• mavu@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 days ago

    well, he is correct.

    That is what among other things, ethics is supposed to do. hold back science from doing things that would be bad. you know?

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, otherwise you get some real assholes doing experiments on pregnant women and twins.

      I think it’s a discussion worth having, so long as both sides realize there needs to be lines drawn.

  • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
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    2 days ago

    So, this has actually been one of those things often claimed, you may have heard of it or maybe even thought it yourself (I certainly had the thought as an edgy teen). Stuff like “For all the horrors, they probably did make some progress with experiments in concentration camps” or similar things.

    Now, beside the point of it being unacceptable to do so ethically - the stuff done there was also quite useless. I currently can’t do the work of searching for and gathering all the sources again, but to my memory: the cruelty and dismissal of humanity made the “results” of those “studies” mostly useless garbage, saying nothing at all worthwhile for science, and being clearly tainted ideologically.

    Because, while you may think that in some “ideal” world, you could have neutral research on unwilling humans, the reality has always been, that the conditions needed to get humans to do such experiments on other humans, necessitate the kind of ideological distortions, that mostly make the results useless in the end. There’s simply not enough psychopaths that are also willing to do proper, frustrating, hard-work-necessitating, non-self-aggrandising research - and to get non-psychopaths to do it, you need an ideology that ultimately removes their neutrality and the neutrality of the research.

    The only things I remember being deemed “useful” and “properly” done from a scientific perspective in the recovered “studies” were things like “lethality of grenades by proximity to the explosion” - something that is questionable to begin with in value and that can also be determined with sensors of different kinds - as well as “effects of massive hypothermia and frostbites” - which as far as I remember basically just confirmed what has been estimated from case studies in a broader way, as well as animal studies (the latter, admittedly, have their own legitimate controversy).

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      For all the horrors, they probably did make some progress with experiments in concentration camps.

      They did. Read about Unit 731. Unquestionably inhumane experiments yielded breakthroughs in human-pathogen interactions that substantially advanced the field. However, it goes without question that no amount of knowledge justified the means.

      https://www.pacificatrocities.org/human-experimentation.html

      • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
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        2 days ago

        I did, and from what I heard, it is a big myth that the results were actually as useful as the first assessment on discovery of them had been. Later studies have, as far as I know, been much more sobering as to the “usefulness” of the data acquired there.

        The website you link also immediately shows the problem (even in presentation, presenting them quite sensationalist, immediately highlighting, that there is no possibility of neutrality in assessing the results): The “cruelty for cruelty’s sake” in the conditions of the experiments cannot easily be removed from the results. Making the data in the end only useful for very specific circumstances, and hard to untangle. Lets take venereal diseases for example - it ultimately shows how they spread and interact in conditions of forced mass rape under conditions of extreme squalor, as documented by people not engaged in proper double-blind environments. The usefulness of that is not as high as the myth surrounding Unit 731 or Mengele’s experiments might suggest - and as your linked website also shows, there is a material interest in selling that myth of “forbidden, evil experiments resulting in knowledge”.

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          It’s more like the truth lands somewhere in between. The people making the argument of “despite the lack of morality, Unit 731 gave us a lot of useful research and advanced human knowledge!” have the same type of mindset as the ones saying “literally nothing Unit 731 did is worth anything. It is all 100% useless and we shouldn’t spend any time looking at any of it!”.

          Essentially, both of these groups started with a conclusion and worked backwards from there. One wants desperately to believe that at least something worthwhile came from all that evil, the other wants desperately to believe that evil like that couldn’t possibly produce anything of value.

          It’s just an attempt to rationalize the absolute atrocities that Unit 731 was allowed to commit. Either by saying it was for some “greater good”, or by saying they weren’t scientists at all and there was no purpose other than the cruelty.

  • makyo@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Can we insist that he put his money where his mouth is and be the first of his own victims er I mean test subjects

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Did Twitter in retweets not display the added context at the bottom which says this particular doctor illegally expirimented on infants and served prison time?

    • Geodad@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, but he did it to make the child resistant to illness. That’s a worthy cause.

      • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
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        1 day ago

        The whole point of ethics is that violating it makes it inherently unworthy. There were other safe and known methods for these children and my understanding is there is no guarantee that what he did would be effective.

        He did it to make a name for himself. He’s not some rogue doctor illegally manufacturing and distributing insulin to diabetics who can’t afford it, he’s a self important narcissist who thought he could do what he wanted and that he was above the law.

  • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
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    2 days ago

    our scientific understanding of exactly how many punches the mean baby can withstand is being held back by ethics

  • KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    What a shame you fuckers aren’t allowed to kill off humanity with yet another experiment gone bad.

    • Agrivar@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Right? That dude even has an uncanny resemblance to the potato headed NPCs in FO3 and FONV!

  • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    I think this is a parody account, I think I saw some other wild comment and there it showed the account was branded as parody