4 ms·

Unless a "bioethicist" can make testable predictions, there is no reason you should listen to them when formulating policy. They are secular priests, nothing m

Unless a "bioethicist" can make testable predictions, there is no reason you should listen to them when formulating policy. They are secular priests, nothing more.

dalke 11y ago
Should we listen to a 'public intellectual' who doesn't make testable predictions?
- splawn 11y ago
  Imo, no. I try not to buy into any concept if there is no way for anyone to ever understand it. Honestly, would doing so even be considered intellectual?
  - dalke 11y ago
    The first ~20% of the article concerns comments by "Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist and public intellectual", written in an op-ed piece. There are no testable predictions. Therefore I think fiatmoney is saying that we should ignore Pinker's comments. As regards your comments, many ethical concepts are not testable in any meaningful way. What limits should be placed on vivisection? Should we use prisoners as research guinea pigs? Should prisoners be required to participate in medical experiments as part of their incarceration? When is it okay for a doctor to put the interests of the government ahead of the health of the patient? That doesn't mean there is no way to understand these issues.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > As regards your comments, many ethical concepts are not testable in any meaningful way. Fundamental ethical propositions by definition are not empirically testable. They aren't statements about facts, but about values. (Derivative ethical propositions of the form "Given that we value A, B, and C , we should do X" can be testable, insofar as A, B, and C are amenable to objective measurement, and we can test whether or not X optimizes them relative to alternatives.)
      - dalke 11y ago
        Exactly. But fiatmoney's point is that we should ignore the views of bioethicists unless they can produce testable results. Which I think means pretty much ignoring the views of those who on principle want to uphold the Declaration of Helsinki and similar ethical guidelines.
    - fiatmoney 11y ago
      Pinker is making testable hypotheses. He is explicitly claiming "bioethicists hold back research; jurisdictions that listen to them will have worse outcomes". He's furthermore claiming "not listening to bioethicists will not result in Mengele 2.0". These are both falsifiable. Bioethicists are capable of formulating predictions too, they just prefer not to, or to make them but formulate the decision rule as ignoring them, since it diminishes their self-claimed moral authority. It would be easy to make a prediction like "governments which experiment on prisoners will begin imprisoning people explicitly to experiment on them" or "vivisectrixes will experience high rates of PTSD" (look, I just did!) but instead it's usually "dignity of man etc nazi atrocities etc ethics requires a balancing test", with themselves as the balancer, which they are of course well suited for on account of tenure or something.
      - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        > Pinker is making testable hypotheses. He is explicitly claiming "bioethicists hold back research; jurisdictions that listen to them will have worse outcomes". But testing that one means having jurisdictions that don't listen to bioethicists, and researching into things that bioethicists say should be left alone. Yes, we can test that... > He's furthermore claiming "not listening to bioethicists will not result in Mengele 2.0". These are both falsifiable. But only at the price of not listening to bioethicists and seeing if we get Mengele 2.0. I'm not sure that I want to run that test - at least one of the outcomes extracts too high a human price. > It would be easy to make a prediction like "governments which experiment on prisoners will begin imprisoning people explicitly to experiment on them" or "vivisectrixes will experience high rates of PTSD"... Yes, but testing them requires governments experimenting on prisoners, and vivisection, respectively. Again, I don't want to test the predictions at that price. If you need a testable prediction to understand why vivisection is horrible and should be avoided, your sense of ethics is extremely foreign to mine...
      - dalke 11y ago
        You and he are right that 'bioethicists hold back research'. Some research should be held back. So that part is true pretty much by definition. The article doesn't use the phrase 'Mengele 2.0', nor does the original op-ed, though Pinker brings up 'Nazi atrocities' and 'armies of cloned Hitlers' and the author says 'no one needs an expert to verify that Dr. Mengele was a monster'. However, that's Godwining, and not testable. The question is more, will not listening to bioethicists lead to inhumane treatment? We know the answer to that is "yes." Look at the last few years of the American Psychological Association to see an example, where the board and the military secretly worked to change the ethical guidelines to permit practices that the APA as a whole found unethical, once it was revealed. Yes, it would be 'easy to make a prediction' for the two examples you suggested. Your original requirement though was 'testable predictions'. It would be unethical to run those experiments, and the point of bioethics is to block that sort of testing. Which means they are not testable. There are all sorts of experiments people might want to do if it weren't for ethics. How do you measure "worse outcomes"? Is it better to know the full natural progress of syphilis in a human, or to treat the human? If you can't measure it, it's not testable.
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  "Listen to" in the sense of "act on what they say is a good idea"? Hell no. Testable predictions are how you figure out if people are good at formulating policy with the intended effects. Is the point of policy to affiliate with high-status "public intellectual" who proposed it, or to get something done?
freshhawk 11y ago
So you are agnostic on the question of whether our society should butcher the homeless to feed to the hungry because it's a value question and therefore not testable?
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  "Well see, we were going to hunt people who made terrible hypotheticals for sport (boosts the endorphins, doncha know), but then this guy walks up (a Yale man, as it turns out), and he says that, whaddaya know, it's real good for ya, but the universal dignity of man / communist dialectic / brotherhood of christ forbids it on principle. Good thing he wandered up when he did; I say we better hire a couple'a more of them so we don't miss anything second time around!"
  - freshhawk 11y ago
    So the cliched hypothetical was part of my point but I can be more clear if you like. You stated that ethicists should make testable predictions. This means you either don't know what "testable prediction" means or you don't know what ethicists do. You told a group of people to do something that is logically impossible, testing a value claim is a logically contradictory notion. The untestable nature of value claims is literally how they are defined.

Unless a "bioethicist" can make testable predictions, there is no reason you should listen to them when formulating policy. They are secular priests, nothing more.

dalke 11y ago

Should we listen to a 'public intellectual' who doesn't make testable predictions?

splawn 11y ago
Imo, no. I try not to buy into any concept if there is no way for anyone to ever understand it. Honestly, would doing so even be considered intellectual?
- dalke 11y ago
  The first ~20% of the article concerns comments by "Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist and public intellectual", written in an op-ed piece. There are no testable predictions. Therefore I think fiatmoney is saying that we should ignore Pinker's comments. As regards your comments, many ethical concepts are not testable in any meaningful way. What limits should be placed on vivisection? Should we use prisoners as research guinea pigs? Should prisoners be required to participate in medical experiments as part of their incarceration? When is it okay for a doctor to put the interests of the government ahead of the health of the patient? That doesn't mean there is no way to understand these issues.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > As regards your comments, many ethical concepts are not testable in any meaningful way. Fundamental ethical propositions by definition are not empirically testable. They aren't statements about facts, but about values. (Derivative ethical propositions of the form "Given that we value A, B, and C , we should do X" can be testable, insofar as A, B, and C are amenable to objective measurement, and we can test whether or not X optimizes them relative to alternatives.)
    - dalke 11y ago
      Exactly. But fiatmoney's point is that we should ignore the views of bioethicists unless they can produce testable results. Which I think means pretty much ignoring the views of those who on principle want to uphold the Declaration of Helsinki and similar ethical guidelines.
  - fiatmoney 11y ago
    Pinker is making testable hypotheses. He is explicitly claiming "bioethicists hold back research; jurisdictions that listen to them will have worse outcomes". He's furthermore claiming "not listening to bioethicists will not result in Mengele 2.0". These are both falsifiable. Bioethicists are capable of formulating predictions too, they just prefer not to, or to make them but formulate the decision rule as ignoring them, since it diminishes their self-claimed moral authority. It would be easy to make a prediction like "governments which experiment on prisoners will begin imprisoning people explicitly to experiment on them" or "vivisectrixes will experience high rates of PTSD" (look, I just did!) but instead it's usually "dignity of man etc nazi atrocities etc ethics requires a balancing test", with themselves as the balancer, which they are of course well suited for on account of tenure or something.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      > Pinker is making testable hypotheses. He is explicitly claiming "bioethicists hold back research; jurisdictions that listen to them will have worse outcomes". But testing that one means having jurisdictions that don't listen to bioethicists, and researching into things that bioethicists say should be left alone. Yes, we can test that... > He's furthermore claiming "not listening to bioethicists will not result in Mengele 2.0". These are both falsifiable. But only at the price of not listening to bioethicists and seeing if we get Mengele 2.0. I'm not sure that I want to run that test - at least one of the outcomes extracts too high a human price. > It would be easy to make a prediction like "governments which experiment on prisoners will begin imprisoning people explicitly to experiment on them" or "vivisectrixes will experience high rates of PTSD"... Yes, but testing them requires governments experimenting on prisoners, and vivisection, respectively. Again, I don't want to test the predictions at that price. If you need a testable prediction to understand why vivisection is horrible and should be avoided, your sense of ethics is extremely foreign to mine...
    - dalke 11y ago
      You and he are right that 'bioethicists hold back research'. Some research should be held back. So that part is true pretty much by definition. The article doesn't use the phrase 'Mengele 2.0', nor does the original op-ed, though Pinker brings up 'Nazi atrocities' and 'armies of cloned Hitlers' and the author says 'no one needs an expert to verify that Dr. Mengele was a monster'. However, that's Godwining, and not testable. The question is more, will not listening to bioethicists lead to inhumane treatment? We know the answer to that is "yes." Look at the last few years of the American Psychological Association to see an example, where the board and the military secretly worked to change the ethical guidelines to permit practices that the APA as a whole found unethical, once it was revealed. Yes, it would be 'easy to make a prediction' for the two examples you suggested. Your original requirement though was 'testable predictions'. It would be unethical to run those experiments, and the point of bioethics is to block that sort of testing. Which means they are not testable. There are all sorts of experiments people might want to do if it weren't for ethics. How do you measure "worse outcomes"? Is it better to know the full natural progress of syphilis in a human, or to treat the human? If you can't measure it, it's not testable.
fiatmoney 11y ago
"Listen to" in the sense of "act on what they say is a good idea"? Hell no. Testable predictions are how you figure out if people are good at formulating policy with the intended effects. Is the point of policy to affiliate with high-status "public intellectual" who proposed it, or to get something done?

freshhawk 11y ago

So you are agnostic on the question of whether our society should butcher the homeless to feed to the hungry because it's a value question and therefore not testable?

fiatmoney 11y ago
"Well see, we were going to hunt people who made terrible hypotheticals for sport (boosts the endorphins, doncha know), but then this guy walks up (a Yale man, as it turns out), and he says that, whaddaya know, it's real good for ya, but the universal dignity of man / communist dialectic / brotherhood of christ forbids it on principle. Good thing he wandered up when he did; I say we better hire a couple'a more of them so we don't miss anything second time around!"
- freshhawk 11y ago
  So the cliched hypothetical was part of my point but I can be more clear if you like. You stated that ethicists should make testable predictions. This means you either don't know what "testable prediction" means or you don't know what ethicists do. You told a group of people to do something that is logically impossible, testing a value claim is a logically contradictory notion. The untestable nature of value claims is literally how they are defined.