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Comment by selfishgene | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting that we should administer IQ tests to everyone currently serving time in prison in order to identify which "geniuses" should be released so that they can pursue nobel-prize winning careers in physics instead?

"Punishment usually serves no noble purpose" is something that Martin Nowak has argued with members of the press, at a time when Mr. Epstein was scared that he could be re-indicted on the felony sex-trafficking charges, which in his case given the egregiousness of his misconduct would have almost certainly led to serving a life sentence in federal prison.

From your comment, I'm now starting to wonder if the word "noble" was accidentally misspelled in the Science magazine interview quoted above.

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You realize people are more than just one thing right? If someone won a Nobel prize for physics, and then murdered someone, the murder doesn't make the physics wrong. You understand that, right? Like, if we discovered tomorrow that Isaac Newton was a pedophile, the theory of gravity is still something important and still works. You can hold people accountable for one action and still recognize that other things they did may have been correct. You don't have to hold an all-or-nothing approach like releasing murderers who might be physics geniuses.

Mr. Nowak is no Isaac Newton ... not even close!

The best way to cancel a person like Nowak is to cite his work by replacing his name with initials only ... after firing him of course and denying him future funding.

Personally I don't think the scientific community would miss him all that much anyway. There are plenty of more decent scientists out there who can fill his size shoes.

I believe that scientific discovery is inevitable ... even if someone like Isaac Newton had died in the plague and not have worked out calculus there were other contemporaries of his caliber like Leibnitz to keep the field moving forward.

Thus I don't think that we need as a society to ignore the cruel behavior of child rapists, or their abettors, in the name of advancing science.

You're missing the point. You don't have to ignore their behavior. The behavior and the work are two separate things, and can be regarded separately. If you require everyone to be a saint to learn anything from them, you'll never learn anything.

A speeding ticket or a disorderly conduct charge is very different from aiding and abetting sex-trafficking of minors.

Epstein was facing a life sentence in federal prison and forfeiture of an estimated $500 million estate for his crimes if you need help understanding the seriousness of them.

The law views aiding and abetting sex-trafficking just as seriously as the crime itself.

Some of us are still holding out hope that Prof. Nowak will serve some hard time behind bars for what he did. He has no shame, but apparently still quite a few apologists.

> A speeding ticket or a disorderly conduct charge is very different from aiding and abetting sex-trafficking of minors.

You're missing the point. The crimes and the research are unrelated.

The fact that you consider this some kind of apologia for Nowak demonstrates that you are either unable or unwilling to understand. If Nowak tells you 2+2=4, are you going to say "No that must not be right, because you hung out with Epstein"?

No, I am not saying that at all here.

Given his complicity in Mr. Epstein's heinous crimes against humanity, Mr. Nowak now needs to start following a little of his own advice: donate all future research results to the world "anonymously" to avoid forcing victims of sexual assault to have to relive their traumas from the mere mention of this child rapist enabler's name or the sight of his lying face.

Is that clearer now?

If Nowak committed a crime, he should be tried - with rules of evidence, a jury of his peers and due process, and then punished according to the laws we enacted via our elected representatives. That is the appropriate venue for justice for crimes. Mob justice, shunning, harrassment via anonymous or pseduonymous reports on the Internet are not appropriate. Is that clearer now? You can relinquish your role as a self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner for people that someone told you did something bad. We have a whole system for dealing with that.

> We have a whole system for dealing with that.

Worked pretty well in the case of Epstein, didn't it?

That's why some of us are not going to shut up when it comes to holding Mr. Epstein's "enablers" accountable this time around, got it?

I'm sure Nowak is quaking in his boots that two people he's never heard of, nor ever will hear of are debating whether it's necessary to scrutinize a biography of an author in order to discuss their ideas. Truly, a fate worse than death. You sure showed him. I'll bet he thinks twice before committing the atrocious crime of lending someone an office again.

Honestly, I had never heard of who Nowak was, and I probably never would have if you hadn't brought it up. If your goal is to relegate him to obscurity, you're doing the opposite.

Looks like he's enjoying paid leave right now as a free man:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/5/2/epstein-review-n...

Axios is a reliable source for updates:

https://www.axios.com/jeffrey-epstein-mit-billionaire-favors...

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