Comment by quinnjh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quinnjh | Hacker News Reader

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In Hitler's Ethic Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race.

https://www.csustan.edu/history/hitlers-ethic

Further- if we use dynamical system theory and look at coastal engineering-when we apply a control (say a barrier wall or "groyne" at the beach, to retain the nice sand) mother nature with time will work around it (the sand is carried by the tide and waves to carve out of the beach and deposit on the back of the retaining wall) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-The-terminal-groyne-sy...

Engineering nature properly requires a liberatory embrace of differentiation, diversity, and ultimately futility. The natSoc obsession with systemic perfection and crystallization leads somewhere predictable, and we rightly stamped the movement out (though many of the doctors worked w and moved to the US, and allies have had their share of eugenic fantasies and doctrines).

We need to wake up from the childlike belief in the infallibility of scientism. As Richard Feynman put it: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"

> We need to wake up from the childlike belief in the infallibility of scientism.

What I’m talking about is not scientism. In medical research and medical practice ethical questions come up all the time. Someone has to make a decision about these questions. I personally don’t have the time nor the resources to adjudicate all of these questions, therefore I have to trust the decision of some proxy on most questions. Trusting a group of people who care about ethics, and know about medicine is a good proxy (the ethics board).

This doesn’t mean that I believe them infaliable. If you believe that a particular ethics board in a particular case made a bad call let me know. Identify the case, tell me what the board decided and what you think should have been decided and why. I promise you that I will use all my faculties to learn more about the case and make a decision of my own if possible. Does that sound like scientism to you?

That being said this is a complete non-sequitur in the present case. The article is not about an ethics board who made a bad call. It is about a researcher who skipped the whole process and decided that he alone is enough to decide what is ethical and what is not. That is very suspect in itself. Furthermore people think that he made the wrong call, and what he did was not ethical.

Are you arguing that the ethics board system is so faulty that he was right to ignore it?

Are you arguing that he made the right call in thinking that this particular intervention is ethical?

Thanks for your take! I have more faith in the internal compass of people taking things seriously than i do in outsourcing ethics, but this doesnt mean that i conversely trust bad actors.

Surely not advocating for the latter, i think informed consent and voluntarism should be required. Personally not sure where i stand on some of the leading edges of genetic tech, but i also appreciate that there likely are arguments for development akin to atomic science. My hope is that we can continue to support and synthesize a broad spectrum of humanity rather than a few quantifiably valuable breeds. Im biased since i have a sibling with disability who i value more than the ethics boards that will triage him off of a ventilator :)

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