Also people like him tend to be shit at getting useful data.
Comment on Least extreme biophysics phd
hikuro93@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before. And each time humanity concluded that some knowledge has too high a price and we’re better off not finding out some things.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, especially with a heavy blood cost, isn’t the way to progress as a species.
And I should know, as a person greatly defined by curiosity about everything and more limited emotions than other people due to mental restrictions.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
angrystego@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.
Dengalicious@lemmygrad.ml 9 hours ago
You can critique him all you want but how in the world did you come to the conclusion that his and goals were knowledge for knowledge’s sake?
comfy@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
I have problems with their way of doing so, but their act was to allow an informed consenting(? it’s complicated) couple with an HIV-positive parent to have a child resistant to HIV. It was problematic, yes, but very different to the war crime experiments, much of which was simply about morbid curiosity and torture.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
If you’re talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.
They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn’t, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.
It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.
hikuro93@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
Exactly. Society should never conflate knowledge driven by curiosity and knowledge as an excuse for sadism.
There’s a difference between experimenting by following rules, and then observing the results vs giving in to base forbidden desires just to see what happens or trying to bend reality to suit one’s desired view.
militaryintelligence@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.