Comment on A Sense That More Is Possible

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 19:04:05 GMT

Just so long as it doesn't involve much real world experimentation. :)

But this is the fundamental problem: you don't want to let the theory in any field get too far ahead of the real world experimentation. If it does, it makes it harder for the people who eventually do good (and ethical) research to have their work integrated properly into the knowledge. And knowledge that is not based on research is likely to be false. So an important question in any field should be "is there some portion of this that can be studied ethically?" If we "develop its instrumental rationality for a while without moralists sticking their noses in", we run the risk of letting theories run wild without sufficient evidence [evo-psych, I'm looking at you] or of relying on unethically-obtained (and therefore less-trustworthy) evidence.

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