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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”

#731

Post by trashtester »

generj wrote: post #696
trashtester wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a group has power to prevent other people from writing or saying things about them that they do not like, even otherwise legitimate scientific findings in a scientific journal, I would say it is proof that they DO have power. Kind of like how Putin and Xi are able to prevent citizens in their respective countries to write bad things about them. > Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents d…

Moving beyond the abortion issues, in the hypothetical above there’s a real chance various regimes would do blood work on their living populations and kill or imprison non-out LGBT people (plus whatever straight people get included due to measurement error). Knowing that this outcome is likely, is it ethically responsible to publish?

With all due respect, I don't buy your premise. There is a handful of places in the world (mostly in the Middle East) that have the death penalty for homosexual practice, as it is seen as a sin. But in the cases I know, it is sin as a sin for being a voluntary act, not because it's in the DNA.

The abortion case is at least realistic. A lot of parents go through the effort of having children at least partly because they want to perpetuate the family line. Whether or not you respect such a goal, for someone with such a goal, it is more likely to happen if your children are straight.

You can also imagine the opposite case. A lesbian couple that WANT to have only female, lesbian daughters, and wanting to abort fetuses that are unlikely to match that pattern. Should that also be illegal?

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

#732

Post by mike00632 »

dymk wrote: post #727
mike00632 wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we devoted a tremendous amount of resources to studying whether being left or right handed increased your chances of transmitting COVID. Then millions of people online start citing scientific papers saying that right handed people spread COVID more often. Then some left handed people attack right handed people (similar to how Asian Americans are being brutalized in public during the pandemic). The point is…

That sounds like an unrealistically stretched hypothetical to justify not pursuing otherwise interesting scientific avenues.

Sounds like you're trying to censor information by dismissing the left/right hand hypothesis as "unrealistically stretched".

To put it another way: the way you feel about studying handedness being linked to COVID is the way I feel about studying an assumed link between race and "intelligence". It's not "otherwise interesting" at all. It's ignorant at best.

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

#733

Post by refurb »

mike00632 wrote: post #725
refurb wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two major vaccines - Pfizer and Moderna, never tested for infection prevention . There was literally no data to even say if they did or didn't prevent infection. You can look up the clinical trial endpoints. Patients were only tested for infections if they experienced symptoms. I believe it was only AZ or J&J that regularly tested to capture any effect on infection rate. But it was stated several times "The vacci…

I didn't mention COVID. You're focusing on COVID vaccines because that is the anti-vax cause at the moment. It's the case with ALL vaccines that they don't provide 100% protection. They are still incredibly useful for preventing infection, reducing the severity of disease and preventing further transmission. Btw, vaccines work by clearing infection quickly, not preventing infection. The virus infects you and begins t…

Ok, but how is that relevant to my point which was about Covid?

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

#734

Post by mizzack »

mike00632 wrote: post #712
mizzack wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

You mean in the United States. Monkeypox isn't a MSM disease worldwide. And you should perhaps look at the case trends in countries where children have started going back to school.

And France. And Spain. And the UK. Basically everywhere that it wasn't previously endemic it's 95%+ MSM cases. It isn't 100%, nor is it only sexually transmitted. But burying our heads in the sand to overlook obvious facts and preventing messaging to at-risk communities out of sensitivity is contributing to _why_ there are cases in kids at schools.

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

#735

Post by switchbak »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #227
rplst8 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

There's clearly some cache to calling your field a science, because we see it so often. They'll even emulate Sciencey Things to maintain the illusion, but like you say, they don't produce testable, falsifiable models. Political Science is a perfect example of a study that's very far from a real science.

Actual science will accept when it's been proven wrong. Much of we have these days isn't that. And that includes many folks working in what would be considered the hard sciences.

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

#736

Post by switchbak »

trashtester wrote: post #661
Banana699 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 stat…

Racism of the margins, as it were.

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

#737

Post by funcDropShadow »

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.

This is correct and completely irrelevant in the real world. It is similar to numbers cannot cause harm. Information and numbers are nothing more than interlectual constructs, patterns, or platonic ideas.

But collecting information can enable as much harm as collecting some numbers. For example the Nazis started with collecting information about the racial status of as many people as possible, see [1]. The collected information was later used to decide who to deport and kill.

Although, this is another example of humans causing harm, it also shows why collecting information is not harmless. Although the information itself cannot cause anything. It simply has no agency, so it can neither harm nor heal people. But it can enable both.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_certificate

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

#738

Post by bilvar »

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,…

I think we should terminate all pregnancies, as the baby could become a racist. We should be able to deprive the KKK community of all future members.

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

#739

Post by UIUC_06 »

macspoofing wrote: post #665
UIUC_06 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, well, I guess you're right that "our society" does not value boys over girls as much as China and India. I don't really see the relevance if you're arguing "no, sex-selective abortions will not happen."

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

#740

Post by heresie-dabord »

hilbert42 wrote: post #520
heresie-dabord wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are social in so far as they derive benefit from society. But they have always resented society to varying degrees. In the past, people's resentment was mostly expressed in casual ways because a society tends to suppress crazy behaviour. But the social media business profits from this social resentment.

Right, social media is the updated form of sensational headlines selling newspapers. And such headlines have always played on difference, resentment and moral values. And the more glaring and outrageous they are the more business profits from them. This is a serious issue for society to resolve, especially given the clear evidence that many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by…

> many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.

People are generally punished throughout their lives for being ignorant. But lack of comprehension is sometimes feigned. Some people test the tolerance of their behaviour.

The existence of propanda is at once a difficult problem and a profitable problem. There is no bright side to propaganda.

In cases where people are materially punished for their bad behaviour, they shut up and pay attention. I think it likely that future social-media business will require user accounts to have verified identities and users to accept responsibility by risking direct, personal financial loss for their behaviour.

People may call this tyranny, but in fact it's how society works despite their resentment.

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