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I wonder if there is an ethical limit to some categories of knowledge. There are surely some sociological phenomena which are currently unexplained, but could p
by jl6 2y ago
I wonder if there is an ethical limit to some categories of knowledge. There are surely some sociological phenomena which are currently unexplained, but could potentially be explained by, say, incredibly invasive monitoring of peoples’ lives, but which we would probably rather remain unexplained than go down that route.
- ninjanomnom 2y agoGet a large enough population and you'll be able to get volunteers for any conceivable experiment.
- jl6 2y agoI’m not sure. Imagine you want to answer the research question of how people come to adopt certain beliefs. You can probably answer that robustly by monitoring absolutely all their cultural inputs - including throughout childhood where these inputs likely have high impact, but where consent for such an experiment is likely impossible. Every book they read, every website they visit, every person they listen to. I think if you constrain this experiment to a more reasonable level of information gathering, you’ll miss important details.
- ninjanomnom 2y agoYou could get permission from the parents to install the recording devices, but until the child is grown up the data could be kept locked away somewhere completely inaccessible. Then when the child is old enough to grant permission you unlock that data for use. This sort of pattern should work for all studies involving children. Honestly though, most of these kinds of studies would probably just stop at getting permission from the parents.