“Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#281

Post by elefanten » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:55 PM UTC

abeppu wrote: post #266

tarakat wrote: post #6

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, potent…

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 conve…

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.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#282

Post by nradov » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:56 PM UTC

Banana699 wrote: post #246

freejazz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"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 m…

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.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#283

Post by mosdave » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #167

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

first as tragedy, then as farce

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#284

Post by coryrc » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #271

psyc wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 co…

The, uh, US civil war.

The Tulsa massacre.

Emmett Till

Murders have dropped every decade for the last five.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#285

Post by systemvoltage » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

causality0 wrote: post #280

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?

No post body was provided.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#286

Post by timmg » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

i_love_limes wrote: post #112

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,…

> 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.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#287

Post by tomp » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

jpeloquin wrote: post #221

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?

I hold both of these views.

Science is about figuring out the truth about the world.

Censorship prevents that.

Something that is not reproducible isn’t even science.

I really don’t see a contradiction.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#288

Post by causality0 » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #274

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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, whe…

Indeed. This religionization of political beliefs where everyone must be without sin lest they be thrown into the pit has time and again handed elections to awful people and driven wedges further between people who really aren't all that different.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#289

Post by pmyteh » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

Dig1t wrote: post #269

scelerat wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

That's not making the claim that the line of questioning is itself violence. It's making the claim that a consequence of the line of questioning is going to be violence against trans people (in an unspecified time and place).

I don't know the context, or how sane the claim is. But I don't think it's an example of what GP said.

Re: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

#290

Post by stonogo » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

tarakat wrote: post #6

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, potent…

This strikes me as an incredibly bad faith interpretation of the article. I do not understand how this widespread determination to pretend that scientific research is "just another religion" got so popular but I do understand the practical effect is to convince people that their superstitions are as valuable as research, which is just going to lead to another Dark Ages. Nevertheless, your immediate leap to political conspiricy is tiring, irrelevant, and ultimately pointless.

Science (as in organized, rigorous research efforts) has had a problem with respecting human rights for most of its history. This ethical guidance is here to prevent horrible shit like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Operation Upshot-Knothole downwinders, the CDC Tuskegee Study, and so forth. The sociopathic robots who believe that research must ignore human dignity in order to be valid are not correct. There is still room in research to treat human beings like human beings, regardless of the destructive paranoia currently en vogue on web forums.