lukeprog comments on A brief history of ethically concerned scientists - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 09 February 2013 05:50AM

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Comment author: fela 09 February 2013 06:47:15PM 15 points [-]

Jared Diamond, in Guns Germs and Steel, argues that when the time is ripe scientific discoveries are made quite regardless of who makes them, give or take a few decades. Most discoveries are incremental, and many are made by multiple people simultaneously. So wouldn't a discovery that isn't published be just made elsewhere in a few years time, possibly by someone without many ethical concerns?

Comment author: lukeprog 10 February 2013 04:10:19AM 3 points [-]

Maybe.

I'm not an expert on the history of science, but it seems to me like:

  • Lots of psychology could have been done decades or maybe a century earlier, but nobody bothered until the mid-20th century.
  • If Einstein hadn't figured out General Relativity, it might have been another 15-25 years before somebody else figured it out.
  • On the other hand, things like computers and Bayes nets and the structure of DNA wouldn't have taken much longer to discover if their actual discoverers hadn't been on the case for whatever reason.
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