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After reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, I can't help but recoil in disgust at what it must have taken to produce the results for such a paper. Sure, thi
by banach 8y ago
After reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, I can't help but recoil in disgust at what it must have taken to produce the results for such a paper. Sure, this is interesting, but is it really worth the cost? Did the researchers or those who funded the research even reflect on it?
- mapster 8y agoby the time you've gotten thru grad school, you've most likely have accepted the dogma of animal research. then there's little time for pause as its a mad dash for collecting good data, grants/funding, publishing. of course some funding agencies (NIH) have lab inspections but these can be real or a farce depending.
- 21 8y agoI was watching on YouTube a talk by someone on AI intuitions coming from brain research, and the presenter was casually speaking about an experiment where a cat was sitting there with it's skull open and electrodes inserted into the brain and how the cat did this and that and what they measured.
- firethief 8y agoIt's a one-time cost for knowledge that will have benefits indefinitely. I don't eat or wear animals, but I'd holocaust a million rats to solve the opioid epidemic.
- komali2 8y agoIs the barrier for you species difference? For example, medical insights provided by Nazi scientists, and to a lesser extent Japanese ones, were provided by tests on human subjects with often fatal results.
- velp 8y ago"medical insights". Japanese and Nazi human experiments were hardly scientific. Torture disguised as science does not produce reliable results.
- nine_k 8y agoUnfortunately not. E.g. most of what we know about reactions of human body to extreme cold was found by Nazi scientists in quite unethical, but reasonably scientific ways, for entirely practical military purposes.
- firethief 8y agoOnly as a matter of degree I suppose. For valuable enough knowledge, I'd support medical experiments on unconsenting human subjects too if it were the only option. But this is a very hypothetical situation; the former bar and the latter constraint are extraordinarily unlikely ever to coincide (they are very rarely met even separately).
- komali2 8y agoThat is the problem with these hypotheticals, yea. In what circumstance do we absolutely need to perform human experimentation on unconsenting humans to get results? But because these are my favorite too-drunk-at-a-bar conversations I wanna give it a crack. Here's a couple things I think require human experimentation 1. Creative a definitive best-practice guide to child rearing. I.e., hitting yes/no? Shouting at yes/no? 2. Fully understanding primitive/baseline human psychology absent of culture, which could help us understand if there is for example biological morality, how to teach language, how languages form. Can't see how to do this without abandoning a child in the wilderness. 3. Determining best-case formula for human tribal organization. I.e. what's the most effective leadership traits, organizational schemes, rule enforcement mechanisms... Could be figured out with Vaults ;) 4. Is post-death ressurection possible and at what point? I suppose you can get consent before death, but does that count when that individual terminates? Can you think of any more? What are your thoughts on what would be "worth it?"
- wavefunction 8y agoYour first two examples don't even seem scientific, or at least incredibly difficult to structure as a study in a truly scientific way.
- komali2 8y agoReduce for simplification: How do we scientifically demonstrate effective means of raising children without experimentation on children?
- nordsieck 8y ago> Is the barrier for you species difference? I haven't met a person for which this isn't true. From my conversations with other people, the hierarchy of care is roughly: Humans > large mammals > small mammals / cephlopods > birds / large reptiles > small reptiles / fish > large insects / trees > small insects / spiders / plants > yeast / fungi / bacteria
- komali2 8y agoIf this is true then why does non consenting human experimentation happen ever? In any case, hierarchies like that are almost totally arbitrary, like anything about a culture. I'm just poking the bear here and seeing what comes out. Let's play with this more.
- drdeca 8y agoBecause expiraments on humans can provide information that expiraments on other animals can't, and the information in question is information that we care about. In addition, humans can consent to things.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoConsent is interesting, usually poor people will get paid for it, in which case it's a sort of coerced consent.
- Tomminn 8y agoYup, totally arbitrary. That's why I prefer the poetry yeast writes about the beauty of the universe and the pain of existence to that written by humans.
- komali2 8y agoIs your point that only humans have culture? There is evidence of culture and learned behaviors in animals as simple as birds.
- dredmorbius 8y agoNB: I'm not finding a source with a summary of total Nazi human experimentation subjects, though eyeballing totals, it seems that both Germany and Imperial Japan had several thousands of victims in ttheir respective programmes. Triggers: pretty much all of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoThere are other states too - USA did live human subject experiments with nuclear weapons, for example. Also they did biological experiments with people having some diseases, not curing them in order to watch what happened. Also non-consented administration of drugs. I'm sure we, the public, don't know the half of it.
- dredmorbius 8y agoTuskeegee, St. George, San Francisco, and elsewhere. Modern ethics requirements were established for reasons.
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- nkkollaw 8y agoIf you see it as a sacrifice, yes. This can help a lot of people for a long time.
- komali2 8y agoWhat is the alternative?
- banach 8y agoPerforming such experiments only on humans, who are capable of consent, or not performing the experiment at all, and finding other ways of understanding the world that don’t involve doing things to animals that we consider ourselves too civilized to do to humans.
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- eljimmy 8y agoIt is interesting to read people's views on animal testing. Some are very empathetic while others view every other species as inferior and worth nothing compared to a human life. Obviously the advancement of our species is important but we definitely think far too highly of ourselves when we consider how destructive we are to this planet and all its inhabitants.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoHardly surprising when you consider that, historically, people considered other human beings worth nothing compared to their tribe, race, or religion.
- contoraria 8y agoThis is no surprise when you have people think like that about other humans. In what dimension do you measure hight of thought? I guess on the one hand this could be linked to the architecture of the brain, directly translating to some topological notion. On the other hand, you might simply argue that others and self are on two different planes of existence and that higher consciousness is not concerned with just self and emotions, but with thoughts of thoughts ... per se, on very high levels of abstractions. And as those thought models are, if the bayesian crowd is to be any judge, highly probabilistic, those thoughts are just hypothetical. So, you are just saying they harbour wrong thoughts. They (we) are painfully aware of the possibility, but not very precisely. Then, in absence of other viable theories, they run with it. In effect, I guess, if they have a low opinion of other creatures, they might not have a high opinion of themselves.
- kolpa 8y agoIf you keep reading on the topic, you might reach the conclusion not that you should sacrifice your incremental well-being for the sake of animals', but that you should stop sacrificing your well-being for the sake of other humans'. Utilitarianism is internally consistent but inconsistent with most humans' (and animals', but they are instinctive not thoughtful about it) deepest sense of self.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThat is a really creepy, skeevy thing to say when we're talking about painful medical experiments.
- nnq 8y agoIf this sounds "too painful for the animals" to you, then other things done routinely in medical research would be 100x times beyond "pure torture" or "hellish" to you, meaning your cruelty threshold is waaaaay dis-calibrated. Thankfully researchers have learned to "forget describing" the painful effects or use "over-technical description of procedures avoiding the perceived pain by animal subjects", so they can actually not be noticed by people like you, and carry on working on things like curing cancer and other important stuff. Also, the "is it really worth" question is the dumbest thing to do in science - most scientific discoveries are valuable because of their unforseen and unintended consequence, so saving cures can come from a 10th level consequence of "pointless research" (that could have gone unfounded because someone like you might've said "but is it really worth the cost [in animal suffering]?"). Better wake up and see the cruelty that is all around us first, including abundant human-to-human cruelty everywhere, and adjust your cruelty-tolerance threshold accordingly!
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