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

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.

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.

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."

> "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.

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.