Science Ethics and Racism in Drug Enforcement Thread

Low blow Tuco.

Everything we know about ourselves, our history, our evolutionary course, all of which elucidate our behavior patterns, and guide us to a better future, comes from the social sciences.

There is some nonsense in the field, but the hard soil and the bones of our ancestors speak volumes about ourselves. One cannot know where they are going until they know where they have been.

Added: Consider joining the Bioanthropology News facebook group, and you'll see how interesting and fascinating, and how much research that is really important to our species, is coming out of the social sciences on a daily basis. Biological anthropology especially is both hard and social science, and sits at the center of a web that unites physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and anthropology, to just name a few.

Physics and chemistry are heavily involved in the osteological sciences, especially.

Here's some recent stuff they've posted, just a random selection I'll pull out as I scroll down my facebook wall

From sticks to stones-getting a grip on the human genus

Marmoset Parents Teach Their Kids Not to Interrupt - Inkfish

Every Self Gene Must Also Cooperate | Big Think

World's oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya | Science/AAAS | News

Impact of Industrialization to be Studied With High-Tech Tools - Archaeology Magazine

The caveman dilemma: Why we take such lousy care of ourselves and our planet | Grist

So forth

Qhue_sl said:

Back around 2000 I was at the University of Minnesota which was on a federally mandated massive Science Ethics kick. Why federally mandated? Well because the University's medical school and associated hospital had been caught selling unapproved anti-rejection drugs to transplant patients for decades. In fact this research bankrolled the University hospital which then had to be sold to pay the massive fine and the U of MN was then put on "special" status with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation which required extra scrutiny to any and all grant applications.

Even though all the ethics transgressions landed solidly in the lap of the medical school the restrictions and emphasis of the ethics education hit everyone and so we were all made to go to a seemingly interminable series of ethics training courses, symposiums, colloquia, etc.

The truly amazing thing, to my view, was that the ethics training was aimed mostly at the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, engineering) rather than the bio sciences or anything at all related to the social sciences. The social scientists all considered themselves immune to ethics training because they were all naturally-born ethical researchers by virtue of being social scientists and believed that any member of the hard sciences were all monsters who were out to destroy the planet with our doomsday machines. When I pointed out that we already had ethics in our curriculum BEFORE this mandate hit (dealing with Oppenheimer for physics, Dow Chemical for Chemistry, the Challenger Accident for Engineering) and asked exactly where ethics had been discussed in their departments they just sputtered and stomped off.

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That's weird because the social sciences must be held to the exact same standards as the medical fields. Informed consent, do no harm, non-malefiscence, etc.

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber - The Atlantic

This time my return was prompted not by nostalgia but by curiosity. No. 7 Divinity Avenue is a modern multi-story academic building today, housing the university's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. In 1959 a comfortable old house stood on the site. Known as the Annex, it served as a laboratory in which staff members of the Department of Social Relations conducted research on human subjects. There, from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Harvard psychologists, led by Henry A. Murray, conducted a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on twenty-two undergraduates. To preserve the anonymity of these student guinea pigs, experimenters referred to individuals by code name only. One of these students, whom they dubbed "Lawful," was Theodore John Kaczynski, who would one day be known as the Unabomber, and who would later mail or deliver sixteen package bombs to scientists, academicians, and others over seventeen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-three.

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Ted Kaczynski is an interesting case and fellow all the way around. He was exceedingly brilliant, mathematical super genius, so yeah I could see how experiments on his reactions to extreme stress could cause him to slip.

Bob Loblaw is the best thing to come out of Arrested Development.

I say that to my wife all the time, cracks her up every time without fail.

Tuco_sl said:

I was joking about the social sciences, but it is funny that the contribution you've come up is social sciences discovering what the hard sciences did 3.3 million years ago.

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The hard sciences didn't fossilize bone. The hard sciences give us explanatory models for how fossilization occurs.

kek.

Math is great.
Math is my worst enemy.

It's very conflicting.

That chart is inaccurate, though, since it should be a web, and at the center of that web is anthropology, literally "The study of humanity". Because the human experience is the glue that ties all the fields together.

khalid_sl said:

I took one course in intro anthropology (my "diversity" credit) and it was pretty cool. Filled with moral relativism though. Witchcraft, Oracles and magic amongst the Azande was a great read though and something every atheist who ever has to argue with theists should check out.

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The intro anthropology courses are always taught by the ethnographers, and ethnography is the arena that probably dominates anthropology in America more than any other, less so in Europe and Asia. The thing about Anthro is it is holistic and about synthesizing things into a cohesive whole. American education is highly specialized. The higher you climg the rungs, from undergrad to masters to doctorate and post graduate research, the more specialized you become, which is a double edged sword, in that it leads to reductionism (also a double edged sword, not saying reductionist views are bad or wrong by any stretch), and anthropology is probably one of the more academic pursuits, meaning its usefulness isn't as well understood in the broad general public.

Yet pretty much every single thing in the human experience falls under its rubric. Its just the nature of the field.

Cultural relativism isn't really moral relativism, though I can see where the two can be conflated. Cultural relativism is about reducing bias. It was found that, as early Western anthropologists spread out around the globe, their judgements of "lesser" civilizations tainted their research, and failed to give an accurate portrayal of what those life experiences actually were like. By engaging in cultural relativism in ethnographic research, systemic bias is reduced (though you can't remove it completely, hence the need for multiple viewpoints and people of varying backgrounds to engage in said research as well, to help reduce bias). In something like chemistry, you can reduce bias by taking large enough sample sizes. It doesn't work that way in ethnography.

Ethnography really isn't my arena, though. My background is bioarchaeology and osteology. Those areas are closer to pure hard science. Carbon dating, and isotopic dating, and radiography, how bone responds to physical stresses, how tissue and bone become equilibrized with the environment, taphonomy, so forth and so on.

Its too broad a field to really put labels on it, except to say "Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human".

ZyyzYzzy_sl said:

No, fuck anthropology. Zero need for it in the vast majority of subfields within chem/bio/physics.

Edit - Math would be the field tying the web together.

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Math is culturally constructed and transmitted.

There are aspects of it that appear to be pan cultural, and surely it'll be one of the fastest and best ways to speak directly to intelligent alien species, were we to encounter one, since in that way it is universal, but how each society relates to mathematics is culturally predicated. Cultures that never invented the concept of 0, for instance, relate to mathematics in ways that are wildly different from our own, and this actually alters how they experience reality in fundamental ways.

Imagine not having a word for an absence, a 0 place holder, how that alters the entire way you view reality. Anthropological research on how mathematics is learned, transmitted generation to generation, society to society, is just as critical to the field as relaying that 1 and 1 equate to 2 and so forth.

Let's not have a science war here, brothers. We all seek Truth (tm), and Truth (tm) will not be found in a box.

Actually primatology and Darwin's interaction with a primate directly is one of the things that led him to his conclusions about evolution.

When Darwin Met Another Ape Phenomena: The Loom

Anthropology isn't just a social science. It is, again, too broad a field to put in a box. It is both hard science, and social science.

Added: Really I could go into quite a lot of detail nitpicking away at that litany of ridiculous assertions you just made. Climate change, for instance, isn't called anthropogenic climate change, for nothing. Biologists and geologists aren't referring to this time period as the Anthropocene for nothing. Cell phones? They're just tools. Humans have been making tools for a long long time, and their patterns of usage are pretty consistent throughout time, whether we're talking about particular lithic shaping techniques, or highly technical cell phone technology. The fact is that how we relate to them is anthropologically relevant. How these new tools shape our understandings, our worldviews, alter our lives and impact future generations. Its all anthropological bro.

Here comes some of that anthropological insight for you: Humans love categories. They love splitting splitting splitting splitting. That's why concepts of race are so prevalent, despite there beingnot an ounce of biological, genetic or other justification for them.

We are like that because of our evolutionary history, our cultural history. There is no functional divide between mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and culture.

Its all self reinforcing, a snake eating its own tail.