
| Meta comment: It's disappointing to see this axed from the front
| page. While I agree we should generally avoid low quality flame-
| war inducing content, the fact that _Nature_ , one of the most
| prestigious and renown scientific magazines/journals has adopted
| such a viewpoint certainly warrants exposure and discussion.
| remram wrote:
| I don't see any evidence that it was "axed", it is not getting
| that many upvotes and is falling to later pages.
| dcow wrote:
| It was top 5 or 10 or so on the front page and then after a
| page refresh gone. It has more votes than many of the topics
| on the front page and discussion is active. Maybe just really
| unlucky timing on my part but not the normal progression you
| see. I know these type topics are typically removed from the
| spotlight by staff out of a presumption that the comments
| won't be productive. I think that's fair in some cases, but
| if it was done in this case I am stating my disagreement.
| john-shaffer wrote:
| IIRC, posts with more comments than votes are automatically
| penalized. It is #11 on the front page now, though.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| I noticed the exact same thing. I found the post on the
| front page. A short time after, mid second page. Last I
| checked it was on the 3rd. I suspect there's a bit too much
| wrongthink going on here and someone doesn't like it. The
| priesthood is displeased with the vulgar masses in this
| thread.
| sjducb wrote:
| I think the best way to help ethinic minorities and women is to
| get accurate facts about their lives. If you want to improve the
| world then you have to start from the truth.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| No, science must pursue the truth, no matter where it leads.
| There is no such thing as a hate fact.
| volkadav wrote:
| you'd probably benefit from reading and thinking about this
| wikipedia article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
|
| sadly, what is called a fact is a malleable thing in the hands
| of the ill-intentioned, and all too many bigots are more than
| happy to pass off pseudo-science as the real deal. "science"
| isn't some abstract thing, it's composed of people and their
| actions, and as i think every adult will recognize, people can
| be turbo-shitty. like every other human endeavor, it deserves a
| close eye and critical thought. (i say this as a big fan of
| science in general and a degree-holder in the physical
| sciences.)
| kodyo wrote:
| Positing ideas that can be disproven is science. It's also
| how thinking works.
| nitrixion wrote:
| Sorry, this is completely off topic. Why aren't you using
| capital letters? I've seen this trend starting to gain more
| traction and it makes no sense to me.
| singlow wrote:
| If the science is bad, then the science is bad. If you do
| good science and find a result that doesn't fit your
| preconceived ideas of right and wrong, that doesn't make the
| science bad. You don't need to be concerned with the ethical
| impact of the truth, but you do need to be concerned with the
| ethics of your process.
|
| I don't understand what the actions of pseudo-science bigots
| has to do with someone who is doing real science. Idiots will
| be idiots regardless of what real science says.
| freejazz wrote:
| Oh, good and bad. It's just that simple!
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Right we just publish the facts. If another group wants to use
| it to justify genocide that's on them. I wash my hands of it.
|
| This is of course merely hypothetical and factual research
| results have never been used in this way. Similarly no
| scientific consensus has ever turned out to be wholly incorrect
| after being used to perpetrate atrocities.
| blueflow wrote:
| What would you do when someone says "Women are inferior
| because the Sun shines?"
| red75prime wrote:
| The proposed medication is worse than the disease. Fight
| fascism/racism/whatever with state supported lies (of
| omission). What could go wrong?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| If you read carefully I'm actually not proposing any
| specific course and I think the reality will be nuanced and
| highly context-specific.
|
| What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be
| completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other
| elements are interested in their work and how they might
| use it.
|
| The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of
| ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong
| and has lead to obvious harms in the past. Research on any
| domain of human activity is a political act and produces a
| political product, the researchers need to be aware of that
| and actively participate in that part of the process as
| well. Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| > What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should
| be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other
| elements are interested in their work and how they might
| use it.
|
| Why?
|
| > The consensus in this comment section is that that sort
| of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very
| wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past.
|
| You think that because you have biases, like all humans
| do. You say harms can arise. Let's try to do an exercise.
| It's the late 40s early 50s and research is finally
| starting to show there are, in fact, no real biological
| races of humans. We are one human race. The dutiful
| scientist at that time considers the society he is in,
| the notions of morality he has and decides it would be
| harmful to publish his research. Who knows what some
| crazy extremists will do with this fact. They might give
| the blacks rights, they might rile them up, they might
| they might even allow miscegenation! Bear in mind, all
| these were societal harms at that time!
|
| Is this the future you wish? Or this scenario doesn't
| count because it's the wrong politics? Have we found the
| end all be all of morality and must now protect it at all
| costs, even from facts if need be?
|
| > Research on any domain of human activity is a political
| act and produces a political product, the researchers
| need to be aware of that and actively participate in that
| part of the process as well
|
| I disagree. The way I see it, there is no politics in
| science. Science is not a set of beliefs. It's a process.
| It's a method of observing empirical reality and
| producing methods to describe it.
|
| > Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
|
| For whom?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I think the reality will be nuanced and highly context-
| specific
|
| If you actually think that, you haven't been paying much
| attention to the behavior of the Twitter mob over the
| past few years.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| There was plenty of racism before the scientific method,
| there will be plenty after we ban using it to study anything
| related to race.
|
| And this guidance won't prevent people from thinking and
| spreading racist ideas, it'll just keep people from studying
| anything related race.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Censoring yourself on what some other person may do with your
| words is folly.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yes you can either fully censor yourself or publish it with
| no regard for how it will be used by others. There are
| certainly no other options.
| tarakat wrote:
| Okay. Then let's censor science, and put an asterisk next to
| every published study: "If the results had been different,
| they would not have been published."
|
| And when someone claims "research shows your prejudice is
| unfounded", one can justifiably answer with "because the
| findings have been cherry-picked to support a pre-determined
| conclusion. So I will trust my gut instinct, because the
| scientists have admitted their research is subordinate to
| propaganda."
|
| Though I have a feeling social science will try to be very
| discreet about what kind of filtering they're doing, and will
| hope that, when they disseminate findings they like, that we
| will have forgotten they're self-confessed propagandists
| first, and scientists second.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| > Right we just publish the facts. If another group wants to
| use it to justify genocide that's on them. I wash my hands of
| it.
|
| Unironically this.
|
| Science is here to present facts.
|
| Politics is here to decide what we do with the facts.
|
| Do not mix the two.
| twblalock wrote:
| > Similarly no scientific consensus has ever turned out to be
| wholly incorrect after being used to perpetrate atrocities.
|
| How do you suppose it was proved incorrect?
|
| If people can't question the current consensus because it
| might offend someone, then the current consensus cannot be
| improved or overturned.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets take
| an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through the
| population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a
| scientist finds out that the disease is primarily (exclusively)
| spread by red haired people. Should they just publish the
| finding? The fact becoming openly known might lead to mobs of
| people chasing red hairs and locking them up or even lynching
| them. A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities
| first.
|
| Another example could be that there is some disease that is
| entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group
| (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released
| into the public? This might encourage some groups to
| purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in
| significant danger.
|
| I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said
| the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples.
| I'm sure we had many situations where resesearch was suppressed
| in reality for some reason or another.
| hbrn wrote:
| The question is where and how do you draw the boundary for
| censorship? If you can't use science to draw the boundary,
| what is left? Let humans with their own biases do it? This
| inevitably turns into dictatorship.
|
| You can come up with hypotheticals where truth strategy _may_
| harm some people. But censorship strategy is _guaranteed_ to
| harm more people in the long run.
|
| Also your hypotheticals can be easily countered:
|
| > disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and
| deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that
| research just be released into the public? This might
| encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people,
| thus putting them in significant danger.
|
| Let's say you decided to censor your research. And then few
| years later the groups that you mentioned got lucky enough to
| discover the same disease. Now, because your research wasn't
| public, the world was not able to develop a cure.
|
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
| mizzack wrote:
| You don't need to make up a hypothetical disease. Just look
| at the current monkeypox situation with health authorities
| waffling on how best to message that 98% of cases are in men
| who have sex with men.
|
| It's simultaneously totally relevant information from a
| public health standpoint while also being stigmatizing.
| Completely ignoring the facts/suppressing that info to avoid
| stigma would contribute to greater spread within and outside
| of that community, and is irresponsible. Nuance, indeed.
| dqpb wrote:
| > quietly talk to the authorities first.
|
| This is risky because the authorities are are almost
| certainly idiots.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets
| take an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through
| the population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a
| scientist finds out that the disease is primarily
| (exclusively) spread by red haired people. Should they just
| publish the finding?
|
| Yes, they should.
|
| >A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities
| first.
|
| OK - talk to the authorities first, and then publish the
| results.
|
| >Another example could be that there is some disease that is
| entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some
| group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be
| released into the public?
|
| Yes, it should.
|
| >I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you
| said the truth should always come up,. I just give
| counterexamples.
|
| You didn't give counter-examples. You gave examples of times
| where the information should be shared with the public and
| then asserted that it shouldn't for .. I don't know what
| reason.
|
| Here's a pragmatic reason for sharing truthful information
| with the public: If you want the population to trust public
| health officials, public health officials need to trust the
| public with the truth.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| ding ding ding
|
| I don't think a lot of scientists and health officials
| realize that their work is two sided. ESP if you're working
| with public health the other side is who you view as the
| unwashed masses. You don't get to make commandments
|
| Maintaining trust with the public is the most important
| thing to do, and the best way to do that is transparency.
|
| All the games about if we "should tell people xyz" needs to
| end if these institutions want to rebuild their credibility
| with the broader public.
|
| The cdc is at least being retrospective but it seems like
| nature has gone the opposite way and are institutionally
| entrenching this idea that the public can't be trusted with
| the truth.
| kansface wrote:
| Ah, we've already tried this! Check out the early history of
| HIV in SF - scientists/doctors/politicians knew how it was
| spread and refused to do or say anything lest they further
| stigmatize the gay community, which was disastrous to the
| actual gay community.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| This is incorrect. Politicians and doctors refused to do
| very much about it because gay lives weren't considered
| worth saving. Before the viral factor was discovered it was
| believed it was literally divine punishment to kill gays.
| [deleted]
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities
| first.
|
| Who will then have to create a public health campaign
| targeted at, for example, gay men, and everyone will learn of
| the research anyways.
|
| Besides which, most countries are led by people who
| constantly leak secrets. It would get out long before any
| action could be taken.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| Science brings facts.
|
| Politics deals with how we use those facts.
|
| If the fact brought about by science leads one group of
| people to kill another, we are faced with a political
| decision. Do we allow this or do we stand against it.
|
| We need the separation of science and politics. Otherwise,
| important facts will be politically suppressed and falsehoods
| will be presented as truth for political gain.
|
| It's a story as old as the world, I don't understand why so
| many people still want to mix those two.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Finally, a charitable reading!
|
| The article draws the comparison with the ethics of doing
| science on human subjects. We mostly agree in principle, that
| some science simply shouldn't be done if it harms human test
| subjects[1], _even if_ it would produce important scientific
| output. We 're willing to make that trade-off because the
| cost outweighs the potential results. The article simply
| extends this principle to harms done to humans that are not
| test subjects.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentat
| io...
| contravariant wrote:
| Those are terrible examples. In both cases you're advocating
| to keep vital information about how a disease works and
| spreads hidden in order to protect the social standing of an
| ethnic group _while that very group is most at risk_.
|
| Heck this isn't even an hypothetical scenario, you'd suggest
| we should have kept secret the ways in which monkeypox
| spreads?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Those sorts of hypothetical "facts" don't just happen though.
| At best there might be some research indicating a very high
| correlation between hair colour and level of infectiousness.
| But just as often as not it turns out not to be the
| straightforward connection an initial finding might suggest.
| So there's no reason to withhold publishing of the results of
| such research, but every reason to ensure that new research
| is presented in a way that makes it clear that they're new
| preliminary findings that are likely to be overturned as more
| research is done and better understanding is achieved. If
| that still sets the mobs loose then your only option is
| government intervention to protect the victims. Suppressing
| knowledge about the real world is not a feasible long (or
| even medium) term strategy anyway - it's there to be
| discovered by anyone and everyone.
| DeWilde wrote:
| As someone who believes in Darwinism I think this is good as it
| will only accelerate shifting any meaningful research into the
| labs of private multi-billion companies.
|
| Will this be good for us, the public? Probably not but only the
| capable survive, and the current academia is not capable of
| survival.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I'm pro trans rights, pro LGBTQ, and also very much value free
| speech.
|
| There is a trend on the political left right now that basically
| equates speech directly with violence (e.g. asking whether a man
| is capable of getting pregnant is violence)
|
| >Academic content that undermines the dignity or rights of
| specific groups
|
| >We commit to using this guidance cautiously and judiciously,
| consulting with ethics experts and advocacy groups where needed.
|
| It seems very likely to me that this policy is going to give
| advocacy groups and crusaders the ability to start censoring
| scientific publications that disagree with what they are saying.
| scelerat wrote:
| > There is a trend on the political left right now that
| basically equates speech directly with violence (e.g. asking
| whether a man is capable of getting pregnant is violence)
|
| I must admit I have not seen an argument like this outside of a
| strawman characterization.
| Dig1t wrote:
| https://youtu.be/uU7nzwbJ-Hk?t=41
|
| Here is a good example:
|
| > "I want to recognize that your line of questioning is
| transphobic and opens trans people up to violence"
|
| This is a US senator and a Berkeley law professor talking in
| court.
| thisiscorrect wrote:
| In fact, there were even claims during the 2020 riots that
| "White silence is violence." See e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSVUrvnJFXs. That's right,
| even _not_ saying anything at all (including not parroting
| the expected slogans) is a direct act of violence.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| This is not the same thing.
|
| If you know the kid next door is being abused - and you do
| nothing about it, you are partially at fault for the
| violence happening to the kid. If you do something (call
| child services, for example) and it fails, you tried, and
| should try again lest you fall in the same trap.
|
| It is similar with police violence and racism. If you sit
| idly by and don't demand change, despite knowing people are
| getting beaten and things like that, you are partially
| responsible.
|
| I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with other things
| too: You knew someone was taking money from the company yet
| did nothing, you are at risk of getting in trouble too. It
| isn't a concept that exist in only one arena.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| shredprez wrote:
| I see it more as an acknowledgement that, in the midst of a
| propaganda war (which the entire world is now engaged in 24/7,
| thanks to the internet), the information you put out into the
| world may have strategic value to individuals or groups whose
| goals are contrary to the good of the human race. When true
| things are used to justify horrific actions, it's particularly
| difficult to prevent because that truth lends serious
| credibility to the supposed rationality of the horrors being
| enacted. Superficially-rational evil is the most destructive
| force in the world specifically because it's built on a
| foundation of carefully-selected truths.
|
| That doesn't mean the truth should die or we should hide from
| true things. But it's impossible to avoid the amoral power of
| true things, and pretending "just telling the truth" won't or
| can't lead to horrific outcomes is a level of naivete
| intelligent people can't afford to have in an era when
| political and civil violence is back in the Overton window
| throughout the world.
| croes wrote:
| Everything can be used to harm someone. Every knowledge can be
| taken out of context to bolster someones agenda.
|
| So stop publishing anything because you can't prevent harming
| others inadvertently.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| This would not only destroys woke research but pro-woke as well
| because if you are guaranteeing publication bias you can't trust
| the research either way.
|
| This is also a boon to racists who never have to defend
| themselves against science again.
|
| "Yeah that study shows that Hispanic immigrants don't commit more
| crimes, but it's against the rules to publish anything else"
| i_love_limes wrote:
| This has garnered quite a lot of reactions from the comments. I'd
| like to ask a genuine question about this, from the perspective
| of assuming that Nature is acting in good faith about this.
|
| Let's say someone has calculated the polygenic scores (PGS) of
| Heteronormativity, meaning that a model, can predict with a
| decent level of accuracy that someone will or will not be
| straight from their DNA.
|
| This, in an ideal world, would be good knowledge to have. You can
| raise you child knowing and accepting this reality.
|
| In the world we live in, this would be used to abort babies that
| don't pass the PGS to the vast majority of people who have this
| information.
|
| So, in this case, where we have an oppressed group that can be
| oppressed further, is knowledge better than ignorance? It seems
| that many in the comments would say yes, and that the pursuit of
| knowledge is the clear winner, and anything else is merely the
| price of progress. Which I might ask, you would say the same
| thing if you were gay?
|
| I want to make one thing clear, this is not a silly thought
| experiment. This is very possible right now with the advent of
| biobanks, GWAS tooling, and machine learning. Nature is thinking
| about these things when writing that up.
|
| I presume that most of you would agree that releasing this
| information for anyone to know would have negative consequences,
| and should maybe be controlled. So, then, you fundamentally agree
| with Nature's stance, do you not? We're merely talking about
| where the line of publishing exists, not if one should exist at
| all? Are you not being a bit overzealous with your declarations
| of orthodoxy?
| n4r9 wrote:
| That's a great example, much better than the one I thought of.
|
| The line has to be somewhere, right? Even if someone dismisses
| your example, you can make it more and more extreme to the
| point of "if this knowledge becomes public, a maniac will 99%
| likely destroy the rest of the earth".
| intimidated wrote:
| Which is more likely:
|
| 1. These censorship policies will be used to save the world
| from 99% certain destruction at the hands of a maniac.
|
| 2. These censorship policies will be used to crush evidence
| that [GROUP X] is overrepresented in [FAVORABLE SITUATION Y]
| due to [FAVORABLE TRAIT Z], thus legitimizing policies
| unjustly punishing [GROUP X].
|
| Even if you think this censorship is righteous and good, how
| will you deal with folks no longer trusting the scientific
| basis of what you claim? Why should anyone believe there is
| no genetic difference between [GROUPS D and E] when you're
| confessing that you'd never admit it?
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > from the perspective of assuming that Nature is acting in
| good faith about this
|
| Wrong. Unless you consider "good faith" saying what they really
| mean, in which case, yes, it IS good faith.
|
| > I presume that most of you would agree that releasing this
| information for anyone to know would have negative
| consequences, and should maybe be controlled
|
| No, most of HN's readers would _not_ agree with that. A good
| many of us, maybe even most, would agree with the Bible, John
| 8:31-32:
|
| _And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you
| free._
| gadders wrote:
| It's an interesting thought experiment. However, a lot of
| scientific discoveries have the possibility of being used for
| good or ill. Why single out this one?
|
| Scanning of foetuses allows you to spot any issues to help keep
| the developing baby healthy, but is also used to abort female
| foetuses in some places.
|
| Or what about nuclear physics - you get a decent energy source
| (subject to green objections) but also nuclear bombs.
|
| I think until a scientific discovery is widely known, you never
| know what uses for good or ill it would be put to. Supposing
| the technology you outline above plus gene editing cured heart
| disease or cancer?
| tckerr wrote:
| TheFreim wrote:
| In this scenario the "oppressed" group could only be "oppressed
| further" if you assume the position that abortion is killing a
| person, otherwise you wouldn't be able to call it a further
| oppression since nobody came into existence to be oppressed. I
| don't see how, if you assume the common pro-choice paradigm
| which usually coincides with the views you express, this could
| be considered wrong.
| i_love_limes wrote:
| Is this a real opinion? My god.
|
| Thinking that aborting female embryos because they will be
| considered less important in society is wrong, AND think that
| removing a women's right to choose entirely based on
| religious teachings is wrong, AND thinking that forced
| sterilization of a whole cultural/ethnic group is wrong, are
| not incompatible.
|
| Where are you getting these opinions from? I'd honestly have
| a hard look at where you got these thoughts from, they are
| pretty backwards, and not morally considered at all.
| ISO-morphism wrote:
| I appreciate the question you posed in your original post.
|
| I'd challenge you to engage with GP rather than deriding
| them. Your comment comes off as a selfish display of moral
| superiority that shuts down discussion and serves to
| further polarize. GP pointed out a perceived logical
| inconsistency in moral reasoning, by definition this is
| morally considered. I don't think they're acting in bad
| faith, and while a more inquisitive tone on their part may
| have avoided heated responses, I don't think GP's line of
| thought is beyond the pale. I hope we can try to follow
| where those opinions come from rather than talking past
| each other.
|
| > Thinking that aborting female embryos because they will
| be considered less important in society is wrong, AND think
| that removing a women's right to choose entirely based on
| religious teachings is wrong, AND thinking that forced
| sterilization of a whole cultural/ethnic group is wrong,
| are not incompatible.
|
| You assert this as if it is inherently true, which isn't
| going to do anything against a logical challenge. There is
| a widely-held line of reasoning that your first two
| statements contradict.
|
| In the pro-choice position that women have a positive right
| to abortion, many people in attempting to understand that
| position interpret the moral grounds for it to be that the
| fetus is not a person - it does not have a right to life,
| therefore terminating its life is moral. That
| interpretation of the moral justification doesn't come from
| nowhere, I've heard it in person from people arguing in
| good faith. Your original post suggests that disseminating
| information that could cause more women to elect for
| abortion is morally wrong because it harms marginalized
| groups. This undermines the moral grounds for abortion as
| the individual negative right to life is widely held to be
| the most basic of rights, to be universal to persons, and
| so if the fetus is to be considered a member of a
| marginalized group, working backwards it must necessarily
| be a person and necessarily have the right to life.
| Therefore it is illogical considering only these three
| factors to hold all simultaneously: (i) a fetus does not
| have a negative right to life, (ii) a woman has a positive
| right to abortion, (iii) a fetus can be a member of a
| marginalized group of persons, as (iii) contradicts (i),
| leaving (ii) unjustified.
|
| That line of reasoning is consistent. It flows forwards
| from individuality, that group rights are derived from
| individual rights, the personal right to life, and that
| personhood is a necessary condition for membership in a
| group of persons. It hinges on the assumption that the
| moral justification for abortion is that a fetus is not a
| person, and does not have a right to life.
|
| One legitimate rebuttal to GPs probe, and defense for your
| 3 assertions, is that there is an alternative moral
| justification for the pro choice position. It's not that a
| fetus does not have a right to life, but that a woman's
| rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination, or some
| other factors, supersede the fetus' right to life. There
| are more, but "your thoughts are backwards" isn't one of
| them. That's exactly the imposition of dogma that other
| commenters are fretting over.
|
| I'd be curious to hear your opinion on the recent case of a
| pregnant woman in Texas pulled over in the HOV lane who
| argued that due to the state's legislation limiting
| abortion, the fetus inside her should qualify as a person
| and so she is justified in driving there.
|
| EDIT: typo
| goethes_kind wrote:
| I never understood this perspective, that aborting fetuses
| whose prospects are guaranteed to be worse, is somehow wrong or
| even oppression, and somehow oppression of a whole group of
| other people completely unrelated to the family. If me and my
| wife are planning a baby, that's between us. There is no
| outside group that has a say or is somehow being oppressed when
| we decide that we do not want a child who is going to suffer
| more than necessary due to being dealt the wrong cards.
|
| >I presume that most of you would agree that releasing this
| information for anyone to know would have negative
| consequences, and should maybe be controlled.
|
| No. What? Are you insane? If you knew that a couple were going
| to have a baby with whatever problems, and you did not inform
| them of this because in your mind, their decision might then
| somehow upset some other group of people who are neither the
| mother, nor the father, nor even the close family, then I would
| find that morally unacceptable.
|
| EDIT: Although I disagree with your choice of example, I would
| also like to say, that I do think that there ethics is
| important in any profession, including in scientific research
| and publication.
|
| EDIT 2: I think your reasoning and people who think like you
| comes from this (very American notion) of thinking that being
| homosexual or being deaf or being mute somehow makes you part
| of a "community". And then from this comes this idea of
| oppression when the community is deprived of one of their new
| prospective members. I find this whole thinking absurd.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| There is one very common case where people abort fetuses
| because of reasons that are not "saving the child from worse
| prospects". This is people not wanting girls because "girls
| are economic and social liabilities and boys are assets". In
| my country, sex-selective abortion has been so prevalent that
| doctors now don't tell parents the sex of the fetus. If they
| did, very quickly would there be a difference of millions
| between males and females in the population with all the
| social problems that brings about.
|
| If somehow tomorrow, some research project resulted in a very
| cheap device, usable by anyone, that could tell the sex of a
| baby, I think one would have to at least seriously debate and
| ponder whether publishing such work is good for the country
| or not.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| > I think your reasoning and people who think like you comes
| from this (very American notion) of thinking that being
| homosexual or being deaf or being mute somehow makes you part
| of a "community". And then from this comes this idea of
| oppression when the community is deprived of one of their new
| prospective members. I find this whole thinking absurd.
|
| Thank you for putting this into words. I share the same
| perspective but never articulated it so elegantly. You made
| my evening.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > In the world we live in, this would be used to abort babies
| that don't pass the PGS to the vast majority of people who have
| this information.
|
| Does it matter? Neither fetuses nor abstract population groups
| are moral agents, only individual people are. Therefore,
| selective abortion of any kind (that does not cause potential
| offspring to be worse of) is morally neutral act.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >In the world we live in, this would be used to abort babies
| that don't pass the PGS to the vast majority of people who have
| this information.
|
| Are you sure about that? We have a pretty good way of
| predicting the sex of the fetus and somehow our misogynistic
| and sexist society doesn't have a mass problem of aborting
| females.
|
| >So, in this case, where we have an oppressed group that can be
| oppressed further, is knowledge better than ignorance?
|
| Abortion is oppression?
|
| Today, in most regions, you can abort a fetus for any reason
| ... even terrible reasons. Are you advocating for abortion
| controls so that abortion is only done for the 'right' reasons?
|
| >I want to make one thing clear, this is not a silly thought
| experiment. This is very possible right now with the advent of
| biobanks, GWAS tooling, and machine learning.
|
| If it is possible today, where are those mass abortions?
|
| >I presume that most of you would agree that releasing this
| information for anyone to know would have negative
| consequences, and should maybe be controlled.
|
| You assume you can hide this information. Why do you assume
| that?
|
| And no, I don't agree that it should be controlled.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > We have a pretty good way of predicting the sex of the
| fetus and somehow our misogynistic and sexist society doesn't
| have a mass problem of aborting females.
|
| But we do...
|
| > The natural sex ratio at birth is approximately 103 to 106
| males for 100 females.[37][38] However, because of sex-
| selective abortions, the sex ratio at birth in countries with
| high proportions of missing women have ranged 108.5 in India
| to 121.2 in Mainland China.[6][18] As a result, counts of
| missing women are often due to missing female children.[18]
| It is estimated that the cumulative number of missing female
| births due to sex-selective abortion globally is 45 million
| from 1970 to 2017.[38]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women
| timmg wrote:
| > In the world we live in, this would be used to abort babies
| that don't pass the PGS to the vast majority of people who have
| this information.
|
| _If_ you think that aborting babies, in general, is not
| immoral, then _I, personally,_ don 't see this as a problem.
|
| Let's try a different thought experiment:
|
| If you were doing IVF because you wanted _one_ child. And you
| had two embryos. So you knew you would discard one. And you
| found out one of the embryos was going to be born blind. Which
| would you discard?
|
| Most people (I think) would discard the to-be-blind one. You
| could argue that that is ableist. But another way to think of
| it is: you had a choice to decide if your child can see. You
| chose to give them sight.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| nubero wrote:
| Enrico Fermi comes to mind: "Whatever Nature has in store for
| mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance
| is never better than knowledge."
|
| I guess he wasn't talking about the magazine...
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| That might be the finest rebuttal on offer
| AlanYx wrote:
| It's interesting that the linked policy says almost the exact
| opposite of Fermi's statement, implying that ignorance is
| sometimes better than knowledge: "...considerations of harm can
| occasionally supersede the goal of seeking or sharing new
| knowledge, and a decision not to undertake or not to publish a
| project may be warranted."
| nubero wrote:
| Indeed... The rot has spread frighteningly far.
| Banana699 wrote:
| I know the people behind statments like these are coming to
| it with extremly unintelligent and bad faith definitions and
| intentions, but the actual words are actually correct. If you
| had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs
| to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any
| substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath,
| you would probably do it. If you had the atomic bomb, you
| probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or
| Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA. If
| you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread
| propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably
| liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is
| built in from the outset. This is a very well-discussed topic
| in philosophy of science and technology and good sci-fi.
|
| Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if
| climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always
| good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if
| knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to _new_ dangers,
| its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its
| spread or pursuit.
|
| The dishonesty of the -ve IQ people behind attitudes like the
| criticized is that they see danger in everything and use
| moral panic to enforce views. If the actual "dangers" they
| are freaking out about are legitimate, they would have been
| justified to supress (non-violently) science and technology)
| colpabar wrote:
| yamrzou wrote:
| This is so general that its either very obvious or nonsense. They
| should include examples of what they consider "harmful science".
| Analemma_ wrote:
| That would defeat the purpose. The whole point is to have rules
| vague enough that they can be selectively applied whenever
| there's an angry mob on Twitter that has to be appeased, while
| still saying "hey, we're just following our policy".
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Right. Like many commenters on this thread, people tend to
| pick apart these types of messages from these now-woke
| institutions from a logical perspective, which is a huge
| mistake. These are effectively _religious tenets_ ; they
| aren't issues of logic but issues of faith.
| deepdriver wrote:
| Studies on heritable differences in intelligence are effectively
| banned in the West due to the overlap with genetics of ancestral
| continental populations, or what's approximately known as race.
| Everyone who looks at the well-developed, consistently-replicated
| body of study here knows what is known and why it is politically
| unpalatable. East Asian countries do not have these self-imposed
| bans on scientific truth (these truths, anyway). They will do the
| research first, reap its rewards, and develop a permanent
| civilizational advantage. Designer babies are an irresistible
| competitive edge.
|
| Ironic and sad, as it's precisely this research that could
| finally close today's measured gaps.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| "In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations
| studied may outweigh the benefit of publication."
|
| I'm sure our demigods will gladly enlighten us with their wisdom
| to distinguish between misthoughts and correct thoughts.
|
| So that when journalists claim to be following the science there
| will be no dissenting voice in research to disagree.
|
| Those who defend opposing ideas will have no leg to stand on and
| will rightfully be labeled science deniers
| bergenty wrote:
| At a very simple level, it's akin to not yelling bomb in a
| theatre since it would be faster and more efficient for
| everyone to evacuate in an orderly manner without being
| informed of the bomb. I feel like our society does require some
| gatekeepers and can't be run well if it's just vocal
| collectives yelling at each other.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| > I feel like our society does require some gatekeepers
|
| Which should be people who broadly speaking share your
| political and ethical beliefs, yes?
|
| And, if the gatekeepers are people with a different sense of
| morality, it is fascism and must be torn down in the name of
| freedom, correct?
| bergenty wrote:
| There is something to building around a consensus on who
| they are roughly around the phrase "first cause no harm"
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| What is harm?
| freejazz wrote:
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I feel like our society does require some gatekeepers and
| can't be run well if it's just vocal collectives yelling at
| each other.
|
| I'm glad you recognize in yourself that you can't be trusted
| with certain information and you need, personally, a big
| brother to lie to you. You do you. I'd appreciate if you
| didn't make the same assessment about me, and others.
| mellosouls wrote:
| TL;DR:
|
| Principle 1:
|
| _Researchers should be free to pursue lines of inquiry and the
| communication of knowledge and ideas without fear of repression
| or censorship._
|
| All following principles:
|
| _Eh, on second thoughts, maybe not so much..._
| tlb wrote:
| Well, I respect them for formally stating as policy what was
| presumably being done informally for a long time.
|
| It gives their audience something specific to disagree with,
| rather than a vague feeling that some kinds of research were
| being buried.
| wikitopian wrote:
| The astrophysical sciences make me feel vulnerable,
| insignificant, insecure, and irrelevant relative to the vast
| expanse of the universe.
|
| I demand an end to this harm.
| 62951413 wrote:
| Telescopes evoke phallic associations and so promote the male
| dominance. The world demands female-friendly optics.
| #defundastronomy #cancelgalileo
| oaiey wrote:
| Things like this will not foster review/magazine based
| publications.
|
| Well they are on their way down, this will just speed that up.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| Researchers are asked to carefully consider the potential
| implications (including inadvertent consequences) of research on
| human groups defined by attributes of race, ethnicity, national
| or social origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation,
| religion, political or other beliefs, age, disease, (dis)ability
| or other status
|
| ---
|
| Say there's an article coming out clearly disproving racial
| differences. Will the researchers be "carefully considering the
| potential implications" of this finding on people with national-
| socialist persuasions?
|
| It is after a finding negativity affecting a group of people
| defined by, and I quote "political or other belief".
|
| Or is it only the correct political beliefs that one must be
| "carefully considering the potential implications" of?
|
| If that's the case, can I please know who decides the correct
| political beliefs?
| tpoacher wrote:
| > but may be harmed by its publication.
|
| I can't think of a _single_ piece of research for which this
| wouldn 't apply.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| It entirely unsurprising that an author cannot be found attached
| to this excrement
| dcow wrote:
| Most of this seems wildly unenforceable at a practical level. And
| yes that's all really bad and non-secular and society will be
| harmed because people, even with the best intentions, will try to
| filter facts. The two terminology clarifications they make I
| don't mind though: sex vs gender and race vs biological lineage.
| I think society would be better off with very clear and precise
| usage of those terms.
|
| I mentally flip a table every time I hear someone colloquially
| say "sex is a social construct" (they mean gender) or get
| hesitant about describing the sex of their gestating baby because
| they want to leave it ambiguous or on the flip side want to have
| a "gender reveal" party. People care about the sex of your baby,
| not their gender. And it's totally fair to study the effects of
| biological lineage on modern humans instead of treating all
| humans as the same biological profile or reducing the question to
| _tribally_ relevant characteristics like skin color (race _is_ a
| social construct, but biological lineage is not).
|
| Consequently this is why the zeitgeist is so weird. Everything is
| about e.g. _racial identity_ but race is a social construct that
| by definition you can 't apply based on biological attributes
| (just like gender) so... ... ??? ...
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| As you've identified, they've tied themselves into knots with
| inconsistencies and hypocritical positions. There is no logic
| to be found here, only insanity masquerading as such. Luckily
| for everyone else, the scientific method will remain, even if
| it is temporarily suppressed.
| deepdriver wrote:
| Ideology can remain inconsistent longer than you can remain
| fed and housed while opposing it.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Most of this seems wildly unenforceable at a practical level.
|
| At a practical level, it's very enforceable. You just setup a a
| "science-must-respect-dignity-of-all-humans" committee at every
| major publication and university, and just block any violating
| papers from publication, prevent grants from going to 'bad'
| research and don't hire anyone who does subscribe to your
| orthodoxy.
|
| We're well on our way to do that (if not already there).
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > wildly unenforceable at a practical level
|
| I suspect it will be enforced the way open source codes of
| conduct are enforced. Very, very selectively, by very, very
| suspiciously agenda-ed people.
| deepdriver wrote:
| It's trivially enforceable. Academic institutions have been
| absolutely ideologically and politically captured. The long
| march through not only the institutions, but especially the HR
| departments has achieved total victory.
| Banana699 wrote:
| > People care about the sex of your baby, not their gender.
|
| For the vast majority of people outside of """"certain
| groups"""", those 2 are aliases. They were created as aliases,
| they were always used as aliases by the vast majority of
| people, and are still used as aliases by the vast majority of
| people including in formal paperwork.
|
| "Always 2 there are, no more, no less"
|
| - Yoda, Star Wars The Phantom Menace
| landofredwater wrote:
| I think that most of these types of guidelines and rules are
| written with good intent, but intent is what ruins good science.
|
| Science, as a method, works when you have a hypothesis, but when
| that hypothesis isn't supported by your findings you can't just
| discard the findings and go "well I'm still pretty sure I was
| right anyway."
|
| If you find something you disagree with to be true, that makes
| the science even more important to share! Other people can start
| to look at what you've seen and get more details and finer
| understanding.
| anon291 wrote:
| The only 'good' intent in science is to pursue empirical truth
| based on the application of the scientific method. Every other
| intent is questionable, and certainly if one is following it,
| soon deviates from the realm of 'science'.
| psyc wrote:
| It's the same Science you know and trust, now with 50% more
| social consciousness!
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| This whole "having good intentions" as justification for
| anything scares the living crap out of me. I really believed we
| for once learned from history. Even letting the non trivial
| problem of defining what is "good" aside, intentions and
| results are very very different things. Intentions describe
| your own story for your actions. Its about how your see
| yourself. That has no impact on the result in reality. Valuing
| intentions instead of outcome is actual insanity.
|
| And it only got worse once i realized that this isnt some kind
| of horrible stupid accident but people do this to deal with an
| utterly horrible reality they cant cope with anymore. So they
| just gave up on reality and instead focused on a story they can
| tell themselves to feel good despite reality.
|
| edit: Just to point it out, even if both of those very obvious
| fundamental problems would be addressed, what would be left
| would be "the ends justify the means". Its utterly horrific
| from which ever angle you look at it.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| You're more charitable than I am. I think these things are
| written with a mindset of "how far can we push this/what can we
| realistically get away with?"
| trashtester wrote:
| This is like the burning of the Library in Alexandria.
|
| Looks like we're entering a new Dark Age.
|
| A 1984-like Orwellian Nightmare.
| redleader55 wrote:
| Nature magazine existence is attacking my dignity. Now what?
|
| I'm taking the proverbial piss, but their statement is completely
| absurd.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Almost charitably, how much confidence do we have that they will
| abide by these same principles when research showing a
| combination of intelligence and measurable personality or genetic
| traits put other collective groups at risk?
|
| Their logic is that abstract ideas, which have been subject to
| criticism by credentialed intellectuals, cannot be held above the
| material interests of any human being, and especially beings who
| must be made _more_ equal because of historic oppression. In this
| view, logic itself is an artifact of that oppression, and it
| forms a literal substrate of abuse that deprives people of having
| the material symbolic things that others do. Appeals to logic or
| principle cannot be given standing, because these are the literal
| barriers that confined beings in the first place. To bring change
| and justice, they cannot accept their enemy 's rules of being
| accountable to logic, truth, principle, or anything that prevents
| their absolute overthrow of these oppressive systems and places
| them at the helm.
|
| My argument against this anonymous central committee decree here
| is that it is a statement of principle by people who reject
| principles as a matter of principle. Arguing the internal logic
| of their points directly is to fatally underestimate the
| malevolence of the people behind them.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Newspeak to English translation: we're no longer publishing any
| papers whose results contradict our preferred worldview.
| ausbah wrote:
| like most here I don't particularly agree with the main premise
| of the piece (objectivity taking a sideline to how something
| _might_ affect a population), but I am a little saddened if not
| scared at how vitriolic some of the comments are here. there are
| many vulnerable populations in the world that might negatively be
| impacted by publications, to label even the thought of that as a
| factor in ethics as _evil_ makes me uncomfortable
| mrchucklepants wrote:
| "I reject your reality and I substitute my own."
| waterpowder wrote:
| googlryas wrote:
| It would be great if the author would provide example research
| which they think should not have been published under this new
| ethics guidance.
| hbossy wrote:
| ,,If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."
| carapace wrote:
| I thought this would be about e.g. building telescopes on
| Maunakea.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| There is a lot of off the cuff reactions in the comments, most
| from non-scientists, who obviously did not read the actual
| guidelines that are being proposed, which primarily encourage
| full transparency and contextualization when scientists use group
| variables, and to avoid over generalization of findings by
| relying on stereotypes without empirical basis.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| > most from non-scientists
|
| I am really curious about your source on this.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The actual guidelines that are being proposed, namely the
| following quote, _do_ sound like a veiled requirement to self-
| censor (or 'contextualize') any data or findings that go
| against the expected norm.
|
| "Researchers are asked to carefully consider the potential
| implications (including inadvertent consequences) of research
| on human groups defined by attributes of race, ethnicity,
| national or social origin, sex, gender identity, sexual
| orientation, religion, political or other beliefs, age,
| disease, (dis)ability or other status, to be reflective of
| their authorial perspective if not part of the group under
| study, and contextualise their findings to minimize as much as
| possible potential misuse or risks of harm to the studied
| groups in the public sphere."
|
| I would argue that the "possible misuse" of some undesirable
| findings explicitly should _not_ be a valid factor to consider,
| since it 's even more important to publish valid findings
| especially if they are controversial. As you say, we should
| definitely avoid generalization of findings by relying on
| stereotypes without empirical basis (because that's a false
| implication), _however_ , we should also not shun findings
| strongly supported by empirical basis even if they coincide
| with some stereotypes - and this statement does not even try to
| mention this balance.
|
| I would welcome the same passage to say something like "If this
| research touches these sensitive topics, then we implore the
| authors, reviewers and editors to be double-sure that the
| assertions are actually true, but for $Deity's sake don't ever
| omit any controversial but true results".
|
| In essence, it's a statement about priorities and values. Being
| respectful is important. Being true is important. But if you
| say that the former is more important than the latter and
| should sometimes override it, then you don't share my values
| and are not a friend of science; you should respect the dignity
| and rights of all humans as long as it doesn't harm the
| communication of truth and not an inch more.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This is the end of objectivism and a terrifying rise of
| subjectivism. Emotions, feelings, offense, sensitivities, racial
| background, gender, etc are now more important than nature,
| reality, rationality, logic, truth and facts.
| [deleted]
| MicolashKyoka wrote:
| Hiding results is a good way to end up with people not trusting
| what you say. Truth should be paramount for science to flourish,
| even if the conclusions are not palatable.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| hashtag #nooneleftbehind appears to be in a similar vein..
| "sovereignty" is so pre-modern </snark>
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| I haven't heard of this and doing a web search didn't really
| help me out. Can I read more about this somewhere?
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Yet, people can be harmed indirectly. For example, research may
| -- inadvertently -- stigmatize individuals or human groups. It
| may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic."
|
| If it's good research, then it shouldn't have any of these
| biases. Stigmatization and restrictions of rights is a _policy_
| issue. _Science is not policy_. I think we need to promote this
| separation more. Too often I see "but the study says this
| thing". Sure, that may be a scientific fact, but that doesn't
| mean it's the best thing for society, or even that it provides a
| complete picture of the issue.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Nowhere in the scientific method does this message fit.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Science has nothing to do with the dignity and rights of all
| humans. Science just a mechanism for separating truth from
| nonsense.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Science has for too long been complicit in perpetuating
| structural inequalities and discrimination in society.
|
| > Finally, authors should use inclusive, respectful, non-
| stigmatizing language in their submitted manuscripts.
|
| > Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs.
|
| ---
|
| To me, this sounds like a clergyman espousing articles of faith
| and commandments.
| californiadreem wrote:
| "[...] Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhort the episcopate and
| the whole body of the faithful to be on their guard against
| heretical writings, whether old or new; and one of the functions
| of the Inquisition when it was established was to exercise a
| rigid censorship over books put in circulation. The majority of
| the condemnations were at that time of a specially theological
| character. With the discovery of the art of printing, and the
| wide and cheap diffusion of all sorts of books which ensued, the
| need for new precautions against heresy and immorality in
| literature made itself felt, and more than one pope (Sixtus IV.
| in 1479 and Alexander VI. in 1501) gave special directions to the
| archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Magdeburg regarding the
| growing abuses of the printing press; in 1515 the Lateran council
| formulated the decree De Impressione Librorum, which required
| that no work should be printed without previous examination by
| the proper ecclesiastical authority, the penalty of unlicensed
| printing being excommunication of the culprit, and confiscation
| and destruction of the books. The council of Trent in its fourth
| session, 8th April 1546, forbade the sale or possession of any
| anonymous religious book which had not previously been seen and
| approved by the ordinary; in the same year the university of
| Louvain, at the command of Charles V., prepared an "Index" of
| pernicious and forbidden books, a second edition of which
| appeared in 1550."
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| Any dissent against the state religion shall not be tolerated.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This all seems quite dull considering the other reactions here:
|
| > Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should
| explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used
| as proxies for other variables -- for example, socioeconomic
| status or income. For studies involving data collected from human
| participants, researchers should explain:
|
| * who provided the classification terms (the participants, the
| researchers or third parties)
|
| * what the classification terms are
|
| * how racial/ethnic identity was determined (by the participants,
| the researchers or third parties)
|
| > Biomedical studies should not conflate genetic ancestry (a
| biological construct) and race/ethnicity (sociopolitical
| constructs): although race/ethnicity are important constructs for
| the study of disparities in health outcomes and health care,
| empirically established genetic ancestry is the appropriate
| construct for the study of the biological aetiology of diseases
| or differences in treatment response. If race/ethnicity are used
| in the context of disease aetiology due to the unavailability of
| genetic ancestry data, this should be done with caution and
| clarification.
| alphabetting wrote:
| I posted this to garner some discussion but wanted to be clear
| it's not an endorsement. The new IRB ethics guidelines Nature is
| pushing here is absurd and would be a disaster in my opinion.
| effingwewt wrote:
| So glad I saw this after my comment, I couldn't believe what I
| was reading and am so very glad I wasn't the only one, much
| less from GP.
|
| I appreciate you calling it out greatly, they've been circling
| the drain but _wow_.
| dqpb wrote:
| The ethics argument is a cover story for capturing greater
| power and control.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| And sadly, I correctly guessed what the article would be about
| just from reading the title.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > Editors, authors and reviewers will hopefully find the
| guidance helpful when considering and discussing potential
| benefits and harms arising from manuscripts dealing with human
| population groups categorized on the basis of socially
| constructed or socially relevant characteristics, such as race,
| ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender identity,
| sexual orientation, religion, political or other beliefs, age,
| disease, (dis)ability or socioeconomic status.
|
| How do you effectively discuss, and communicate, that for
| example sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance affects
| people of African descent, or skin cancer is prevalent in
| people of European ancestry? And that poor and badly educated
| people are susceptible to bad diets, lifestyles and medical
| issues that are a consequence of that?
|
| > harms arising from manuscripts
|
| I'm pretty sure the readership for papers in Nature is pretty
| low, and already read by a target audience of academics that
| already use a scientific dialect that doesn't cause 'offense'.
| Scientific language is terse and unambiguous for a reason.
| Efficient and precise transfer of ideas. "Go the shops and get
| a loaf of bread. If there are eggs, get a dozen".
|
| "Offense" in 2022 is the social construct here. Not age, or
| disease, or origin.
| timr wrote:
| > How do you effectively discuss, and communicate, that for
| example sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance affects
| people of African descent, or skin cancer is prevalent in
| people of European ancestry? And that poor and badly educated
| people are susceptible to bad diets, lifestyles and medical
| issues that are a consequence of that?
|
| Don't worry, it says in the guidelines that race and
| ethnicity aren't real:
|
| > Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do
| not have biological races, at least based on modern
| biological criteria for the identification of geographical
| races or subspecies.
|
| This, of course, is going to be Good News to people of
| African descent (where sickle cell anemia is ~20x more likely
| in black newborns than white [1]), Ashkenazi Jewish people
| (at higher risk for a number of different genetic illnesses
| [2]), or pretty much every non-white person with lactose
| intolerance [3]...just to name a few examples.
|
| [1]
| https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/features/keyfinding-
| tr....
|
| [2] https://www.gaucherdisease.org/blog/5-common-ashkenazi-
| genet...
|
| [3] https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/lactose-
| intoleran....
| freejazz wrote:
| To do you the favor, as ashkenazi jew (at higher risk for a
| number of different genetic illnesses) nothing about my
| understanding of this is predicated upon the concept of a
| race. That there is a genetically distinct haplotype group
| that corresponds to many folk that share these traits with
| me, is sufficient. By the way, I don't think "African
| descent" is a race by any means of my understanding of the
| word...
| wyager wrote:
| > That there is a genetically distinct haplotype group
| that corresponds to many folk that share these traits
| with me, is sufficient
|
| This is what race means. You are taking the same referent
| and giving it a different designator.
| freejazz wrote:
| If that's the case I'm sure you can provide a link to a
| dictionary stating as much. In reality, such haplotype
| groups, when they even exist, do not correlate with what
| people call "race".
| nradov wrote:
| Everyone is of African descent, depending on how far back
| you look. So it's a rather vague term, and becoming less
| useful over time as previously distinct groups become more
| intermixed.
|
| In studies of conditions like sickle cell anaemia or
| lactose intolerance or skin cancer it would probably be
| more useful to relate those to particular genotypes and/or
| phenotypes rather than relying on which "race" field each
| experimental subject selected on the intake form.
| timr wrote:
| I was waiting for the first person to say this, which is
| why I explicitly wrote "black" when describing the
| disproportionate rates of sickle cell in black children
| vs. white children. This isn't some rhetorical game. We
| know what "race" is, intuitively, and we _know_ that it
| correlates strongly with real-world biological outcomes.
|
| These guidelines are gaslighting people into ignoring
| broadly useful categories because we don't have a
| _reductive_ way of defining them. We don 't have a
| biological test that defines race (yet), ergo, it doesn't
| exist. Except that's wrong. It's absurd.
|
| > In studies of conditions like sickle cell anaemia or
| lactose intolerance or skin cancer it would probably be
| more useful to relate those to particular genotypes
| and/or phenotypes rather than relying on which "race"
| field each experimental subject selected on the intake
| form.
|
| If we could do that -- relate the (known) gene for sickle
| cell to some other "genotype" that captures the racial
| bias we _know_ exists -- we 'd have a strict biological
| definition for race, wouldn't we?
|
| Aside from that, we know the "phenotype" that correlates
| with the illness. Black people have it, at high rates.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Actually, sickle cell anemia is disproportionately high
| only in specific populations of black people. The black
| race is more genetically diverse than all other races
| combined. Race has a very poor basis in science vs
| specific genetic lines correlated with specific
| geographical regions of genetic drift.
| freejazz wrote:
| Black isn't a "race", it's a social category. You can't
| actually be serious? In America, black includes people of
| Caribbean descent, people from South America, African-
| Americans, someone that stepped off a plane from
| Ethiopia. It's a completely meaningless term in regards
| to science. You can't actually be serious?
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Well -- no.
|
| Those people have a shared biological lineage, with only
| a relatively short period of differentiation -- while
| they have radically different cultures.
|
| What you're describing is "black" being useless as a
| social construct (ie, I know nothing about their culture)
| but useful medically/scientifically (ie, there's
| groupings of medical conditions correlated with that
| lineage).
|
| I would go so far as to say only racists use "black" as a
| social construct -- and project that the medical
| groupings are the same.
| freejazz wrote:
| What medical conditions do you know of that are specific
| to every group in the (allegedly useless and racist)
| social category of "Black"?
| Banana699 wrote:
| "Blind isn't an actual biological condition, it's a
| social category"
|
| The same thing can be different categories. Black is
| social category, and is also a very well defined
| biological state of the most visible organ in your body,
| and is associated with certain genes. Instead of
| repeatedly stating the name of those different genes
| every time you say something about them, you can simply
| say the name of the most visible marker of them and still
| be correct the vast majority of time.
| freejazz wrote:
| The notion was that a "race" is something of such
| significant scientific relevance, that not being able to
| use "Black" to refer to a "race" would be a disservice.
| But you aren't here saying Black is a race, it is a
| "defined biological state of the most visible organ in
| your body". Okay, what does that have to do with race?
| Did you not understand my previous post explaining that
| "people who are socially considered Black" is basically a
| useless scientific criteria outside of its social
| circumstances?
|
| You seem a little bit more focused on repeating some
| rhetorical dunk you read somewhere online than actually
| understanding what is being discussed. Take a moment and
| actually consider what I'm writing. To repeat the example
| that I gave before, research on Ashkenazi Jewish diseases
| is not hindered by calling it research on the specific
| haplotype group that it is. The poster that brought up
| Ashkenazi Jews is misunderstanding if not disingenuous. I
| think you also don't get the difference between what a
| haplotype group is in this context, and your concept of
| "race".
| nradov wrote:
| If the biological state is "very well defined" then
| please point us to the definition. Is it based solely on
| skin hue and reflectance, or are there other factors? Do
| some people in South Asia with very dark skin meet that
| definition or are they excluded?
|
| I'm not just trying to be argumentative here. If
| scientists want to produce high quality, reproducible
| research then they must precisely define their terms.
| They can't just assume that everyone has the same
| understanding and knows what they mean.
| nradov wrote:
| Are you taking about scientific research (as per the
| original article) or healthcare delivery? Medical
| researchers should take the take the time to be precise
| about characterizing their subjects, and rely on subject-
| reported demographic data as little as possible.
| Practitioners and public health have to take a more
| pragmatic approach, and rely on generalizations for the
| sake of convenience. Those are different use cases with
| different best practices.
| hattmall wrote:
| Goodbye Science, you brought us a long way.
| dqpb wrote:
| > Science must respect
|
| Science is abstract
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| h2odragon wrote:
| Summary: Orthodoxy above all. If your Facts run over the Dogma we
| won't publish it.
| drorco wrote:
| Can anyone actually think of an actual discovery that harmed
| people?
|
| I'm missing some actual examples of what they're trying to
| protect people from.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Even if there are examples, they will be _political_ examples
| and not scientific ones. Of course, they 'd conveniently
| conflate the two to mislead the less observant among us.
| causality0 wrote:
| _the guidance helps in considering whether it is ethically
| appropriate to question a social group's right to freedom or
| cultural rights_
|
| Somebody want to explain to me what the heck "cultural rights"
| are and how publishing data could interfere with them?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| There is nothing to debate here and to understand. Wheels have
| fallen off. They've shown the cards. We're seeing a rise of
| 1984 style authoritarianism in academia + corporate culture.
| What cannot be legislated must be forced through proxies of
| corporations and scientific journals.
|
| The only north star we as humans have is what nature is and to
| understand it. Nature is immutable and does not care about our
| interpretation of it. Rejection of cold truth is a surefire way
| for society to regress into chaos and decay.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| What about the harm done by allowing publication from a group of
| humans killing other humans? Russian research institutions were
| given carte blanche while the state murdered innocent Ukrainians
| (and still does). Yet all the high and mighty science
| institutions keep insisting we should keep supporting Russian
| research. The ethical thing to do would be to use the influence
| of the scientific community to hinder, impede, and block any
| group that so horrifyingly and blatantly violates human rights.
| But apparently we're all okay with oppression as long as we're
| not the ones being oppressed.
|
| Ethics make us sound noble, but nobody will stand up to China, or
| the USA, or Russia. We all care about getting ours much more than
| we care about protecting people. The hypocrisy is so obvious
| nobody mentions it, like a turd on the sidewalk. Step over it and
| move on.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| > Nobody will stand up to China, or the USA, or Russia.
|
| If you rank how many people were killed in the past 20 years,
| US is 100X of China and Russia summed up together...
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I am glad that Nature has taken this stand. I've seen so many bad
| people try and use "science" to do things I disagree with, even
| when The Science has been settled from things like Jewish Space
| lazers to people hesitant to wear a mask that killed grandma.
|
| I am grateful that Nature has decided to become the arbiters of
| what "The Science" is, do you know how many people blithely like
| to talk about science, and "scientific experiments" they have run
| on their own? They don't even have lab coats or a degree and then
| pretend they can speak for "The Science". Why it's absurd as a
| Swiss Patent Clerk claiming to overturn hundreds of years of
| accepted "settled Science" because he published some paper.
|
| What happens if we let anyone practice "The Science" some people
| might do so erroneously and then use that to convince other
| people of things that aren't right. What would happen to our
| beloved institutions if just anyone could overturn scientific
| discoveries without having been inducted into the proper
| priesthood of the PhD?
|
| I think this is a wonderful thing, now we will ensure that only
| good people that really understand The Science can tell other
| people what The Science says, and they will remain true pure and
| uncurroptable and if anyone disagrees with them, well they are
| obviously dangerous deluded individuals that argue with reality
| itself after all The Science has decreed what reality is. We
| should force those people to be re-educated until they understand
| The Science. For efficiency purposes though maybe we could put
| them in camps of some sort, where they could be concentrated.
| Hmmm....
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| Praise be to The Science!
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| The smart people on Television and the Internet tell me what
| the correct science is and people who don't agree with the
| science, need to go to re-education camps to learn the correct
| science. I even hashtag to support the science, that's how much
| I trust it. #believeInScience
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| I am getting dumb-funded by the obvious senseless thinking in the
| title:
|
| Science is about the mechanisms of natural worlds. It's the
| foundation of human civilization. It's the basis of human
| thoughts and the ideology etc.
|
| To say Science must respect dignity and rights of all humans,
| it's like to say nature must respect the dignity and rights of
| all humans. But Science is the rendition of natural world's
| mechanisms, they do not have personality and emotions. They
| cannot respect anything!
|
| It's reasonable to say "scientists must respect the dignity and
| rights of all humans". It's senseless to say Science must respect
| the dignity and rights of all humans.
| georgex7 wrote:
| wtf is going on
| chinabot wrote:
| jpeloquin wrote:
| I'm having difficulty reconciling these two opinions:
|
| 1. This ethics guidance is bad because it limits, or even
| censors, scientific investigation related to socially sensitive
| topics.
|
| 2. Social science has a reproducibility crisis and is mostly
| useless (a viewpoint commonly expressed in response to other
| articles).
|
| Does anyone hold both of these opinions, or is it just different
| people talking at different times?
| Natsu wrote:
| If you're using outrage to select science for what's pleasing
| to hear instead of what's true, you can use 1 as an explanation
| for 2. And 1 isn't exactly new.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Ah, so the social science reproducibility problems are
| hypothesized to be caused by bias (or, less provocatively,
| filtering), moreso than e.g. bad experimental design. Yes,
| that would nicely reconcile both perspectives.
| Natsu wrote:
| There's plenty of room for both. If you have lots of bad
| experiments and filter the ones you agree with, the
| combination is even worse because there's an apparent
| consensus.
| dqpb wrote:
| These are orthogonal issues.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Are they really? If social science is unreliable, then it is
| reasonable to conclude that (a) limiting its scope of
| investigation doesn't matter or even (b) limiting its scope
| of investigation is actually good, so that it at least does
| less harm. In what perspective are the issues fully
| orthogonal?
| kingkawn wrote:
| hilarious the many comments here equating their own disinterest
| in the lives of others with scientific objectivity
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| look man these paperclips aren't going to maximize themselves.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| As usual, the academic sociopoliticals don't want to delve into
| issues of wealth and poverty. Notably this has been a real issue
| in pharmaceutical drug safety trials, which have tended to
| exploit poor populations in industrialized countries as well as,
| more recently, the impoverished populations in developing
| nations. There's no mention of this whatsoever, instead it's
| about this:
|
| _" We also developed two specific sections -- on race, ethnicity
| and racism; and on sex, gender identity/presentation and
| orientation -- that clarify issues with these constructs and
| explain that racism and discrimination on the basis of gender
| identity or sexual orientation should have no place in science."_
|
| The trend towards moving clinical trials to developing nations
| was first commented on over a decade ago and is in full swing
| today, but it doesn't even get a mention. For example:
|
| "Ethical and Scientific Implications of the Globalization of
| Clinical Research", Glickman et al. (2009)"
|
| http://archive.sph.harvard.edu/schering-plough-workshop/file...
|
| > "This phenomenon raises important questions about the economics
| and ethics of clinical research and the translation of trial
| results to clinical practice: Who benefits from the globalization
| of clinical trials? What is the potential for exploitation of
| research subjects?"
|
| That's an explicit fundamentally important ethical issue, but
| raising it might imperil academic funding from pharmaceutical
| corporations, so they stick to their safe topics. It's really
| kind of pathetic.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It's one thing - one correct and good thing - to specify an
| ethical framework that says all people are of equal intrinsic
| moral value, and therefore have equal rights as human beings.
| It's another incorrect and bad thing to deny reality and specify
| a factual framework that demands that all people be claimed to be
| scientifically indistinguishable, having no identifiable
| characteristics that differ along social groupings.
|
| Point 1, that they can deny _" Content that is premised upon the
| assumption of inherent biological, social, or cultural
| superiority or inferiority of one human group over another based
| on race, ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender
| identity, sexual orientation, religion, political or other
| beliefs, age, disease, (dis)ability, or other socially
| constructed or socially relevant groupings (hereafter referred to
| as socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings)."_
| is pretty hard to disagree with. Such content is morally wrong
| and should not be published, can't we just agree to treat
| everyone with respect?
|
| On the other hand, Point 2 is qualitatively different, in that
| rather than considering the immoral and subjective value
| judgements that may motivate some researchers, it calls into
| question the objective factual truths that some researchers are
| allowed to uncover: It says they can deny "Content that
| undermines -- or could reasonably be perceived to undermine --
| the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the
| basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human
| groupings." This is a prohibition on publishing facts that some
| people may abuse to justify their abhorrent moral position.
|
| For example, as a tall Dutchman, it's a fact that I'm able to
| reach things on shelves that my shorter coworkers cannot reach
| without assistance. At our office, we have a few freakishly tall
| Dutch guys, and some shorter Hispanic women. If, hypothetically,
| you did a study of the time it takes us to dry and put away
| dishes in the break room, you'll observe that Thais needs to move
| a stepstool around to put away mugs on the top shelf, taking
| significantly more time, and that Dave and I can touch the
| ceiling flat-footed and need no such aid, so we Dutchmen can
| complete the task faster. To be very clear - that's a fact, not a
| value judgement! It should not be misconstrued to undermine the
| position that men have equal value to women, or to suggest that
| Hollanders deserve more rights than Columbians! That's ridiculous
| and wrong!
|
| It is unfortunate that there are some people with a morally
| abhorrent worldview who will seek to use factual differences to
| justify their cruel behavior. But prohibiting the dissemination
| of those facts does not make the fact disappear or become untrue,
| it only makes the prohibitors look foolish and makes the study of
| those differences the exclusive domain of the discriminatory
| people.
| tarakat wrote:
| _Yet, people can be harmed indirectly. For example, research may
| -- inadvertently -- stigmatize individuals or human groups. It
| may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. It
| may provide justification for undermining the human rights of
| specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics.
| [..] Advancing knowledge and understanding is a fundamental
| public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the
| populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication._
|
| "The teachings of the Church must not be undermined by
| heliocentrism or evolution research, so findings in those areas
| will be strictly filtered for heresy before publication.
|
| But those findings that _support_ the Church will be permitted,
| and loudly trumpeted as scientific proof of our dogma. "
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Beautifully put. What I loved about science growing up is that
| it valued truth and knowledge (or such was the impression I had
| of science in history). If someone argues for self-censoring
| truth/knowledge to avoid XYZ values today, they would've been
| the same people to argue self-censoring the truth about
| heliocentrism yesterday. It's a tragedy to see science fall
| prey to dogmatism and I hope we can see some kind of new field
| emerge that has the courage to pursue truth first and worry
| about implications second.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > "The teachings of the Church must not be undermined by
| heliocentrism or evolution research, so findings in those areas
| will be strictly filtered for heresy before publication."
|
| This is actually a bit of a historical myth that due to anti-
| religious bias prevails widely.
|
| Contrary to widespread belief, the works of Charles Darwin were
| never on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books, nor
| did the Catholic Church ever state that Evolution as a theory
| could not be believed, but rather emphasized that a few
| specific theological events (a garden in which man fell) must
| remain, though the lead-up to those events was not rigidly
| defined. This is also why a Catholic priest is responsible for
| the Big Bang theory.
|
| As for heliocentrism, this is also baloney as it was initially
| proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus, who was not censored for his
| beliefs[1], and also served as a Catholic canon (religious
| member but not necessarily a priest). This idea was backed by
| Galileo using astronomy, however, Galileo was tried for
| writings other than his heliocentrism that were arguably
| heretical (including attacks on the Pope within his work) and
| not necessarily for the heliocentric view itself, as seen by
| the Church making Copernicus mandatory reading in some
| universities for astronomy courses.
|
| [1] The Roman Inquisition would later censor it for a short
| time, however, their main requirement was that it definitions
| be changed from fact to theory, and the Roman Inquisition
| actually used 13 mathematical arguments of their own from the
| astronomer Tycho Brahe, versus only 4 theological ones. The
| Spanish Inquisition never censored the book. Even though Brahe
| was later proven incorrect in his arguments, he was still one
| of the most accurate astronomers of the era, and Johannes
| Kepler (of the Kepler Space Telescope fame) would later use his
| measurements to create the 3 planetary laws of motion. In any
| event, it would appear that this censorship of Copernicus
| requiring revisions before publications was due to Copernicus'
| overconfidence in potentially erroneous mathematics, rather
| than a theological dispute.
| phaistra wrote:
| Can you provide some books or links if so that I can read up
| on these misconceptions?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Try here for a purely academic overview (no religious
| Catholic websites or other "biased" commentators for this),
| that was also very recent. There are plenty of other
| sources, but this was just what I found first that was
| academic in scope.
|
| https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-30833-9
| _...
|
| I would also recommend reading about Nicolas Copernicus
| (geocentrism before Galileo), as well as Georges Lemaitre
| (Catholic Priest who had idea for Big Bang), and Gregor
| Mendel (before Evolution, experiments with Genetics).
|
| Example: "In Spain, new cosmological discoveries and ideas
| were discussed at both the universities and at the Casa and
| Consejo. For example, Jeronimo Munoz (ca. 1520-1591), who
| taught astronomy and mathematics at the universities of
| Valencia and Salamanca, was one of the many European
| scientists to observe and write about the supernova of
| 1572. For Munoz, the supernova challenged the Aristotelian
| notion that change was impossible in the celestial realm.
| In some of his unpublished work and letters to other
| European astronomers like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), he
| espoused an understanding of the relationship between the
| celestial and terrestrial realms drawn from Stoic
| philosophers. He denied the existence of celestial orbs and
| instead asserted that the planets moved through the heavens
| like birds through the air or fish through the water. He
| also discussed Nicolaus Copernicus' (1473-1543)
| heliocentric system with his students, although he did not
| endorse it (Navarro-Brotons 1995, 57). In fact, as Victor
| Navarro-Brotons has shown, "the work of Copernicus
| circulated freely in sixteenth-century Spain, where its
| technical and empirical aspects were greatly admired and
| used" (Navarro-Brotons 1995, 63). In 1561, the statutes of
| the University of Salamanca specified that in the second
| year of the astronomy course the professor must teach
| either "the Almagest of Ptolemy, or its Epitome by
| Regiomontanus, or Geber, or Copernicus," and that the
| students could vote on which text they wanted (Navarro-
| Brotons 1995, 55). In 1594, these statutes were amended and
| the teaching of Copernicus was made mandatory, no longer
| subject to the vote of the students (Navarro-Brotons 1995,
| 59). The 1594, statutes were reproduced with no change in
| 1625, despite the prohibition of Copernicus' work by the
| Roman Inquisition in 1616 (Navarro-Brotons 1995, 60). In
| fact, De revolutionibus was "never placed on any Spanish
| Inquisitorial index" (Navarro-Brotons 1995, 63), which does
| not mean Spanish astronomers were free to adopt
| heliocentrism but does indicate that it was possible to
| teach and discuss Copernicus in Spanish universities. As
| Navarro-Brotons notes, only one Spanish scholar, Diego de
| Zuniga (1536-1597), is known to have actually endorsed the
| Copernican system. Others used the Prutenic tables, which
| were calculated using Copernicus' mathematical models, and
| other parameters drawn from De revolutionibus, in much the
| same way that Copernicus was taught at the University of
| Wittenberg (Navarro-Brotons 1995, 59; Westman 1975).
| Finally, interest in Copernicus spread outside
| universities, because the Prutenic tables and other
| technical aspects of Copernicus' work had applications in
| navigation. For example, Juan Cedillo Diaz (ca. 1560-1625),
| who studied at Salamanca and became chief cosmographer at
| the Consejo de Indias and professor at the Mathematical
| Academy in Seville in 1611, made a free Spanish translation
| of the first three books of Copernicus' De revolutionibus
| sometime between 1620 and 1625 (Granada and Crespo 2019;
| Navarro-Brotons 1995, 63; Esteban Pineiro and Gomez Crespo
| 1991)."
| mistrial9 wrote:
| without handy references, I believe that part of the
| significance of Church dogma on stars and celestial
| mechanics, was that astronomy was widely practiced by many
| civilizations to varying rigorous results, but that science
| and most all abstract learning was also connected to
| religious or mythological meanings. Different societies, in
| particular the overall Muslim world of today, viewed the
| movements of the stars and planets with different meanings,
| which sometimes were taken very seriously. This connects to
| the imagery of the three wise men at christian nativity, who
| follow a star but give their gifts to the newborn.
|
| Social prestige associated with higher learning was a subject
| of rivalry and competition, as most things were in those
| places at that time it seems.
| al_mandi wrote:
| I'm a person of faith. At the same time, we point out that the
| religion of "scientism" exists whether people admit it or not,
| especially when they claim that they "believe in science".
| Correct faith and science are not contradictory. And those
| people mix up belief in the unseen with blind faith without
| proof or evidence.
| altruios wrote:
| Tell me how your believe is better than someone else's 'blind
| faith'?
|
| Science is falsifiable - anything pushed forward by science
| has a way to be disproved built in (other wise it is not
| science). That's important because then you can update your
| worldview based on new evidence.
|
| For the same to be true of religion - it must be falsifiable:
| it MUST have a way to disprove itself via experimentation...
| oh wait... the (Christian version) does...
|
| Go do this test: "Kings 18:20-40": When you've soaked your
| bull in water and it doesn't magical catch fire by praying...
| I'll be waiting. (Or I'll be waiting video proof of the
| Christian god - that should be repeatable by many people...
| right?)
|
| MAKE THE BULL CATCH FIRE WITH YOUR PRAYERS OR GTFO WITH YOUR
| NONSENSE
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Just because that prayer lead to a miracle in the past,
| doesn't mean you can demand that God grants the same
| miracle again in different circumstances. That's trying to
| treat God as something like an appliance rather than an
| agent, and even an appliance would have instructions for
| when it would work.
|
| If I may reverse the burden of proof, and be equally
| unreasonable, let me say that if you think that there is no
| afterlife, then you should go kill yourself. You're going
| to die at some point anyway, and this way you'll get your
| answer right away. It's a 100% falsifiable position, but
| unfortunately very few people who have done the necessary
| experiment have been able to communicate their findings to
| the scientific community afterwards.
| teawrecks wrote:
| I think your view on this is being influenced by the
| limitations of the language you're using.
|
| When a religious person says they "believe" something, it
| means they operate as if it were true even though they have
| no evidence to indicate it as such (a.k.a. the god of the
| gaps).
|
| When a scientist says they "believe" something, it means all
| evidence gathered so far indicates that it is true, but if
| more data comes in and a different conclusion is drawn, then
| the belief should be abandoned.
|
| These are two entirely different concepts, but in English we
| tend to just say "believe". The scientific "belief" is more
| akin to a mathematical theorem: - if X, then Y - All data
| indicates X is probably true, so for now I believe Y. - New
| data indicates X is probably false, so I no longer believe Y.
|
| And of course when you're engineering something, it's not
| that simple because you need contingencies. X may have a 99%
| chance of being true, but you still need to have a plan for
| for that 1% case.
|
| None of this is something that religion considers whatsoever;
| with religion, a belief is true and anything contrary to that
| belief is considered false, even if that thing is a
| measurement of reality itself. There are still huge swaths of
| people who believe a person thousands of years ago was
| immaculately conceived, walked on water, turned water into
| wine, all things that you and I know are inconsistent with
| reality. But all contrary evidence simply doesn't matter, the
| "belief" remains. This is the antithesis of science.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Yet your opinion falls in the same criteria on limitations
| of the language you're confining it to. "believe in
| science" can mean what you said, i.e "it means all evidence
| gathered so far indicates that it is true, but if more data
| comes in and a different conclusion is drawn, then the
| belief should be abandoned"; however, it was also
| exemplified during COVID as "You're not allowed to question
| it no matter what merit you have, no matter how logical and
| methodical your perspective is and regardless of the
| content of your argument; science is untouchable". The
| latter is absolutely a religion, but worse, it is a
| religion that's masquerading as real science, the former,
| dictating public policy. Far more dangerous and destructive
| than your run of the mill religion/faith.
| humanrebar wrote:
| > When a religious person says they "believe" something, it
| means they operate as if it were true even though they have
| no evidence to indicate it as such (a.k.a. the god of the
| gaps).
|
| In practice religious (or spiritual) people are a rather
| diverse bunch and it's not all that helpful to paint with
| too broad of a brush.
|
| I will point out that in at least Christian theology,
| "faith" and "trust" are basically synonyms. In the original
| Greek of the New Testament, it's literally the same word.
|
| In that sense, making choices based on trust in God or
| making decisions based on trust in science are really
| fairly similar. And quite often they're not contradictory
| either.
|
| For example, both science and scriptures say worrying is
| bad for you, so someone can try to minimize worry based on
| faith in science and faith in scripture simultaneously.
|
| I'll also point out that a lot of the "scientific"
| objections to religions boil down to metaphysical
| disagreements about the nature of observation of the nature
| of a (notional, at least) deity. I put "scientific" in
| scare quotes because science itself only makes sense given
| some assumptions, like the axiom that it's reasonable to
| assume things do not exist until it's definitely proven
| they do. That's a valid opinion, but it's not scientific as
| such. Another common assumption is that a creator and a
| fossil record (for instance) are somehow incompatible. As
| if a creator can create the cosmos but a fossil record is a
| bit much somehow.
|
| Anyway, I think folks would find each other more thoughtful
| and reasonable if they'd take some time to listen more.
| There are lots of misconceptions in all directions in these
| discussions.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Science must always report the truth. What was the old saying?
| "That which can be destroyed by truth, should be"?
|
| Whenever science attempts to prop up political regimes by
| obscuring the truth, then tragedy and travesty occurs.
| dcow wrote:
| Moreover, how can any of these be enforced, and by whom? At
| least you know who your church authority figures are and who to
| criticize. Where do we even start if we let Twitter outrage
| decide whether science is potentially harmful and should be
| allowed or not?
|
| This is _worse_ than religion because it's pretending to be
| rational. And many many people will be fooled.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >This is worse than religion because it's pretending to be
| rational. And many many people will be fooled.
|
| I hate to make the comparison because it's such a trope, but,
| IMO this is one of the most insidious things the Nazis did to
| indoctrinate the population:
|
| They did things like send people into schools and they would
| cherry-pick the weakest, least intelligent, least-liked
| Jewish kid they could find and set him alongside the most
| athletic, attractive, smart, well-liked Aryan looking kid.
|
| They'd bring them both up in front of the class and from that
| point on, they'd use "scientific" discussion and observation
| of their qualities to convince the kids that the Aryan kids
| were superior in every way. I'll tell you what, I was a
| pretty savy independent thinker and empathetic kid, but I
| really think I might have fallen for that type of technique,
| masquerading as science.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| and this is, if you read the actual guidelines proposed,
| exactly what they are guarding against: inappropriate
| overgeneralization.
| [deleted]
| timr wrote:
| Guarding against overgeneralization is not something we
| need new scientific heresy rules to prevent. It's already
| part of being a good scientist. It's also a subjective
| bar, and adding "inappropriate" to that makes it entirely
| fungible.
|
| Moreover, I've spent the last 2+ years _horrified_ by how
| willing "scientists" have been to generalize to wild
| real-world conclusions from miniscule data based on
| Twitter outrage, so I have zero faith that a board of
| clerics is going to use these rules with magnanimity.
| Whichever political faction that controls the board will
| be tempted to define "inappropriate" to mean "whatever
| conclusion we don't like".
|
| Just to make it concrete: run an RCT that shows that
| masks don't have any effect on Covid transmission? Good
| luck getting that published in a top journal, even today.
| With these new rules, _literally anyone who doesn 't like
| the conclusions_ will claim that the result is an
| "overgeneralization". There will be no study large enough
| to satisfy the clerisy...unless The Science says
| something approved, of course.
|
| ---
|
| Edit: and lest you think I am _exaggerating_ with my
| example, consider the following, directly quoted from the
| new guidelines:
|
| > Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the
| publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly
| communication - for instance, stigmatization of a
| vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of
| research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies
| that undermine human rights or misuse of information to
| threaten public health).
|
| They're literally saying that they're open to censoring
| research that might be "misused" to "threaten public
| health". And they've defined it broadly enough that
| pretty much anything that displeases "a vulnerable human
| group" can be covered. Convenient.
| tarakat wrote:
| Good thing this practice has since ceased, and is entirely
| absent from movies and news reporting, where care is taken
| that even the most maligned groups are represented by,
| well, representative individuals, instead of cherry-picking
| the most unlikable members.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Hey at least Stranger Things had one semi-likable
| Russian.
| 8note wrote:
| Stranger things has had many likeable Russians though?
| wizofaus wrote:
| For sufficiently small values of "many" and broad
| definitions of "likeable", perhaps...
| jtbayly wrote:
| I assume you're being facetious?
| thisiscorrect wrote:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvNNtBmA3SQ
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It can be enforced by Nature refusing to publish papers with
| bad results, obviously.
| dcow wrote:
| Shouldn't nature already be doing that?
|
| The question is how do you define _bad results_ if you
| include provisions for socially constructed feelings about
| whether results are socially and politically correct or
| not.
|
| I hope hope hope hope hope underneath all the crummy filler
| language and what appears to be rationalization for a
| distinctly unscientific expansion of editorial discretion
| to suppress unsightly factual results, _Nature_ is simply
| saying: _don 't study social constructs, it's not
| scientific_, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree
| (without deeper thought as to whether there are valid
| situations to study socially constructed groups that can't
| be better expressed by studying the non-social-construct
| characteristic).
|
| If that's all this is, I think we'll be fine. But I have a
| real hard time believing that Nature would allow a paper
| that found there to be cognitive discrepancies between
| people with genealogical lineages that closely align to the
| socially constructed races, under these new guidelines,
| since arguably the "effects on society" might be negative.
|
| And I know people who would ignore the science and fight to
| the metaphorical death to suppress that type of information
| regardless of the terminology used. So, understandably, I'm
| not super confident this will be handled carefully and
| appropriately. Notice there is no burden of proof or
| scientific rigor required to determine that the effects
| some some research _are_ negatively impacting society. A
| presumption that they _might_ is all that 's needed. I
| worry scientific pursuit will suffer.
| mizzack wrote:
| > And many many people will be fooled.
|
| At least you can spot the acolytes with "I believe in
| Science" bumper stickers and yard signs. Science is not a
| belief system.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| No, but the trappings of science have been used to dress
| the new religion of the west. Same old shit, we just don't
| call it god now, we call it "the science".
|
| We are romans in the early 5th century. What's coming won't
| be pretty.
| dcow wrote:
| Isn't it crazy how easy it is to see but how inevitable
| the outcome ultimately is? Why must future generations
| repeat the mistakes of the past? This is the human
| condition.
| mosdave wrote:
| first as tragedy, then as farce
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Is it not? I certainly don't know or understand even a
| fraction of what would be considered established science,
| but if a credible expert tells me that something is
| supported by established science I will believe it over
| something like religious dogma. I consider myself to be a
| "believer" in science.
| Banana699 wrote:
| "Believe" is an overloaded word. In one sense, it's
| simply the content of your mental state. In basic
| epistemology, Knowledge is defined as "Justified True
| Belief", i.e. when your mental state matches the actual
| state of the world for the "right" reasons (this is
| surprisingly tricky to make formal, see [1])If your head
| is a memory cell, your beliefs are the actual 0s or 1s
| inside it.
|
| In other senses, "beliefs" are an identity, and some
| people like to think theirs are more based on science
| than others. "Believing" in science amounts to adhering
| to a broad package of ethical and lifestyle choices that
| _references_ science to various degrees, their followers
| believe this gives them more legitimacy than other
| lifesyles or ethics systems, but the actual degree to
| which they are justified by science varies enormously.
|
| To take 2 extremes :
|
| (1) Taking a stance against fossil fuel is "believing in
| science" because (good, credible) science says those
| increase carbon footprint which in turn disrupts the
| climate in a huge variety of ways, technically this
| doesn't necessarily imply to oppose fossil fuel as
| science doesn't have normative component (science doesn't
| care - in the strictest sense - if human civilization is
| destroyed or signficantly harmed), but with only an
| additional few, normally agreed-upon, assumptions you can
| get there.
|
| (2) Taking a stance against biological-women-exclusive
| sports is "believing in science" according to the stance
| followers because a few studies of shaky foundations and
| questionable funding says there is no unfair advantage to
| those who had male puberty, although there are tons of
| other studies that disagree.
|
| Those who say (loudly) they "believe in science" are
| usually using "believe" in the non-philosophical sense,
| and the viewpoints they love to push most are usually
| (2)-like rather than (1)-like.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
| mizzack wrote:
| Science exists in a perpetual state of being supported or
| challenged by evidence. If the clergy ("credible expert",
| Nature) make it impossible to challenge the orthodoxy
| ("established science") then it _is_ dogma.
|
| By being a "believer" in science as you've laid it out,
| you aren't believing in science as a process, but science
| as an institution.
| rplst8 wrote:
| >Science exists in a perpetual state of being supported
| or challenged by evidence
|
| One problem with that. Some sciences, particularly soft
| or social sciences cross broadly into culture and "ways
| of life". There are certain things today that cannot be
| questioned without getting shouted down or deplatformed.
| So challenging the current widely held scientific facts
| can be career ending.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| That's why there are quite a few people who don't
| consider some of such fields sciences. I have half a
| heart to agree with that stance. That's not to say those
| fields don't have value, but science is the process of
| building reproduceable, falsifiable evidence. If you
| can't do that, then you aren't practicing science.
| 0xChain wrote:
| psyc wrote:
| I guarantee you that if the guideline documents in TFA came
| to the attention of Twitter, they'd already be dated, and
| somebody would start righteous-indignation-tweeting to get
| their personal army to boycott Nature until they change it to
| say what the mob wants it to say. And I'm not being flip. For
| once.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| >>Advancing knowledge and understanding is a fundamental public
| good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the
| populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication<<
|
| Are they really advocating for self censorship in the sciences?
| And when the whims of societal taste turn or, God forbid (and
| yes, I put this with all irony intended), Twitter decides it
| doesn't like an opinion for five minutes... does science self
| censor then as well?
| rrauenza wrote:
| David Shor was ostracized for presenting this research:
|
| https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-
| wasow...
|
| > Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar
| Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a
| political backlash that would help President Donald Trump's
| bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that,
| historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at
| driving political change "mainly by encouraging warm elite
| discourse and media coverage."
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| If people are truly worried about electing people like
| Donald Trump they'll broaden education and, in particular,
| education in the hard sciences like maths and computer
| science to bolster critical thinking and logic. At that
| point we won't elect reality show hucksters who blatantly
| lie and foment sedition.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| We should get past the belief that those who aren't on
| our political side are just lacking education and not
| thinking properly.
|
| You might despise the candidate (and to my opinion most
| candidate can be despised in many ways), but that doesn't
| put all their voters at the candidate's level, nor
| preclude supporters from "using" their candidates to push
| a specific aspect.
|
| To me that's the lesson times and times again, when we
| think some candidate is obviously non viable and we're
| just dumdfounded as they're elected.
| nradov wrote:
| And yet a surprising number of violent terrorists have
| engineering degrees.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-
| of-...
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| That's a fascinating paper. There are a couple of issues
| I take with it. Their dismissal of recruitment of
| engineers because they use them recklessly in terror
| attacks doesn't seem to hold much water. If They were
| recruited on the promise of heaven by Jihad, then
| logically, they would want to die by Jihad. And the small
| sample size, plus their own mentioned Saudi Exception
| seem to flaw their own paper, even to them.
|
| But it's still fascinating and a great paper, thank you
| for sharing! Plus the over representation of both Nazis
| and Islamist terrorist groups is fascinating. I'm
| completely geeked out! Thanks again!
| giantg2 wrote:
| "If people are truly worried about electing people like
| Donald Trump they'll broaden education and, in
| particular, education in the hard sciences like maths and
| computer science to bolster critical thinking and logic.
| At that point we won't elect reality show hucksters who
| blatantly lie and foment sedition."
|
| If our choices at election time continue ro be between a
| shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread, we
| will continue to have similar issues. Lesser of two evils
| and all that.
|
| Ps which one has the bread is just a matter of
| perspective for each individual.
| haunter wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
| abeppu wrote:
| I think that's a pretty unreasonable comparison. There's a
| difference between religious dogma which makes claims about
| reality, and norms or ethics. Discrimination and harm as
| discussed in this document isn't about factual findings, but is
| about "superiority or inferiority of one human group over
| another" (i.e. a value judgement), "the rights and dignities of
| an individual or human group" (i.e. social norms and
| conventions), "text or images that ... disparage" (again, value
| judgement), "embody singular, privileged perspectives" (an
| issue of viewpoint, not disagreement about facts in reality).
|
| None of these prevent researchers from sharing their evidence-
| based conclusions, only the projection of value, status,
| dignity, or privilege onto those findings. As a society, we can
| agree to be civil, respectful and uphold particular values
| while we investigate objective reality.
|
| Trying to claim that an ethical stance for non-discrimination
| is equivalent to creationism or geocentrism is making type
| error; one makes claims about norms and how we should behave,
| and one makes claims about how the world works whether
| irrespective of our beliefs or behavior.
| elefanten wrote:
| But that's not what the quoted text is saying. It's saying
| research whose outcomes could be "harmful" (where the
| definition of "harmful" is very broad) may have harms that
| "outweigh" the benefits... implying it shouldn't be done.
|
| And now you've attached a high leverage handle to research
| allocation/gatekeeping and put it in deeply politicized hands
| that don't care about the research.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Well connected - and I think this comparison is becoming more
| apt each passing day.
|
| These statements and policies are just so... _egotistical_ ...
| for lack of a better word. What happens when we stop agreeing
| on what the "good" is? How can you claim to respect all humans
| when you don't respect the human cognitive ability to disagree?
|
| Thanks for posting.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > What happens when we stop agreeing on what the "good" is?
|
| "We" always agree on what the good is. If YOU don't agree,
| well, we'll have to sort that out, won't we?
| 0xChain wrote:
| mgoldstein5 wrote:
| anon291 wrote:
| Exactly, the process of applying scientific results to human
| society falls well within the realm of politics. We should
| not allow scientific bureaucrats to have a say in the kinds
| of policies implemented, but rather limit their contribution
| to answering empirical questions based on inquiries presented
| by actual politicians.
| blueflow wrote:
| > What happens when we stop agreeing on what the "good" is?
|
| Did we ever agree? I always felt like Democracy is some kind
| of status quo between the incompatible.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| No, I don't think we did. I was thinking about this when I
| wrote it, too. That's been the case in the past, present,
| and future.
|
| Glad someone picked that out.
| klyrs wrote:
| No, there is no universal "good" otherwise wars would not
| occur. The American Civil War and WW2 are pretty classical
| examples of massive disagreements over the legitimacy of
| certain classes of humans. Had those wars not ended the way
| they did, black people would still be property, and Jews,
| Romani, and LGBT people would have been exterminated. There
| are still people who wish that we lived in that alternative
| history. Democracy is always a compromise, and when that
| breaks down, you get wars.
| EarlKing wrote:
| You are conflating object and subject... the thing and
| its perception. Good can exist even as we disagree over
| its definition. Some people are simply right, and some
| are simply wrong. We are not gods.
| brightball wrote:
| In the 90s before mass internet adoption, it sure felt like
| it.
|
| We had disagreements, but nothing compared to what we see
| today.
| [deleted]
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I wouldn't call being on the receiving end of racial
| slurs for dating outside your "race", being shunned for
| being queer, and other such things mere "disagreements".
| (This was me, as a teen, in the 90s).
|
| It is really easy to romanticize the past, back when you
| were younger and just didn't have the same grasp of the
| world. Especially if you had a decent enough life at the
| time.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > So instead how about this theory: the internet in
| general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than
| we realized, with our American mythology of universal
| white suburban middle-classness and "global village"
| Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy
| in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-
| class practices were the grandfathers from the "Silent"
| or "Greatest" generations before the postwar "mass middle
| class". Our parents were beavery professionals who
| settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were
| destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from
| birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall,
| street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where
| boldness of assertion counted more than patient
| derivation from shared principles.
|
| > And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like
| this now maybe it's cause it's less of a professional-
| class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones
| where "people on the internet" went from "people who
| specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury" to "people with
| telephone service"? That's a real possibility, that for
| all the "Global Village" stuff the wondrous effect of the
| '90s internet was to create a cultural space that was
| MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
|
| > That's... kind of depressing, though. "Haha you thought
| the world was getting better because you were eliminating
| elitist barriers but actually it's cause you were making
| them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite
| are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to
| the extent they're on top of things the thing they're on
| top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and
| anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early
| adopter base and you'll never ever get them back unless
| you make the non-elite economically and politically
| irrelevant."
|
| > Depressing but very well precedented, that's exactly
| the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
|
| https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your
| -gr...
| psyc wrote:
| Everyone's gonna tell you this is fully explained by
| nostalgia and various cognitive biases, actually, cuz
| that's what we do hyea. But I'll back you all day. I know
| they literally can't hear it, but I always have the urge
| to tell Gen Y and later that for a minute in the mid-late
| 90's we had this shit mostly, not totally - that'll never
| happen - but mostly figured out. And then they blew it
| all up, and damned us all to hell. And they'll never,
| ever know that it happened.
| rurp wrote:
| I would go further and say we actually do have quite a
| bit of hard evidence that societal disagreements were
| more civil several decades ago. Bipartisan legislation,
| violent threats against public figures, mass murders, and
| attempts to violently overthrow an election have all
| gotten objectively worse since the rise of the internet.
|
| I don't know how much the internet has _caused_ this
| deterioration, but it is strongly correlated.
| coryrc wrote:
| The, uh, US civil war.
|
| Murders have dropped every decade for the last five.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| I don't think this is true. I think a lot of people were
| insulated from information that created a perception for
| them that those disagreements didn't exist.
|
| A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who
| don't live near them don't share their values.
| kansface wrote:
| > I don't think this is true. I think a lot of people
| were insulated from information that created a perception
| for them that those disagreements didn't exist.
|
| This is correct. The take away is something more along
| the lines of: when people don't know they disagree and
| therefore don't define themselves in terms of
| disagreement and further structure their lives around
| disagreement, they more readily work together;
| disagreements aren't attacks on personal
| branding/identity.
| brightball wrote:
| Oh, that was always true. It just wasn't possible for
| those people to spend all day yelling at each other for
| it.
|
| The context of the disagreements was largely limited to
| newspapers and politicians. Some assumption of
| professionalism, editing and journalistic integrity was
| included with nationwide dialogues.
|
| The internet, Twitter, political amplification, bot
| amplification, media consolidation, etc have made it
| 1000x worse.
|
| Before, you could disagree on a topic and go about your
| day. Now you are beaten over the head with every topic
| constantly to remind you how much you disagree with it.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| Some people could disagree on a topic and go about their
| day. That isn't true for everyone. One person's
| disagreement is another person's human rights.
|
| A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the
| discomfort of that knowledge.
| brightball wrote:
| And other people prefer to incite people to better
| control them via polarization.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| And other people just pretend and seek attention, taking
| the tiniest discomfort and screeching "human rights!
| human rights!" left right and centre. All while every
| government institution and corporation bends over
| backwards to please them.
|
| A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the
| discomfort of that knowledge and even more prefer the
| comfort of their self made moral high horse from which
| they chastise everyone they deem unfit.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "A lot of people are surprised to find out that people
| who don't live near them don't share their values."
|
| Maybe. I feel like those people might be living under a
| rock. With all the media today it seems unlikely that an
| individual isn't attacked on at least one belief. I know
| I see constant attacks on my beliefs.
|
| The problem is that with fast transport, we are extending
| many laws to the larger geographic area (state or
| national level), which means increasing the size of the
| negatively affected groups since we are not homogeneous.
|
| Edit: why disagree?
| teawrecks wrote:
| The first part is just basic science: don't draw generalized
| conclusions from data that was poorly sampled.
|
| But I agree the second part is questionable. Scientists
| shouldn't decide whether something is right or wrong. They just
| conduct experiments, gather data, draw conclusions, and share
| the results. Obviously they should consider the ethical impacts
| of conducting their experiments, but beyond that, all valid
| conclusions should be welcome.
| bergenty wrote:
| There is a difference here. One was to maintain the power of a
| theocracy while the other is to protect the lives of
| individuals. Is it the right course of action? I don't know but
| the motivations are definitely not analogous.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| The stated, overt goal of that theocracy was to save the
| souls of individuals. I'm not sure this distinction is as
| real as you state.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| A theocracy is nothing more then a "protect the rights of
| individuals" for contract safety (marriage), primitive
| justice and against more then absolute ruler overreach, going
| heywire and corrupt.
|
| This whole machine will reincarnate again and again though.
| With fairytale or without, the part of society not trusting
| the judical system to uphold contracts and social safety,
| will make there voices heard in pseudo religion after pseudo
| religion.
|
| Let me venture into the testable area. I venture the guess,
| that the more reliable and longer existing a states social
| safety net is, the more religion will be absent from its
| society. It should also corellate with reliability of the
| justice system.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| > _research may -- inadvertently -- stigmatize individuals or
| human groups. It may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist
| or homophobic. It may provide justification for undermining the
| human rights of specific groups, simply because of their social
| characteristics._
|
| Do these people think there are motherfucking X-Men living
| among us who we want to save from stigma? These kinds of
| statements read like the authors don't actually believe people
| are meaningfully equal.
| dcow wrote:
| Exactly. What happens when some research may feel socially
| dirty but is actually a huge boon to some group? I can't
| stand the privilege required to say you know better for some
| other group. Let groups of people stand up for themselves and
| call out BS when they see it. How can the hegemony possibly
| understand the feelings of minority groups?
| User23 wrote:
| What do you mean by "meaningfully equal?"
|
| It strikes me as a tricky set of not always terribly related
| concepts. As a Christian I believe all human beings are equal
| in inherent dignity. As an American who likes the Anglo-
| American legal tradition I believe that all people ought to
| be equal before the law, even though that's observably not
| the case. As someone who has performed hundreds of tech
| interviews and worked in this industry a long time, I don't
| believe people are remotely close to equal in developer
| ability or productivity and I don't see any way they could be
| made to be without bringing high performers down to the
| lowest common denominator.
| 8note wrote:
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > Do these people think there are motherfucking X-Men living
| among us
|
| In fact, there are. You know, we all have genetic
| differences, and most studies do not account for these
| genetic differences. So a medicine that helps one person
| might cause drug induced Lupus in another.
|
| Lithium is a good example of this stigma. I have
| Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and Lithium is constantly
| forces on me even though it does not work. I am what they
| call a "Lithium Non-Responder" and this has bee shown to be
| linked to varying genetics.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4814312/
|
| The stigma is that researchers still think there is only one
| genetic human.
|
| And what do you think the X-Men was about? It was about
| genetic difference and mental health. It is about trying to
| have people see that we have value that others cannot see
| because all they see is the illness.
| implements wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbamazepine can be
| effective for those for whom Lithium is ineffective or
| causes adverse reactions.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Yes, been there. It gave me lupus symptoms. I have much
| better luck eating only seafood and no plant oils. These
| omega 3's inhibit these sodium channels as well as the
| calcium channels implicated in mood disorders.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20167245/
| immigrantheart wrote:
| Seems that they show their true colors.
| antiquark wrote:
| > ableist
|
| This seems like an implicit denial that people can have
| different abilities.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| This reminds me of the short story in "I, Robot" (Asimov) about
| the robot who could read people's minds.
|
| The robots in that world were hard-coded to be incapable of
| injury humans, and the mind-reading robot considered emotional
| damage "injury". Of course the robot got into a paradox where
| it had to hurt _someone's_ feelings, so it just...died.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I believe the conventional orthography nowadays is: eMoTiOnAl
| dAmAgE
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=eMoTiOnAl%20.
| ..
| setgree wrote:
| > In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations
| studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.
|
| I see a counterfactual claim ("may outweigh") and therefore an
| opportunity for some causal identification, i.e. a scientific
| answer!
|
| An RCT would be ideal, but we might also look to the literature
| on attitude change in general to see how new information
| impacts discourse and attitudes. Here's a few things off the
| top of my head:
|
| * https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692739
|
| * https://alexandercoppock.com/graham_coppock_2021.html
|
| * https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-
| psych-...
|
| I think that in general, researchers find racial/prejudicial
| attitudes very resistant to change, either in an anti-
| prejudicial or "confirm my existing biases" direction...
| bitwize wrote:
| We are converging on a new definition of truth which takes into
| account social harm. Claims which protect the marginalized and/or
| harm those groups deemed to be hate groups must be taken as true;
| claims which do the opposite must be taken as false.
|
| It kind of sucks if you believe in objectivity -- but the
| postmodernists taught us there is no such thing. Any pretense to
| objectivity is a means to trick your sorry ass and gain power
| over you. Like it or not, this is the world of Marcuse, Derrida,
| Baudrillard and Foucault.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| I cannot help feeling like what we see in things like this is
| the manifestation of a new religion. My only hope is, this
| woke/scientist religion doesn't become a new christianity and
| instead dies sooner. But even if it goes the way of
| christianity my only happy though is there will be a point in
| the future when the wokes will be looked down with the same
| disgust and revulsion they look down on christianity now.
| ElCheapo wrote:
| letmeinhere wrote:
| Sounds like a nightmare!
| letmeinhere wrote:
| Count me out! I, for one, will pursue my paperclip maximization
| without regard to any such trivialities.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > Farming equipment must respect the dignity and rights of all
| humans.
|
| Farmers must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.
|
| > The TCP protocol must respect the dignity and rights of all
| humans.
|
| Network Engineers must respect the dignity and rights of all
| humans.
|
| > Cinema projectors must respect the dignity and rights of all
| humans.
|
| Cinema owners must respect the dignity and rights of all
| humans.
| ElCheapo wrote:
| Yes, that was the point of my comment. Seeing that it even
| got flagged I can sense people here are treading on thin ice
| for some reason
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| Evolution stops below the neck, everyone knows that :)
| n4r9 wrote:
| There is a very clear trend in the HN crowd's reaction to this
| statement, so I'm inclined to offer a defense. I'm not linked to
| Nature in any way, just of a rebellious bent.
|
| The principle objections to the guidance appear to fall into the
| following categories:
|
| * They threaten the objectivity of science
|
| * They prevent the publication of "heretical"/"non-PC" results
|
| * They are too vague
|
| I strongly recommend that people read the actual guidelines
| before forming a strong opinion about the linked statement:
| https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/e...
|
| I'd also recommend mulling for a moment on the trade-off between
| scientific freedom and ethics. Because it has always existed and
| journals have for a very long time had a position on what is an
| appropriate trade-off. We've come far since scientists were able
| to cut live dogs open without anesthetic for their experiments,
| and that's a _good_ thing.
|
| The great majority of the guidelines are in my opinion very
| specific (as opposed to vague) and relate either to the conduct
| of the research or to the language of the paper (as opposed to
| the results of the research). They are geared towards the removal
| of bias and make reference to guidelines set out by other well-
| established organisations.
|
| Probably the most problematic guideline is this one:
|
| > [editors reserve the right to request modifications to] content
| that undermines - or could reasonably be perceived to undermine -
| the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the
| basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human
| groupings.
|
| I concede that this part requires further refinement, since it
| looks like it could be used to refuse results that aren't "woke".
| My good-faith take is that it really means "be careful you don't
| give matches to the pyromaniac". For example, if you're going to
| publish a result about substance abuse amongst different
| demographics, please be very cautious about the risk that certain
| institutions might use it as a pseudo-justification for
| persection of minorities.
|
| At the end of the day, a journal has a great ethical
| responsibility for the impact of what it publishes, and is within
| its rights to say "no" on that basis.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| > _At the end of the day, a journal has a great ethical
| responsibility for the impact of what it publishes, and is
| within its rights to say "no" on that basis._
|
| You state this like it is or should be fact, but this is
| precisely the problem. Science should be the beginning of a
| chain starting at knowledge and leading to policy: science ->
| politics -> policy. It is not the job of scientists to try and
| predict or assume reactions to science; that partially inverts
| the flow: politics -> science -> policy. By placing politics
| first, science _becomes_ politics, as nothing disapproved will
| reach the science phase of the process.
| Banana699 wrote:
| > a journal has a great ethical responsibility for the impact
| of what it publishes and is within its rights to say "no" on
| that basis.
|
| No. This is really hilarious, but really though, No.
|
| The whole point of science is no content-related norms. You can
| put content-related norms wherever you want. You can put them
| in your useless HR departments, you can put them in the
| brainwashing (uh, ahem, "orientation") of new hires. But the
| moment you start saying "All papers dealing with topic X are
| refused, regardless of supporting evidence or
| explanatory\predictive power" then you're literally not doing
| science. You're playing dress up.
|
| Every single philosophy of science from pre-Popper onwards is
| very clear that good science doesn't give a single shit about
| the moral content of an idea and how politically-correct it is,
| only how well supported it is and how elegantly it explains
| existing data and how accurately it predicts new data.
|
| Evolution says you're no better and no worse than rats, who are
| also your distant cousins btw, neuroscience says that what we
| call "you" is really just a bunch of electrochemistry that
| anybody can learn to manipulate and push to do things. Science
| doesn't give a shit about your panic that somebody can
| "misinterpret" those results, that's your problem, stop being
| lazy and find other solutions to it, don't censor science.
| kosyblysk666 wrote:
| BurningFrog wrote:
| So if Nature has fallen, what replaces it?
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