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

nature.com

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

#361

Post by FFRefresh »

pmyteh wrote: post #289
Dig1t wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But making it known that the line of questioning will bring violence to others is implying that if the person continues the line of questioning, they are then knowingly and intentionally bringing violence to trans people. In a lot of legal systems and with informal norms, if you know your action will cause harm to others, and you do it anyway, you are considered a cause of the harm.

Claims that an action can cause violence are ultimately claims that the action causes violence.

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

#362

Post by rafaelero »

dane-pgp wrote: post #307
rafaelero wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but unlikely events are still consistent with reality We name people who overly act on this premisse as schizophrenics.

Or gamblers, or entrepreneurs. I don't know why you'd single out schizophrenics. Well, actually I do know why, but I still don't think it's a reasonable example for you to highlight.

It's a totally different level. Believing a shitty product will make a successful entry on the market does require some level of self-delusion, but nothing like believing a cluster of extremely low probability hypothesis about the world. The closest comparison to that, again, is a schizophrenic.

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

#363

Post by selfhoster11 »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #276
thisiscorrect wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ar…

The obvious, yet clearly heartless way question to ask is, why should you care? In the first example, the kid is not yours.

A failed intervention may carry the risk of violence being used against you as revenge. If you’re unfortunate, the police may refuse normal interaction if you later need it (say, because they found no evidence, or if they for some reason ignore domestic violence as a rule of thumb). You’re sticking your head out for someone who you don’t even know.

Even assuming that there are reasons to help that particular person, why is there suddenly a burden on me to do or say something? Doing or saying nothing will of course mean that I’m an an asshole, sociopath, or , but that still shouldn’t compel me to do or say anything. Compelled action and speech aren’t compatible with personal freedoms, or so I gather from the current consensus - so why is there suddenly a pressure to act?

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

#364

Post by timr »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #259
timr wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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.

> Actually, sickle cell anemia is disproportionately high only in specific populations of black people.

I wouldn't be surprised if we had, by this point, some more specific way of breaking down the susceptible population (other than the gene itself, which we know). It doesn't change the broader point that, breaking things down by "race" alone, we see huge, impactful differences.

Even in drug development, there's a huge push to break down clinical trials by gender and race, because not all drugs work the same in different ethnic populations. By these guidelines, I guess we're not allowed to do that? Race doesn't exist!

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

#365

Post by GauntletWizard »

Banana699 wrote: post #232
NoboruWataya wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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…

So far as I can tell, the Gettier problem is exactly the same as "I believe in Science" - There's a fallacy of false equivalence in "X is a justified argument, X||Y is therefore justified because of the justification in X", or something like that, I'm not sure what to call that fallacy.

When you evaluate the truth of the whole argument, you'll find that it's not a "Justified True Belief" because the truth does not flow through the justified prepositions.

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

#367

Post by geoduck14 »

dane-pgp wrote: post #294
teawrecks wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> was immaculately conceived, walked on water, turned water into wine, all things that you and I know are inconsistent with reality. All those things are completely consistent with reality. Every year there are virgin births[0] (not immaculate conceptions[1], which is a term specific to the birth of the Virgin Mary herself), water turning into wine[2], and people walking on water[3]. I think what you mean is, the spe…

You're right. People forget things like: Jesus' disciples witnessed his miracles and wrote about them, other nonbiblical scholars wrote about Jesus and his miracles, there was recorded evidence to his death, there were witnesses to his ascension, 11 of the 12 apostles died for believing that Jesus was God (the 12th was Peter, marooned on Patmos, also for believing Jesus was God)

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

#368

Post by Gatsky »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #20

No, science must pursue the truth, no matter where it leads. There is no such thing as a hate fact.

I don't think this is the right way to think about this. The editors of a journal do screen the articles that get published. Their criteria are hidden. They do not need to justify in any way why the accept or reject a submission. The process is entirely opaque. Scientists are thoroughly obsessed with publishing in top tier journals in many important fields, like biomedicine, so the whims of the editors are extremely influential. Here we have the faceless editors at least specifying some of the criteria they will be using. This is beneficial. We can now discuss and critique these criteria. We can also, if we disagree, choose not to publish in these journals, or post on twitter that our article was rejected on these grounds.

So overall, I think this is a net win.

The Nature Publishing group is not science. Science will survive whatever self-righteous fad the Nature editors decide to champion next week. If you want to criticise anyone, criticise the post-war generation of academics who have allowed journals to have too much power and landed us in this stupid soul crushing arrangement we have today.

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

#370

Post by elihu »

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #128
cycomanic wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lyn…

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…

I don't think you can separate science from politics. The scientific method that relies on repeatable experimental results is just a workaround for the general problem that the search for knowledge is done by highly opinionated, stubborn, egotistical, and very biased human beings. When people become scientists they don't lose those attributes, it's just that reproducibility of results act as a check on their biases. You can't remove politics from science without removing people from science. Even if the methodology is good, the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political.

That said, I think scientists should be given pretty wide latitude to explore wherever their curiosity leads them, and results shouldn't be rejected from publication without really good reasons that go beyond "the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable". (Though as a practical matter, research that doesn't serve some political or social objective probably isn't going to get funding.)

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