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Pierre-Andre comments on Contests vs. Real World Problems - Less Wrong
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Comments (33)
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.
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:
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?
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.
If we assume those scientists actually care about their future number of citations, then yes.
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.