= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
username2 comments on How do you choose areas of scientific research? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (22)
Lots of physics innovations are harmful, and lots are helpful. However social scientific research for the most is helpful.
Isn't it the other way around?
I can think of examples of physics that is harmful, and physics which is helpful.
Can think of examples of social science which is helpful, but none which is harmful (e.g. yesterday read a paper using survival analysis to predict boko haram's terrorist behaviour which is useful in averting terrorist casualties, and in enhancing understanding).
On the other hand, there's MRI machines (helpful), but also torture devices (harmful)
Would you want to bet that there's no social science research that can be harnessed by repressive governments to keep their subjects in line?
Possible example: the Chinese government is proposing to introduce a "social credit" scheme that gives each citizen a credit rating based on all kinds of things, sometimes (I don't know how credibly) alleged to include reducing your creditworthiness if your friends post politically-disapproved-of things on social media. (The idea being to make people police one another's behaviour.) It's not perfectly clear whether they're actually going to do that, nor where they got the idea from if so -- but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that social science will help them judge the likely effectiveness of. (Is this relevant research? It's hard to tell given the low quality of the text there, which I assume is the result of automatic translation.)
Is that bad?
It seems pretty bad to me, and everyone else I've heard talk about the idea has found it pretty chilling. One more way for an already quite totalitarian state to exercise control over its citizens. Of course there may be some selection bias -- maybe the people who talk about it tend to be the people who find it scary.
Perhaps you need to clarify what you would consider bad or harmful if people are to try to give examples of bad or harmful things.
That's a very good point. I'll think about this and get back to us.
You don't need much physics knowledge to torture someone. You could say that electric shock based torture needs some phyiscs knowledge about electricity but I'm not sure that it's worse torture than various treatments done in the middle ages.