James_Miller comments on Contests vs. Real World Problems - Less Wrong

15 Post author: badger 25 March 2009 01:29AM

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Comment author: James_Miller 25 March 2009 02:21:45PM 11 points [-]

Rather than just gambling with money, people could gamble with their lives. A global warming denier, for example, could announce that he is so sure that the earth will not be significantly warmer in ten years than it is today that if he is wrong about this he will kill himself. A legal system that enforced such a promise would, clearly, make it possible for someone to very credibly communicate the sincerity of his beliefs.

Comment author: Pierre-Andre 25 March 2009 03:36:24PM *  5 points [-]

Scary, voted up.

This can be pushed further: law/moral/ethics are often "holding us back". The use of dissection of human body has been forbidden/allowed many time in history and this affected our knowledge of anatomy and medicine. Many physical and psychological experiments that have been done before cannot be reproduced today, for they were "unethical".

It doesn't have to be Nazis experimentations. Informed consent requires that the person knows that he is under study, which might skew the results.

Some famous experiments were even against the legislation of that time: Louis Pasteur has tested his rabies vaccine illegally.

This vaccine was first used on 9-year old Joseph Meister, on July 6, 1885, after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog. This was done at some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy. However, left without treatment, the boy faced almost certain death from rabies.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 25 March 2009 08:26:13PM *  9 points [-]

Related to the Nazi experiments, there are people in the scientific community who argue that they should not be cited, even in case where they provided valuable information:

Although it is difficult morally, one might concede that within the mass of pseudoscientifc Nazi data some shreds can be valuable to researchers, as a small portion of the hypothermia data has proven to be. Of course, such data should be used only in the most exceptional circumstances and only in the absence of ethically derived data.

This seems absurd. The experiments were horrid and reprehensible, no question - but if they provided useful data, shouldn't we try to salvage at least something good from their deeds?

Comment author: CarlShulman 25 March 2009 08:44:51PM *  6 points [-]

A policy against it may provide some marginal disincentive to future scientists under vile regimes.

Edit: of course the real cause of the objection is just 'moral contamination,' the same trigger-happy associational neural machinery used to avoid poisonous foods attaches negative affect to anything associated with the Nazis. But the heuristic can sometimes be useful, just as our cooperative emotions can be hacks to implement binding commitments.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 March 2009 12:20:23AM 5 points [-]

If we assume those scientists actually care about their future number of citations, then yes.

Comment author: taw 26 March 2009 12:15:09AM 1 point [-]

How likely is it to be a result of genuine reasoning leading to this conclusion, and how likely is it to be just a rationalization of the yuck factor? It seems pretty straightforward.

Comment author: randallsquared 25 March 2009 09:09:09PM 4 points [-]

A "global warming denier" doesn't necessarily believe the world is not getting warmer, or that it will certainly get colder. Just FYI.

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