7 ms·

No, science must pursue the truth, no matter where it leads. There is no such thing as a hate fact.

by NotYourLawyer 4y ago

giraffe_lady 4y ago
[flagged]
- blueflow 4y ago
  What would you do when someone says "Women are inferior because the Sun shines?"
  - blep_ 4y ago
    Regardless of the rest of this conversation, we should at least ban the publishing of obvious bullshit with no attempt to establish causality as science. This is in that category. I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      My point: All justifications of oppression are non-causal nonsense like this. I just made an obvious example that is easy to look through.
- red75prime 4y ago
  The proposed medication is worse than the disease. Fight fascism/racism/whatever with state supported lies (of omission). What could go wrong?
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    If you read carefully I'm actually not proposing any specific course and I think the reality will be nuanced and highly context-specific. What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other elements are interested in their work and how they might use it. The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past. Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well. Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
    - throwawayacc2 4y ago
      > What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other elements are interested in their work and how they might use it. Why? > The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past. You think that because you have biases, like all humans do. You say harms can arise. Let’s try to do an exercise. It’s the late 40s early 50s and research is finally starting to show there are, in fact, no real biological races of humans. We are one human race. The dutiful scientist at that time considers the society he is in, the notions of morality he has and decides it would be harmful to publish his research. Who knows what some crazy extremists will do with this fact. They might give the blacks rights, they might rile them up, they might they might even allow miscegenation! Bear in mind, all these were societal harms at that time! Is this the future you wish? Or this scenario doesn’t count because it’s the wrong politics? Have we found the end all be all of morality and must now protect it at all costs, even from facts if need be? > Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well I disagree. The way I see it, there is no politics in science. Science is not a set of beliefs. It’s a process. It’s a method of observing empirical reality and producing methods to describe it. > Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous. For whom?
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      > I think the reality will be nuanced and highly context-specific If you actually think that, you haven't been paying much attention to the behavior of the Twitter mob over the past few years.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  There was plenty of racism before the scientific method, there will be plenty after we ban using it to study anything related to race. And this guidance won't prevent people from thinking and spreading racist ideas, it'll just keep people from studying anything related race.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Censoring yourself on what some other person may do with your words is folly.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yes you can either fully censor yourself or publish it with no regard for how it will be used by others. There are certainly no other options.
- tarakat 4y ago
  Okay. Then let's censor science, and put an asterisk next to every published study: "If the results had been different, they would not have been published." And when someone claims "research shows your prejudice is unfounded", one can justifiably answer with "because the findings have been cherry-picked to support a pre-determined conclusion. So I will trust my gut instinct, because the scientists have admitted their research is subordinate to propaganda." Though I have a feeling social science will try to be very discreet about what kind of filtering they're doing, and will hope that, when they disseminate findings they like, that we will have forgotten they're self-confessed propagandists first, and scientists second.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > Similarly no scientific consensus has ever turned out to be wholly incorrect after being used to perpetrate atrocities. How do you suppose it was proved incorrect? If people can't question the current consensus because it might offend someone, then the current consensus cannot be improved or overturned.
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  > Right we just publish the facts. If another group wants to use it to justify genocide that's on them. I wash my hands of it. Unironically this. Science is here to present facts. Politics is here to decide what we do with the facts. Do not mix the two.
volkadav 4y ago
you'd probably benefit from reading and thinking about this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism sadly, what is called a fact is a malleable thing in the hands of the ill-intentioned, and all too many bigots are more than happy to pass off pseudo-science as the real deal. "science" isn't some abstract thing, it's composed of people and their actions, and as i think every adult will recognize, people can be turbo-shitty. like every other human endeavor, it deserves a close eye and critical thought. (i say this as a big fan of science in general and a degree-holder in the physical sciences.)
- kodyo 4y ago
  Positing ideas that can be disproven is science. It's also how thinking works.
- singlow 4y ago
  If the science is bad, then the science is bad. If you do good science and find a result that doesn't fit your preconceived ideas of right and wrong, that doesn't make the science bad. You don't need to be concerned with the ethical impact of the truth, but you do need to be concerned with the ethics of your process. I don't understand what the actions of pseudo-science bigots has to do with someone who is doing real science. Idiots will be idiots regardless of what real science says.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Oh, good and bad. It's just that simple!
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      The point is that results can be true and correct even if you dislike them. Conversely they can be false and incorrect even if we like them. How could you miss that and instead jump to this snarky response?
      - 4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets take an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through the population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a scientist finds out that the disease is primarily (exclusively) spread by red haired people. Should they just publish the finding? The fact becoming openly known might lead to mobs of people chasing red hairs and locking them up or even lynching them. A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first. Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger. I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples. I'm sure we had many situations where resesearch was suppressed in reality for some reason or another.
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  Science brings facts. Politics deals with how we use those facts. If the fact brought about by science leads one group of people to kill another, we are faced with a political decision. Do we allow this or do we stand against it. We need the separation of science and politics. Otherwise, important facts will be politically suppressed and falsehoods will be presented as truth for political gain. It’s a story as old as the world, I don’t understand why so many people still want to mix those two.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - elihu 4y ago
    I don't think you can separate science from politics. The scientific method that relies on repeatable experimental results is just a workaround for the general problem that the search for knowledge is done by highly opinionated, stubborn, egotistical, and very biased human beings. When people become scientists they don't lose those attributes, it's just that reproducibility of results act as a check on their biases. You can't remove politics from science without removing people from science. Even if the methodology is good, the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political. That said, I think scientists should be given pretty wide latitude to explore wherever their curiosity leads them, and results shouldn't be rejected from publication without really good reasons that go beyond "the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable". (Though as a practical matter, research that doesn't serve some political or social objective probably isn't going to get funding.)
Gatsky 4y ago
I don't think this is the right way to think about this. The editors of a journal do screen the articles that get published. Their criteria are hidden. They do not need to justify in any way why the accept or reject a submission. The process is entirely opaque. Scientists are thoroughly obsessed with publishing in top tier journals in many important fields, like biomedicine, so the whims of the editors are extremely influential. Here we have the faceless editors at least specifying some of the criteria they will be using. This is beneficial. We can now discuss and critique these criteria. We can also, if we disagree, choose not to publish in these journals, or post on twitter that our article was rejected on these grounds. So overall, I think this is a net win. The Nature Publishing group is not science. Science will survive whatever self-righteous fad the Nature editors decide to champion next week. If you want to criticise anyone, criticise the post-war generation of academics who have allowed journals to have too much power and landed us in this stupid soul crushing arrangement we have today.
mike00632 4y ago
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 choosing to study the differences in certain demographic groups makes a big assumption that it's important to study the groups for whatever reason.
- dymk 4y ago
  That sounds like an unrealistically stretched hypothetical to justify not pursuing otherwise interesting scientific avenues.
  - mike00632 4y ago
    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.
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      But if you did notice a subgroup/IQ correlation would you ignore it? Because I wouldn't ignore a handedness/sickness correlation. You can't fix what you don't measure and investigate.
      - mike00632 4y ago
        You're ASSUMING that race could be linked to "intelligence", that it's important to study, just like I was ASSUMING that handedness might have something to do with spreading COVID. There is clear bias introduced by what we think is important to measure.
- 4y ago

No, science must pursue the truth, no matter where it leads. There is no such thing as a hate fact.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

[flagged]

blueflow 4y ago
What would you do when someone says "Women are inferior because the Sun shines?"
- blep_ 4y ago
  Regardless of the rest of this conversation, we should at least ban the publishing of obvious bullshit with no attempt to establish causality as science. This is in that category. I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    My point: All justifications of oppression are non-causal nonsense like this. I just made an obvious example that is easy to look through.
red75prime 4y ago
The proposed medication is worse than the disease. Fight fascism/racism/whatever with state supported lies (of omission). What could go wrong?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  If you read carefully I'm actually not proposing any specific course and I think the reality will be nuanced and highly context-specific. What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other elements are interested in their work and how they might use it. The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past. Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well. Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
  - throwawayacc2 4y ago
    > What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other elements are interested in their work and how they might use it. Why? > The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past. You think that because you have biases, like all humans do. You say harms can arise. Let’s try to do an exercise. It’s the late 40s early 50s and research is finally starting to show there are, in fact, no real biological races of humans. We are one human race. The dutiful scientist at that time considers the society he is in, the notions of morality he has and decides it would be harmful to publish his research. Who knows what some crazy extremists will do with this fact. They might give the blacks rights, they might rile them up, they might they might even allow miscegenation! Bear in mind, all these were societal harms at that time! Is this the future you wish? Or this scenario doesn’t count because it’s the wrong politics? Have we found the end all be all of morality and must now protect it at all costs, even from facts if need be? > Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well I disagree. The way I see it, there is no politics in science. Science is not a set of beliefs. It’s a process. It’s a method of observing empirical reality and producing methods to describe it. > Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous. For whom?
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    > I think the reality will be nuanced and highly context-specific If you actually think that, you haven't been paying much attention to the behavior of the Twitter mob over the past few years.
JamesBarney 4y ago
There was plenty of racism before the scientific method, there will be plenty after we ban using it to study anything related to race. And this guidance won't prevent people from thinking and spreading racist ideas, it'll just keep people from studying anything related race.
vorpalhex 4y ago
Censoring yourself on what some other person may do with your words is folly.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yes you can either fully censor yourself or publish it with no regard for how it will be used by others. There are certainly no other options.
tarakat 4y ago
Okay. Then let's censor science, and put an asterisk next to every published study: "If the results had been different, they would not have been published." And when someone claims "research shows your prejudice is unfounded", one can justifiably answer with "because the findings have been cherry-picked to support a pre-determined conclusion. So I will trust my gut instinct, because the scientists have admitted their research is subordinate to propaganda." Though I have a feeling social science will try to be very discreet about what kind of filtering they're doing, and will hope that, when they disseminate findings they like, that we will have forgotten they're self-confessed propagandists first, and scientists second.
twblalock 4y ago
> Similarly no scientific consensus has ever turned out to be wholly incorrect after being used to perpetrate atrocities. How do you suppose it was proved incorrect? If people can't question the current consensus because it might offend someone, then the current consensus cannot be improved or overturned.
throwawayacc2 4y ago
> Right we just publish the facts. If another group wants to use it to justify genocide that's on them. I wash my hands of it. Unironically this. Science is here to present facts. Politics is here to decide what we do with the facts. Do not mix the two.

volkadav 4y ago

you'd probably benefit from reading and thinking about this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism sadly, what is called a fact is a malleable thing in the hands of the ill-intentioned, and all too many bigots are more than happy to pass off pseudo-science as the real deal. "science" isn't some abstract thing, it's composed of people and their actions, and as i think every adult will recognize, people can be turbo-shitty. like every other human endeavor, it deserves a close eye and critical thought. (i say this as a big fan of science in general and a degree-holder in the physical sciences.)

kodyo 4y ago
Positing ideas that can be disproven is science. It's also how thinking works.
singlow 4y ago
If the science is bad, then the science is bad. If you do good science and find a result that doesn't fit your preconceived ideas of right and wrong, that doesn't make the science bad. You don't need to be concerned with the ethical impact of the truth, but you do need to be concerned with the ethics of your process. I don't understand what the actions of pseudo-science bigots has to do with someone who is doing real science. Idiots will be idiots regardless of what real science says.
- freejazz 4y ago
  Oh, good and bad. It's just that simple!
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    The point is that results can be true and correct even if you dislike them. Conversely they can be false and incorrect even if we like them. How could you miss that and instead jump to this snarky response?
    - 4y ago

cycomanic 4y ago

I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets take an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through the population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a scientist finds out that the disease is primarily (exclusively) spread by red haired people. Should they just publish the finding? The fact becoming openly known might lead to mobs of people chasing red hairs and locking them up or even lynching them. A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first. Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger. I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples. I'm sure we had many situations where resesearch was suppressed in reality for some reason or another.

throwawayacc2 4y ago
Science brings facts. Politics deals with how we use those facts. If the fact brought about by science leads one group of people to kill another, we are faced with a political decision. Do we allow this or do we stand against it. We need the separation of science and politics. Otherwise, important facts will be politically suppressed and falsehoods will be presented as truth for political gain. It’s a story as old as the world, I don’t understand why so many people still want to mix those two.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- elihu 4y ago
  I don't think you can separate science from politics. The scientific method that relies on repeatable experimental results is just a workaround for the general problem that the search for knowledge is done by highly opinionated, stubborn, egotistical, and very biased human beings. When people become scientists they don't lose those attributes, it's just that reproducibility of results act as a check on their biases. You can't remove politics from science without removing people from science. Even if the methodology is good, the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political. That said, I think scientists should be given pretty wide latitude to explore wherever their curiosity leads them, and results shouldn't be rejected from publication without really good reasons that go beyond "the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable". (Though as a practical matter, research that doesn't serve some political or social objective probably isn't going to get funding.)

Gatsky 4y ago

I don't think this is the right way to think about this. The editors of a journal do screen the articles that get published. Their criteria are hidden. They do not need to justify in any way why the accept or reject a submission. The process is entirely opaque. Scientists are thoroughly obsessed with publishing in top tier journals in many important fields, like biomedicine, so the whims of the editors are extremely influential. Here we have the faceless editors at least specifying some of the criteria they will be using. This is beneficial. We can now discuss and critique these criteria. We can also, if we disagree, choose not to publish in these journals, or post on twitter that our article was rejected on these grounds. So overall, I think this is a net win. The Nature Publishing group is not science. Science will survive whatever self-righteous fad the Nature editors decide to champion next week. If you want to criticise anyone, criticise the post-war generation of academics who have allowed journals to have too much power and landed us in this stupid soul crushing arrangement we have today.

mike00632 4y ago

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 choosing to study the differences in certain demographic groups makes a big assumption that it's important to study the groups for whatever reason.

dymk 4y ago
That sounds like an unrealistically stretched hypothetical to justify not pursuing otherwise interesting scientific avenues.
- mike00632 4y ago
  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.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    But if you did notice a subgroup/IQ correlation would you ignore it? Because I wouldn't ignore a handedness/sickness correlation. You can't fix what you don't measure and investigate.
    - mike00632 4y ago
      You're ASSUMING that race could be linked to "intelligence", that it's important to study, just like I was ASSUMING that handedness might have something to do with spreading COVID. There is clear bias introduced by what we think is important to measure.
4y ago