First of all let me say that just this one conversation has paid back for all the work I put into…
By: Udesh Habaraduwa
Tags: Science, Enlightenment, Corruption, Values

First of all let me say that just this one conversation has paid back for all the work I put into writing the original article and thank you for taking the time to engage in this discourse.

Yeah, these are deep questions. I think what we say are our values are not always what our actions reveal them to be. It also forces us to meditate on morality more deeply — is there some suffering that is justifiable for a greater good? Not a question most of us want to face.

Brilliant. I would even take this one step further to say that it is our actions and only our actions that truly reveal what our values are. The question of suffering (now) for a greater good (later) seems to be a notion that has left the common conception of people as of late.

I believe they these experiments were motivated by truth, but without regard for the humanity of the patients.

Agreed and I think this is a key point. In my opinion, it went further than mere lack of regard of the humanity of their victims — they didn’t consider these humans as humans at all. Anything other what the Nazi’s considered “pure” was subhuman. You can see the evidence of this in the way they have referred to jews and other minorities as vermin, parasites and pests. In Mein Kampf (which I have not read but will do!) Hitler, according to the wiki source The Nazi Conscience out of Harvard University press, describes jews as a “dangerous bacillus”. This article from the American Holocaust Memorial Museum describes German soldiers placed in Poland who wrote back about the “criminality” and “sub-humanity” of Polish people and the antisemitic propaganda declaring that jews spread diseases. In this video, a part of a larger lecture, Dr Jordan Peterson discusses disgust sensitivity as core to the Nazi Propaganda machine. The entire Nazi platform is based on the idea that anyone who is not Aryan is some sort of contaminated mutant.

This being the case, I can see how they would simply use the humans they had captured as test subjects as if they were simply experimenting on a rat they caught in a barn.

I still don’t see how the Nazi’s could consider a group of people as so undesirable and different from themselves while at the same time hold the notion that they can learn something to benefit themselves from experimenting on their captives beyond what they could learn form, say, lab mice. Wouldn’t that mean that Nazi’s and their minority captives weren’t so different after all? Seems to me like they are contradictory values to hold.

The use of the data is an interesting problem.

The first thing that comes to mind is the initial conditions of the test subject. Should we not consider the particular conditions of the test subjects before the experiment was run? Would healthy, well-fed people not stand a better chance against hypothermia than a starved, lonely, scared and ,most likely, diseased concentration camp prisoner? How useful is that data?

Are we to assume that these doctors were being truthful with their reporting? This comes back to the premise of my article which is “science equals truth”. We don’t trust good scientific research and researchers for nothing — we trust them because we are assuming that they are sharing the truth. This appears to me to be a fair assumption given that the scientific process, with all of its checks and balances, is designed, when run correctly to its conclusion, to get us as close to the truth as possible. The process of scientific thinking and research has built into it certain processes, like peer reviews, to make the results as trust worthy as possible. Couldn’t it be plausible that Nazi’s would doctor results to strength such nazi propositions as that of a superior aryan race? Are we to accept the results produced by people who were so far off base that they justified the treatment and methods of acquisition of their test subjects?

As far as the data and the usefulness there of is concerned, I think the question is : Can we trust these people? As I mentioned in my previous response, I think if we zoom out a bit and take the entire time line of actions that lead up to the experiments, a macro picture of everything that unfolded, it is reasonable and justifiable to say no, we cannot trust these people. Could people who lied, cheated and stole their way to the position of running concentration camps be truthful and trust worthy in this one particular area? It’s possible but I think the safer bet is to assume otherwise.

We take for granted all the processes and laws that we have in place as a society to help us be able to trust completely random people outside of our immediate family. We use affiliations with groups like our colleges and work place to answer the question of “can I trust this person?”. We use social conventions and laws like, for example, it’s not okay to defecate on the floor and illegal to kill people to be reasonably sure that the stranger walking into my office is not going to defecate on my floor or kill me — of course we can’t be 100% sure on either of those things. I think a big part of the ethical rules and regulations of modern scientific research is in fact to filter out people who might just want to torture animals and kill people in the guise of research.

Again, horrific as it was, many of the aims were valid: what happens to a human being when subjected to extreme cold? The means were unconscionable, but the aims were just fine. At least some of it was scientifically sound. So I ask again — where is the line? Scientific inquiry has no inherent moral restriction. It’s only our humanity that stops us from doing such horrific things to our fellow humans.

Where is the line — that is a damn good question. I don’t have an answer. Again, it comes down to the question of what we value. What are we putting at the top of that hierarchy? The scientific method, as I far as I understand it, is a bottom up approach that evolved out of the human experience of dealing with the unknown. Over decades, it has evolved into a system that is fairly portable — a way of thinking that we can teach our children that will help them look into the unknown and extract useful information that will help them and their fellow man. I guess this is the argument that someone like Sam Harriss would make for a transcendental morality that can emerge out of rationality alone. I think the Christian tradition of putting the value of each individual human being at the very top, assigning some transcendental, other-worldly value (i.e the soul) to each human is an attempt to set some guiding principle. I think you’ve rightly noticed a flaw in the unbridled power of rationality. There certainly appears to be a difference between the “why” and the “how”.

Corruption

I am not arguing that the US is the world’s savior. The issue I have with this take on the situation is the victim/oppressor rhetoric and I will only speak on my anecdotal experience. I am not arguing that what you say does not happen — I am absolutely convinced that it does. My argument is that most of these “oppressed” countries , like my home of Sri Lanka, do it to themselves. Most people in Sri Lanka like to vote in people that they can get favors from — they rather “have it in” at the local municipality than vote for someone who might actually be a better candidate. Then our own people, usually the well connected, are surprised when the people they voted for turn around and betray them in favor of more powerful, better funded parties from the outside world. Sri Lanka is in this debt bondage situation you speak of to China. Our leaders took tens of millions of dollars in bribes to green light debts that we as locals are paying back in the form of taxes on everything from sanitary pads to potatoes. When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in 2004, we got millions in foreign aid that vanished which had nothing to do with debt bondage. In the very opening of the podcast you linked to about Nauru, one of the first things that is described is the fact that the government let anyone set up any bank they wanted without having any audit trail or getting any information about who ran the bank — There is plenty of blame to go around.

I stand by my claim while western countries and countries with enlightenment values are not devoid of corruption, they are not as corrupt as most countries in the world — it’s part of the reason they are wealthy. For the most part, people do what they say they are going to do and are generally aiming at something good. I mean corrupt technically — that the processes that are being carried out culturally and unconsciously are acquiring propagation errors.

I’ll give you an example and keep in mind that this is completely accepted and common procedure through out industry in Sri Lanka.

The executives usually take an annual trip. By executives I mean anyone who is a white collar worker in the company. Every year, a weekend over-night trip is planned. A fancy five star hotel is booked for the employees and their family members. The company pays for part of the cost, around half the price tag, and the executives have to cover the rest. Now, you would assume that the executives will cover the cost with their own cash. After all, it’s their trip right? You would be wrong. What usually happens is that the executives who are usually in charge of purchasing decisions — choosing which vendors the company buys supplies and services from — solicit the existing suppliers for a “donation” to go on this trip. I’m sure that you see the problem here but when I brought it up, people looked at me like I was insane. It happens in almost every company here.

Bad science

One area in which this kind of bad science is happening en masse (controversial as it may be) is in the gender studies fields. Though this may not be ‘hard science’ as such, it is a great example of how mainstream group-think can run rampant without detection. Recently some social scientists, in an effort to expose this corruption, published a series of fake papers with absurd claims, many of which were highly cited, until the hoax was exposed. Another example is the history of scientific study of the effects of tobacco, much of which was deemed ‘inconclusive’ for decades (even today) because of research funded and heavily skewed by the tobacco industry. The same is true today of the sugar industry, which still informs our national health policies today, and has caused the largest epidemic of diabetes in the history of mankind.

You absolutely hit the nail on the head here with bad science happening across the board. I would classify it as a a dangerous misappropriation and corruption of the scientific method to further one’s own agenda. I consider a corruption of the scientific mind. It appears to me to be great examples of the death of hero because we seem to have lost the values that make the hero who he/she is. I don’t consider the people involved in propagating falsified data and biased interpretations scientists at all. To me, without the values of the hero, there is no scientist.

Whether it is cited/published has as much to do with politics, culture and economic interests as it does with merit; often more. I still like the hero metaphor, but I would add that the hero is not only in search of truth. He is in search of truth that is of benefit to his community. He can’t just slay any old dragon — he must slay the dragon that is terrorizing his town. I would argue that it is this aspect of the hero that adds the compassionate element to your ‘good scientist’ metaphor, and makes it more complete from a moral standpoint.

This is an excellent point. The hero must act in a way that is good for him , his family , and his community. He has to act in a way that is good for all of them today, tomorrow and day after. The hero must work in space and in time, for who he is today and the person he will be as well as everyone else. After all, there is a reason that he left the castle that his society built for him in the first place — to protect his people.

I do wish there was no politics and economic interests involved in the publishing of data. At the end of the day, we are still suffering from original sin — we are all, consciously or unconsciously, corrupt and complicit to some degree. I still have some faith though. While it does appear to be that top journals and universities are being infiltrated by dogma and politics, I still hold out faith for the idea that human beings are capable of transcending these things and doing what is best and true. Despite all these failings, I still believe there are a lot more scientists (by my definition) than there are frauds. That being said, I do wish I had a better metric for scientific merit in addition to citations and publishing in top journals. But like you said, the hero can’t slay any old dragon. He has to slay a dragon that is of benefit to his community and in that regard, I believe the number of citations and being published in a reputable journal, even with their inherent flaws, is a good indication of their value.

I thank you again sincerely for engaging with me and reading my writing. I truly appreciate the time you have put into this. It’s really helped me clarify my thoughts and develop my arguments. I hope it has been of some use to you as well!