Email of the Day: Science
I got an email a few days ago, won’t say from who, but it sparked my interest.
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2008/07/science-today-easy-way-to-lie-to-public.html
I know that you guys are in the tank for science, but I found this exchange interesting, if mainly because Brenda Rosser and Bruce Webb are well known and quality.
Think on it for a second, does science help to lie to the public as an arm of the commercial interests? Particularly with greater and greater concentration and specificity of fields. I’m not saying that all scientists fall in this category, but sufficient that certain authority can be bestowed by attaching to the coattails of responsible science.
We need a greater concentration on ethics in science.
It’s a strawman. Just because some people misuse evidence and science speaks nothing to the rest.
Think on it for a second, does science help to lie to the public as an arm of the commercial interests?
No. Science is a way of discovering and analyzing. It’s a way to look at the world and not just see the beauty but explain how it all works and fits together. Science was never meant to be used for good or evil, that’s what people choose to use it for. As stated above it’s more of a way of explaining and analyzing.
We don’t just need ethics in science but all walks of life. I can think of other areas of life where no ethics has done some terrible damage.
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July 21st, 2008 at 6:29 am
Meh, I don’t see it like that, and I’m not sure that there’s much of a strawman there. Just because some people grow vegetables so that we get salmonella and eColi, doesn’t mean everyone does, so we don’t need the tyranny of the FDA. But people want social and economic stability and the ability to trust food.
I happen to think that certain fields that are spent living outside the mainstream milieu would tend to make a person live in their head and wouldn’t have the necessary social feedback conducive to healthy ethics development.
I think there are bio-ethicists, I’m not sure that many other science fields have them. And because some specialized fields wouldn’t have the required feedback for the ethics development, there should be much more of those types of social awareness classes and components to the basic science Masters degrees and doctorates.
Education by default does not make people responsible or ethically better by itself. In my experience, education makes people less ethical because internal logic can be convoluted away to justify just about any outcome when the desire is there. An example would be a stock picking contest that was held last year. It was won by a waitress after five wall street professionals were disqualified for cheating and gaming the system.
July 26th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Sorry for taking awhile to get back to this topic Ted, but I wanted to give you and this topic the time deserved.
This was the point I was trying to make. Not all scientists are unethical (I know you weren’t making that point) and science in and of itself is not good or bad. People make that decision and use science for how they want.
Quite possible, but it seems to me the “scientists” in urban areas are the ones stretching the boundaries of ethics. It might be more difficult to be unethical when you are collecting evidence to support human caused global warming.
To me this goes along with the same thinking the Religious Right has about condoms and sex ed. “If we teach them about sex then they will have sex.” The problem that statement misses is that the people who want to have sex at an early age are most likely going to whether or not they get educated. So why not give them the ability to make smarter choices?
But in your example you are talking about wall street analysts. I don’t know too many people that would argue the ethics of wall street analysts. The other thing though with the example is it’s a contest. It’s simple economics that people will cheat if the stakes are high and they think they can get away with it.
July 31st, 2008 at 4:45 am
“Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.”
Aside from information overload, it takes a certain selectivity of mind to champion some facts and ignore others in order to reach the desired outcome. Education doesn’t make people less ethical, but it might make less ethical people better able to bullshit themselves and others.
With apologies to Shakespeare, “The fault lies not in our diplomas, but in ourselves.”
July 31st, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Very well put indeed Breakerslion! Thank you.