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Pinker is making testable hypotheses. He is explicitly claiming "bioethicists hold back research; jurisdictions that listen to them will have worse outcomes".

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.

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.