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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”

#661

Post by trashtester »

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…

There are extremely few things (if any) we can know for certain. Thinking in terms of boolean logic like this appears very primitive to me.

In my opinion, the only rigorous way to improve our knowledge, is to employ Bayes Theorem, and Bayesian thinking in general.

You and I may have different prior on a topic. We may see the same evidence, but end up believing different things because of the prior. As long as we state the prior, that is good and fair. If the evidence contradicts my prior, I should lower the confidence I have in my belief, even if the prior was big enough that I still believe the same thing.

Unfortunately, what often happens, is that people lock themselves into believing things absolutely. If you lock some prior probability to 1, Bayes' Theorem has n way to let you update that belief.

This is especially common when it comes to beliefs related to religion and identity. In fact, this is one way to define religious belief. Anything you believe that you will NOT stop believing regardless of evidence, could be defined as religious.

If you believe in God, and we discover that Heaven is not on the other side of the starts, the believer just modifies non-core parts, and claims that "God is everywhere and nowhere".

If belief in racist oppression is what defines you, and you find that most individuals are not individually racist anymore, you can just introduce "Structural Racism" that claims that hard work, staying married and maths are racist.

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

#662

Post by parkingrift »

bglazer wrote: post #485

This is in Nature Human Behavior. This is a social science/psychology journal, a field which is suffering from the reproducibility crisis, perhaps worse than any other field. So, any result in this field should be viewed with significant skepticism. This is true for research into population group differences, and extremely true for IQ research into race, which is almost hopelessly noisy and confounded. It is a simple…

Good grief I can’t believe you are serious. Mass shootings almost never happen, and when they do they aren’t because of bad research. It’s almost comical that you believe extremists are scouring scientific journals to fuel their hatred.

Censorship has never worked, but oh don’t worry in this circumstance it will definitely work. Because reasons.

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

#663

Post by blueflow »

EntropyIsAHoax wrote: post #643
blueflow wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can name a specific dogma of transgenderism: That gender is more than performing (like an actor on the stage) an arbitrary set of gender ideals.

Don't know where you get that idea, honestly. A lot of trans people certainly think that, but there is definitely no consensus within the trans community about the definition of gender. Personally I even subscribe more to performativity (mostly as described by Judith Butler) than any other theory. But also I don't care that much about gender philosophy. My "transgenderism ideology" is quite simple: other people's gen…

Where i got my thought from: Whats the purpose of transitioning when you aren't performing your gender in the first place? There isn't much left them.

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

#664

Post by parkingrift »

bawolff wrote: post #591
drekipus wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This should be handled with care, and extra consideration should be given to whether the tenuous, fallible results from this research will result in violence. What is "results in violence" though? One person's violence would be another person's justice. I think trans activism with kids is a severe violence. Would research in allowing transgenderism for children be considered violence or not in your eyes? I'm sure t…

> I think trans activism with kids is a severe violence. You think trans activism is equivalent to shooting someone? I mean, i think most people are going to dismiss you as crazy if you think words and ideas of any form are equivalently violent to shooting someone in the head. At the very least you would need to back up such a radical proposition with some very compelling arguments.

Epic straw man. Is your counter argument so poor that you must resort to defeating a comically false version of what OP said? Where in the world does shooting someone in the head come in based on what OP said?!?

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

#665

Post by macspoofing »

UIUC_06 wrote: post #564
macspoofing wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But we do.. Who is 'we' here? USA? Canada?

you said "If it is possible today, where are those mass abortions?" and he gave you the answer, notably China, the largest country in the world. So now you're saying you actually meant just North America?

>So now you're saying you actually meant just North America

I said "our society" isn't performing abortions on female fetuses - so clearly I must have meant China and India - the two societies that are?

And yes, I want to know why "our society" isn't.

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

#666

Post by DocTomoe »

chaps wrote: post #660
DocTomoe wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia says violence broke out a day after the George Floyd incident [1]: > After the main protest group disbanded on the night of May 26, a much smaller group, numbering in the hundreds, spray-painted the building, threw rocks and bottles, broke a window at the station, and vandalized a squad car. A skirmish soon broke out between the vandals and protesters trying to stop them. At around 8 p.m., police fired tear…

Not so fun fact: on May 29th in Chicago, the address with the highest number of arrests by far was at Trump tower, against peaceful protesters. Then the police department lied about the number of arrests that happened for looting, saying that there were more arrests for looting than protesters. If you're looking to build a better understanding of what happened, you might want to reconsider using wikipedia as your sou…

> on May 29th in Chicago, the address with the highest number of arrests by far was at Trump tower, against peaceful protesters.

I am not surprised that the one place in town which has a strong connection to a sitting US president who is considered racist by protesters is a protest, and thus an arrest hotspot. I see no proof that the arrest was made against peaceful protesters.

Other sources, by the way, speak of 108 arrests, mostly related to property damage and violence [1]

> If you're looking to build a better understanding of what happened, you might want to reconsider using wikipedia as your source and try to find local news that takes a critical look at policing.

I prefer a source that at least tries to be unbiased to a source that makes it very clear it doesn't care about unbiased at all.

The source you quote makes claims, but does not show data to back them up. Their analysis - and they admit that themselves - is based on incomplete data.

[1] https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/5/30/21275417/loop-protest...

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

#667

Post by ZeroGravitas »

justnotworthit wrote: post #477
matheusmoreira wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide. I don't think science should be censored, scientific inquiry should continue with integrity regardless of what people think. What I think is people who can't handle it should not have access to the truths revealed. I generally believe in unrestricted free information but I've been rethinking tha…

It was common in the middle of the 20th century to not tell a terminally ill patient he/she was dying. We look back at that with horror. In your example, I'd prefer chosing (assisted) suicide or not. Surely you're not doing me a favor by not letting me die how I want.

In 1972 people with horrific treatable diseases were being lied to, so that science could record exactly how they suffered and died:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

And that's what led to ethics rules that said you can't do that. You'd think you wouldn't need to write it down, but we did and we do.

> By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]

> The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards,[13] and has been cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history."[16] Its revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP)[17] and federal laws and regulations requiring institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects in studies.

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

#668

Post by throwawayacc2 »

elihu wrote: post #370
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the people practicing science. Because they are people. But science it’s self is a process. It does not have, by definition, political inputs or outputs.

> the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political

In a sense yes, but it also proves my point.

The example I think of is this. For the sake of argument, imagine there is a left leaning scientist and a right leaning one and they study economic differences between ethnic groups. The left leaning scientist will have political biases, politics, etc, because he is human, and guided by these biases he makes the decision to hypothesise the economic differences are caused by systemic inequality. This is indeed an example of a political choice guiding the scientific process.

I think that is perfectly fine. I don’t see this as “politics being in science” I see this as “politics being in humans practicing science”.

Now, coming back to the right leaning scientist, he too has biases and politics and a sense of morality etc because he is human. Also guided by these things he hypothesises economic differences between ethnic groups are caused by innate biological differences.

Just like the left scientist, I think this is fine. This is politics in the human practicing science, not politics in science directly.

Where politics in science appears is, if the prevalent political system discourage research into innate biological differences between humans and interferes in the scientific process to prevent researcher into this topic.

And that is what I have a problem with. And that is exactly what is being done through guidelines like this.

> the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable

I think we both know that is exactly how these rules will be used.

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

#669

Post by rosmax_1337 »

bglazer wrote: post #485

This is in Nature Human Behavior. This is a social science/psychology journal, a field which is suffering from the reproducibility crisis, perhaps worse than any other field. So, any result in this field should be viewed with significant skepticism. This is true for research into population group differences, and extremely true for IQ research into race, which is almost hopelessly noisy and confounded. It is a simple…

>Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact.

I am unable to write something to argue against this point because it would lead to this account being banned. I am unable to publish a paper on Nature that argues against the common beleif of racial equality. I am unable to use most modern communication media to do any of these things.

Why do people resort to violence?

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

#670

Post by austinjp »

emmelaich wrote: post #506
matheusmoreira wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide. I don't think science should be censored, scientific inquiry should continue with integrity regardless of what people think. What I think is people who can't handle it should not have access to the truths revealed. I generally believe in unrestricted free information but I've been rethinking tha…

Information cannot cause harm. Harm is done by people.

That seems oversimplified. If an individual or organisation collects or creates "information", they could/should consider not only what a thief might do with the information, but what they're collecting it in the first place and why. If they know potential dangers, they share at least some responsibility for future damage. If they haven't considered the dangers, this is negligent (mitigated by the act of sincere consideration, not by what dangers were discovered).

Intention exists separately from information (in this context) but they are not independent, they're connected.

A silly example: Let's say someone at Facebook realises they could predict with high confidence the chance of a user voting in favour of extremist political candidates. This is new information, and Facebook has decided to create it. Once created, it could do harm. At this point, saying "information doesn't kill people, people kill people" is a useless abstraction. Sure, it might be "true" in a limited interpretation, but that interpretation doesn't help anyone.

(From an excess of caution, I've constrained the definition of "information" above as something like "information created or collected by humans and our systems". This is to exclude exotic-but-true consideration of literally anything in the universe as "information" e.g. tumours, magnetars, etc etc.)

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