Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
In general, given ethical norms as they currently exist, rather than in a hypothetical universe where everyone is a strict utilitarian, I think the expected returns on such an experiment are unlikely to be worth the reputational costs.
The Tuskegee experiment may have produced some useful data, but it certainly didn't produce returns on the scale of reducing global syphilis incidence to zero. Likewise, even extensive experimentation on abducted children is unlikely to do so for malaria. The Tuskegee experiment though, is still seen as a black mark on the reputation of medical researchers and the government; I've encountered people who, having heard of it, genuinely believed that it, rather than the extremely stringent standards that currently exist for publishable studies, was a more accurate description of the behavior of present researchers. That sort of thing isn't easy to escape.
Any effective utilitarian must account for the fact that we're operating in a world which is extremely unforgiving of behavior such as cutting up a healthy hospital visitor to save several in need of organ transplants, and condition their behavior on that knowledge.
Actual medical conspiracies, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, probably contribute to public credence in medical conspiracy theories, such as anti-vax or HIV-AIDS denialism, which have a directly detrimental effect on public health.