So he is an immoral person That shouldn't effect his research abilities. I can still enjoying watching House of Cards or listening to Soviet music.
There's a broad spectrum of potential bad behavior impacting the results, ranging from straight up faking results on one end to p-hacking to just failing to publish relevant negative results or undesired results. An agenda can affect research in many, many ways, and it's absolutely relevant to whether you should trust a paper.
It shouldn't be that way. Not needing trust is rather the point of the scientific process. But it is.
[0] with caveats for convoluted circumstances such as a consensual BDSM scene where the drunkenness and the beating was negotiated and agreed to while sober, but didn’t seem to be the sort of thing you were talking about
Secondly: There’s a reason why I wrote “social norms” — although I’ve honestly never heard of Gentzen, I knew someone would think of something along those lines.
If one is part of a society that does or supports doing things which we consider to be evil, the social norm of that society is inclusive of that evil, and one who openly and enthusiastically supports that evil is still following their society’s social norms when they do so. Social norms are what keeps science healthy — without good social norms, people would’ve responded to p-hacking etc. by saying “great, let’s all do it!” rather than trying to fix anything.
The importance of comparison with social norms is also sort of reason why people aren’t thrown into insane asylums for claiming that the literal creator of the universe has personally ordered them to eat each week a small token of unleavened bread which have been magically transformed into human flesh by a prayer in honour of the last meal the supreme being had with his mates that one time he took human form right before he prearranged his own temporary execution in order to give his non-mortal other self an excuse to not put people’s immortal souls into eternal damnation by default.
Also the broad reason why Washington is not heavily criticised for owning slaves.
None of this is to say that evil social norms are not to be challenged or fought against, just that it’s really really unusual to have someone who can both do that and avoid taking down Chesterton Fences.
What you're suggesting is quite simple and has been done for as long as humans have been around and it has taken many names like Iconoclasm or Damnatio Memoriae.
The cynical in me suspects it's just a form of group-sycophantry, extreme conformism and virtue signaling.
Sorry mate, you can despise the person without disqualifying their speech a-priory, it's the definition of prejudice.
No, you’re not saying what I’m saying. I don’t even know how you can have that take given my 3rd and 5th paragraphs. (My 4th could’ve been clearer even if it was trying to make the same point).
It’s the willingness of someone to violate their social norms which I regard as a problem for quality research, not the fact my moral code is being violated.
Unless you want to suggest that Gentzen and von Braun were violating the social norms of the literal Third Reich by enthusiastically supporting the government of the country they lived in which was also The Third Reich, your claim is totally different to mine.
(That said, I really wish you’d chosen a less emotive example than figures from the Third Reich, as I don’t want to even implicitly compare this situation to that one).
While of course the nature and the extent of the crimes committed differ drastically from one another, there is still an interesting comparison worth drawing between how the legal process was corrupted in both cases in order to facilitate their respective misdeeds.
In the case of the Third Reich, it was jews, gypsies, etc.
In the case of "Epstein and his Jewish Enablers" (see the article linked in OP) it was underage white female "trailer park trash," as Ghislaine Maxwell herself liked to call them.
I’ve just looked up the phase “Damnatio Memoriae”: that’s way beyond what I had been thinking of even the worst case scenario — the worst punishment even for literal fraud should never be worse than that which happened to Mr Andrew Wakefield. For violating social norms all I’m advocating is more scrutiny and less trust-by-default, in proportion to the nature of the violation.
This feels like a stretch to put it mildly.
I think this covers that:
> This article was probably written to defend MIT president Rafael Reif's decision to mark Epstein's post-conviction donations to MIT as anonymous.
...it's just wildly implausible, or is that me? The author of this piece on game theory has written it at the behest of Reif, or to support Reif...somehow? I promise you Reif has no idea about this article.
The anonymous donations issue is a HUGE part of this. Trust me.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/7/10/20689134/jeffrey-eps...
https://www.insider.com/epstein-riyadh-saudi-arabia-private-...
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/8/18/dubin-epstein-u...
https://columbusfreepress.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-there%...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/if-epstein-stole-fro....
https://dealbreaker.com/2019/08/les-wexner-writes-foundation...
https://www.queerty.com/jeffrey-epsteins-chilling-remarks-ho...
https://www.businessinsider.com/investigation-of-jeffrey-eps...
... and more and more to come for sure as criminal prosecution of Mr. Epstein's most famous "recruiter" gets underway, the daughter of disgraced publishing magnate Robert Maxwell.
So, in real life, a person can be extremely rigorous and honest in one area of life, and much less so in another.
Studies are (where possible) Double-Blind for a reason. The judgement of a researcher obviously affects study design. The goals of a researcher affect the way data is interpreted and presented in subtle and non-subtle ways. That’s not to mention the possibility of academic misconduct or outright fraud, which is axiomatically related to poor moral behavior.
[1] In actuality, there are many, but most have obvious flaws and contradictions.