August--- INTRINSICALLY IMMORAL SCIENCE
Added 2025-08-09 00:40:12 +0000 UTCpodcast version!
Comments
1.) You’re a doctor, just not a medical doctor. 2.) yes hang your degree. 3.) yes your opinion is more useful on many topics. Because there’s a lot of unscientific hateful people speaking with more confidence than you do and that’s bad for the world. 4.) grad school is bad for grad students.
Dr. Andie L, Ph.D., Clinical Psychology
2025-12-22 05:32:18 +0000 UTCThat's unclear. I'll be reading your Methods section closely though.
mykey6375
2025-11-16 01:40:48 +0000 UTCSo my proposed "how many living mice can I and my undergrads eat" paper ISN'T a moral idea?
Sam
2025-10-23 03:59:32 +0000 UTCScience doesn't find truth, science builds useful models. That's all, and it's enough. I should also mention that in the building of these useful models, science often disproves falsehoods.
Herfules
2025-09-22 22:55:25 +0000 UTCYou skipped over the definition of the 3rd word: Science. I've noticed you mostly use it as in your example: Double blind medical trial; you know science is a method for finding truth whether in medicine or elsewhere, but you often use it as everybody else does: an exact synonym for "Truth". That makes people lazy: why demand evidence when Angela said "scientist" or "science'? This has been the norm with everybody for so long, that lots of bad apples are getting to spoil lots of barrels with ease. Solution: quit using the word. Don't say "scientific truth"' Just say truth, and be prepared to prove it. Don't say "the science" ;say "the truth" and be prepared to prove it.
ZZyzx000
2025-09-13 02:09:58 +0000 UTCSo the real immortality was the capitalism we made along the way...
Brian Makepeace
2025-08-24 22:14:24 +0000 UTCCompletely off topic. Would you ever consider teaching courses? Your knowledge and depth (and willingness to acknowledge when you're stepping out of your expertise) combined with your at-your-level delivery would get a huge and, therefore, more educated populous. Lock it behind Patreon because you deserve the reward after all these years, but maybe release the real foundational lectures for free on YouTube. Or organize a site showing all available scientific lectures, including departmental seminars and I would push for Ph.D (MSc though? ) defenses to be made public. A super condensed telling of my grad school experience. I was a grad student for nine years, I did two Post-Docs with the same guy (he moved universities), then I got my own two-year ASH fellowship in his lab when he had a chunk of funding cut. I was out of academia within the year. I did publish though.
john walker
2025-08-21 21:26:54 +0000 UTCWas curious if youve been keeping up with the lenacapavir trial, where it was determined that it would be unethical to have a placebo group in the PURPOSE1 trials and the PURPOSE2 trials (according to gileads site and who)
rinaquid
2025-08-16 04:46:06 +0000 UTCI'd like to suggest a somewhat more technical definition of intrinsic. In essence, I would call it a kind of synonym of residual. A property of a thing is intrinsic if it remains after we control for all of the artifacting we can think of that we choose to attribute to external influences. This is just for the record. I covered this idea in a different form in an earlier reply comment. I used the example of rest mass. In slightly more detail, holding our laws constant, but not the physical appearances, we can by a permitted physical (dynamical) process discover a limit as p --> 0, & decomposing the terms into "mass" & "velocity" such that v also --> 0, we find that the coefficient, which we label m, tends to a constant. The limiting value of this constant is what we call rest mass. An exactly analogous chain of reasoning is what led us to the idea of intrinsic spin. The operator algebra of angular momentum of electrons spits out a series of eigenvalues with this weird constant term of 1/2 tacked on. We can't make it go away by a physical process. It's just intrinsic. While it's apparently universal, that electrons are identical is a separate postulate. This universal applicability is not the meaning of intrinsic. Yes, the two things coincide, are both essential features in our picture of the physics of electrons, but they arise from different aspects of the theory. Intrinsic spin means we can't get rid of it. That two electrons are identical means we can't detect that they're switched. There's no derivation of one of these facts from the other. They aren't equivalent. Edit: I want to dunk the ball. The intrinsic spin of 1/2 is because an electron is a fermion. The total angular momentum of an excited electron isn't necessarily 1/2. We have a quantum number "l" to keep track of how much it differs from 1/2. There are also integer spin things, called bosons. Not all things are spin 1/2. An excited electron can emit a photon. An electron's "l" quantum number can change, but as long as it's still an electron, only the integer part of its angular momentum changes. The hallmark of an intrinsic spin component of angular momentum is simply that if it's there, it tends to stick around. QED.
mykey6375
2025-08-12 20:24:18 +0000 UTCIf we look at the governors who are letting children go hungry, and those who defend them, what we find is NOT that they say this is actually moral. What they claim is that, if you look at it from a certain point of view, this action does in fact conform to the universal sense of morality that we all possess. There aren't people with a different morality, only people who like to argue that their actions do in fact conform to the commonly-held morality, if you look at the whole situation. The entire point of the Nuremberg trials (which all the combatants agreed had no actual legal basis) was that the Nazi war crimes were obviously contrary to any reasonable sense of morality. But to a Nazi, sacrificing hundreds of animalistic Jews to save one of the Master Race was totally moral, just as it's moral to sacrifice hundreds of animals to develop vaccines to save humans. The sense of morality is identical. The mischief, and the malice, lies in the definitions.
Derek Grimmell
2025-08-12 18:57:59 +0000 UTCNothing wrong with identifying that someone has a good idea and also pointing out they usually don't. Whether it's the "blind squirrel" or just how complicated people are, there are things where you can be like "I support you on this topic and nothing else I know about you"
Nick A
2025-08-11 18:31:36 +0000 UTCI think there are at least two different topics in the question: 1) What types of experiments or other scientific work is immoral? All the experiments on humans without their consent and knowledge fall into this category. 2) Is there any kind of science that we shouldn't even study? I think you could put science that leads to better weapons in this category. Although of course that get's complicated. I can understand why some very moral people worked on the Manhattan project. There was a very real (at least we thought at the time) danger that the Nazis might invent an A-Bomb and we had to do everything we could to stop them. Working on chemical and biological weapons is the kind of work I would say is intrinsically immoral, because there is no justification for it in terms of threats and there is nothing to be learned from it that will advance science in general. I think Isaac Asimov (or possibly Arthur C. Clark, I know it was one of them) wrote an essay a long time ago on this topic and that's what he concluded that the Manhattan project was justified but chemical and biological weapons research was intrinsically immoral.
Michael DeBellis
2025-08-11 17:40:30 +0000 UTCCool talk, as always! My 2¢ on immorality, just in case anyone thinks it's interesting: I think there's no doubt that humans are instinctively pack animals as proven by the fact that hardly any of us can bear to live in total isolation. Looking at other pack mammals, one benefit of being in a pack is learning from the misfortunes of your pack-mates. A pack-critter learns lessons when a predator attacks a pack-mate of theirs almost as though they themselves were attacked (mirror neurons, etc). So young critters emotionally mirroring pack-mates is great training for life. But if instead those young 'uns were to emotionally mirror predators then they'd learn totally dysfunctional lessons so that doesn't happen. The problem is that for dozens of millennia the most significant predators for packs of humans were/are humans from other packs. So, out of the box at least, most humans don't emotionally mirror Outsiders. And given that emotional mirroring is probably what eventually gave rise to empathy in humans, many of us probably instinctively empathise within the tribe but not across the tribal boundary. Of course tribal boundaries are difficult to identify in modern mega-cultures, but most of us feel compelled to figure out who we consider 'my people'. And on the political Right (which is more tribal than the Left), caring about Outsiders and strangers (who are competitors at best and potential enemies at worst) as much as you care about your own flesh and blood is often considered akin to treason. So the starving kids of Outsiders are seen as a problem for their tribe not ours. The universal empathy of the Left is seen as a misguided experiment by many on the Right, who tend to think in terms of zero sum situations and permanent scarcity. Plus universal empathy has the effect of erasing tribal boundaries which in turn destroys tribal culture, cohesion and tradition, which (if the tribal instinct is strong with you) seems like an existential threat and a wholly immoral act. The Right can be very kind and generous to their own people, but empathising with strangers/Outsiders typically isn't their way. Each tribe has its own morality, which is always based on tradition. But the Left have principles instead (like 'treat everyone as an equal', 'minimise suffering', etc) and those principles give rise to an ever-shifting morality as we figure out how to better implement those principles. So the Left obsessed about slaves, then women, then gay people, then trans people, etc. To the Left that's a process of enlightenment, but to the Right we're constantly changing our morals, which means they can't possibly be our true tribal traditions, which means we're faithless and lack honour. And so on.
Rob Jones
2025-08-10 10:19:24 +0000 UTCNot that anecdotes matter but having worked in US for 3 years, I genuinely think it's the most anti-worker place on Earth. I worked with and for companies from 5-6 countries on 3 continents and US is, by far, the worst. But what kills me is that this disdain for workers is the primary American export.
Dominik Dalek
2025-08-09 20:57:50 +0000 UTCWelcome to Ohio! We can use another Dem vote.
richard horvitz
2025-08-09 17:50:55 +0000 UTC
