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Comment by nubero | Hacker News Reader

Enrico Fermi comes to mind: “Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.”

I guess he wasn’t talking about the magazine…

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It's interesting that the linked policy says almost the exact opposite of Fermi's statement, implying that ignorance is sometimes better than knowledge: "...considerations of harm can occasionally supersede the goal of seeking or sharing new knowledge, and a decision not to undertake or not to publish a project may be warranted."

Indeed… The rot has spread frighteningly far.

"There you have it, you see how far the termites have spread, and how long and well they've dined." - Christopher Hitchens

I know the people behind statments like these are coming to it with extremly unintelligent and bad faith definitions and intentions, but the actual words are actually correct. If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it. If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA. If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset. This is a very well-discussed topic in philosophy of science and technology and good sci-fi.

Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit.

The dishonesty of the -ve IQ people behind attitudes like the criticized is that they see danger in everything and use moral panic to enforce views. If the actual "dangers" they are freaking out about are legitimate, they would have been justified to supress (non-violently) science and technology)

> If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it.

The alternative was 20-30 million more dead people via conventional means. There were many teams around the world working to build the bomb. One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not.

> philosophy of science

Not sure what that is, but do not want.

> One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not.

In regards to this, I believe they were on the right path but they were split in to three groups across Germany. They shared the radioactive material and because of this weren't able to achieve fission (?) due to not having enough material in one spot. Thank $diety for that.

More info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_progr...

If you don't want philosophy of science, don't comment on an article about the philosophy of science? This isn't some fringe topic for "woke" people, philosophy is fundamental to science and has been from the beginning. It's questions from everything like "what even counts as science" to scientific ethics, to "what is the purpose of science". It's not always about ethics, in fact the 20th century philosophy of science debates were dominated by more practical topics like realism vs instrumentalism.

You cannot just dismiss something you've never heard of and have no idea about

Agreed on the first half of your comment.

Philosophy of science, however, is a well established, important, and fascinating field. Keywords: Positivists/Viennese circle, Karl Popper and falsification, Feyerabend and Against Method, Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, W. V. Quine and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism, the Science Wars.

To add to that: the new experimentalists, Mayo‘s Error statistics and the rise of Bayesianism

Thanks for the Mayo recommendation. I am currently going through her Statistical Inference as Severe Testing, and find it very tiring. So far very little is about actual statistics and the meat of disputes, but rather about meta questions and the he-said, she-said of those disputes. Maybe the prior book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge is a better exposition of the ideas?

I got mich out of it, but only on the meta level also. Afair she never goes into technical detail of e.g. Neyman Pearson, but covers things like how to overcome the Quine-Duhem-problem with statistics, or how to stengthen Popper’s theory. But on that level I learned a lot, and it trickles down to what is important in actual experimental design and why.

I don't blame them for not wanting what appears to be a mix of philosophy into science though - in the same way it is understandable that people who never knew what suffrage was would oppose women's suffrage because they think it involves torment. Ignorant but understandable. Unfortunately, philosophy has a long history of actively defining itself as willfully not referencing reality for validation. Not wanting that mixed with science is understandable even if rooted in ignorance.

Knowledge itself is inevitable. You cannot control every single person's desire to know more and advance knowledge. I lived in 1980's Romania and the state tried everything it could to suppress knowledge about the outside world. People still found out things they were not supposed to know about. (An ironic example - the Romanian religion scholar Mircea Eliade died in exile during the 1980s. The Romanian state did not mention anything... and the next morning everyone was talking in the bus and at my high school. We were not even supposed to know this person existed...) I don't know if you realize, but you are cherry picking the subjects which we can talk about (climate change) versus the subject which we cannot talk about (nuclear power, WWW).

>If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs

Humanity's discovery of atomic bombs wasn't published, though. It was demonstrated in terrifying fashion when they were first used. Worse, the first atomic bomb project was actually carried out by Nazi Germany, not the United States, and might have succeeded if not for sabotage campaigns and the collapse of the German economy. And weapons research is a well-known risk since the invention of the arquebus around 1400, when early gun manufacturers jealously guarded their secrets with state encouragement. It's true that we avoid research into novel biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, with a possible fourth "computational" coming into focus, but we do this by avoiding the research itself, wherein the ends are obvious from the beginning, not refusing to publish a finding because you don't like what it said.

>Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit.

Yes, it's like teaching small children how to make poisons and bombs. It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.

Why would I need to make bombs when I could just collect the remains of the new years celebration from the road every first January? My parents made sure we had oversight and knew what we were dealing with even if it was only the fun small stuff (that could still burn your face off).

> It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.

Yeah, because accidentally mixing cleaning supplies in a way that creates a toxic gas cloud is really better than knowing that common household items can kill you if you aren't careful. Or getting monoxide poisoning because no one told you that using gas grills inside can kill.

Yeah, keep the kids ignorant of dangerous aspects of the world. If they are lucky they will die well before they have to navigate the world on their own.

On the other hand, nuclear physics is also used for things like treating cancer.

In that sense it's the perfect analogy: you don't really know where your research will end up. Did Rutherford split the atom to cure cancer? No, of course not. Most (or all?) people working on particle physics in the early 20th century would have been quite surprised to learn it would be used as such down the line.

> If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA

If I felt that it was plausible that the genocidal regimes of the USSR or Nazi Germany could have developed such a bomb (which was the case): yes, I absolutely would have shared it with the US.

As a counterexample, physicists did use particle physics for medical purposes very early on- E.O. Lawrence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence#Reception was using it for cancer treatments of various kinds in the 30s.

> If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset

The premise is interesting, but at least decentralization was really there at the outset. It is just that market forces shrinked it. I honestly don't know what would have been the best medicine to prevent this. During the 90s I felt there was a larger emphasis on protocols, that almost disappeared during the 00's.

> e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even

Climate wouldn't have been worsened as much as it did without the technological advances provided by science. It's really, really difficult to cut the Amazonian forrest down using just axes and horse-drawn carts, but once you got mechanised stuff (with the help of science) then it becomes exponentially easier to do it (think just how much science went into the fabrication of bitumen/asphalt, once you have bitumen roads going into and out of the Amazon things get exponentially easier for those who are in the business of cutting trees in there).

Which is to say that I fail to understand how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here.

To be clear, I also fully acknowledge that without science and technology our lives would have been way harder, for most of us life wouldn't have been possible at all: without science we would have had no green revolution, which means we still would have had famines around the world, never mind that the green revolution caused a lot of environment-related nasty things, so it's not always black and white.

> how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here.

I can't understand the logic here. The progress of science isn't somehow dead. The problem is our priorities.

For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish.

> For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish.

Not sure your example is clearly bad priorities. (Though generally I think the US wastes too much on the military.) What's the worst case scenario when the money is defending Ukraine instead of science?

Science funding won't as help much if there's an unchecked bully marching across Europe.

I think you’ve simplified things.

Here’s the president, himself, explaining what’s going on: https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-resurfaced-clip-russia-ba...

Perhaps you can ELI5 because I was under the impression Ukraine was a sovereign nation. Free to pursue any alliances it wishes. And that its 1991 borders were acknowledged in exchange for yielding nuclear weapons to Russia.

Speaking as a Russian who grew up in the 90s, NATO was never a real threat to post-Soviet Russia. Our "national patriot" political faction made it into a threat in its propaganda because they needed an existential enemy to build their ideology up on.

You need to read “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch. It will help clear up all the muddled thinking I see going on when I read those lines of yours.

Edit: You can also go here and watch this: https://youtu.be/lX-K63pVPTM I still recommend the book though.

The only reason we know that atomic physics leads to mass destruction is because we followed through with the R&D. We only know that the web is used to spread propaganda and track dissidents because we developed it so far for these problems to develop.

You can't block technology based on understandings of consequences that you dont gain until the technology matures. We can't see the future.

there is a difference between science, as in "understanding nature" and technology, which is about exploiting that knowledge for building something useful. Knowing everything about the atom is harmless, using that knowledge to build an horrendous weapon is evil.

Also, knowing everything about the atom does not affect our behavior, except through technology. Social sciences are more problematic though because they are about us, as part of nature sure, but in the social context we live, which can be affected by what we know about it. So proper considerations must be made when designing the research questions and methods, and when discussing the results.

The only bad faith actor reaching unintelligent definitions here is the one projecting them unto others.

Hiding this knowledge from the world doesn’t make it not exist. It just makes people less prepared for when malicious actors use it against them. You promote ignorance as a solution to technical problems. I don’t.

Read what I wrote again, slowly this time, spelling each word.

See what I mean

You don't have a meaningful point to see.

Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide.

I don't think science should be censored, scientific inquiry should continue with integrity regardless of what people think. What I think is people who can't handle it should not have access to the truths revealed. I generally believe in unrestricted free information but I've been rethinking that for certain cases.

It's not just gender identity. I've seen similar behavior in other groups such as obese people revolting against the "oppressive" science documenting the numerous risks associated with being overweight because it supposedly causes society to marginalize them.

It was common in the middle of the 20th century to not tell a terminally ill patient he/she was dying. We look back at that with horror.

In your example, I'd prefer chosing (assisted) suicide or not. Surely you're not doing me a favor by not letting me die how I want.

In 1972 people with horrific treatable diseases were being lied to, so that science could record exactly how they suffered and died:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

And that's what led to ethics rules that said you can't do that. You'd think you wouldn't need to write it down, but we did and we do.

> By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]

> The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards,[13] and has been cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history."[16] Its revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP)[17] and federal laws and regulations requiring institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects in studies.

I know about Tuskegee. That's a clear example of what not to do. Just one of many documented cases of criminal abuse of human beings. Stuff like this is the reason why informed consent is an absolute requirement these days.

What I meant to say is I'd think twice before telling a depressed patient with a history of suicide attempts about a diagnosis of terminal illness.

Assisted suicide could be a completely rational choice, at that point [1]. It would be a choice that you, or anyone else, could not dictate.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/792317/medical-condition...

Information cannot cause harm. Harm is done by people.

That seems oversimplified. If an individual or organisation collects or creates "information", they could/should consider not only what a thief might do with the information, but what they're collecting it in the first place and why. If they know potential dangers, they share at least some responsibility for future damage. If they haven't considered the dangers, this is negligent (mitigated by the act of sincere consideration, not by what dangers were discovered).

Intention exists separately from information (in this context) but they are not independent, they're connected.

A silly example: Let's say someone at Facebook realises they could predict with high confidence the chance of a user voting in favour of extremist political candidates. This is new information, and Facebook has decided to create it. Once created, it could do harm. At this point, saying "information doesn't kill people, people kill people" is a useless abstraction. Sure, it might be "true" in a limited interpretation, but that interpretation doesn't help anyone.

(From an excess of caution, I've constrained the definition of "information" above as something like "information created or collected by humans and our systems". This is to exclude exotic-but-true consideration of literally anything in the universe as "information" e.g. tumours, magnetars, etc etc.)

> If they know potential dangers, they share at least some responsibility for future damage.

This line of thinking was used during the dark ages to argue against the spread of science vs. religion.

This is correct and completely irrelevant in the real world. It is similar to numbers cannot cause harm. Information and numbers are nothing more than interlectual constructs, patterns, or platonic ideas.

But collecting information can enable as much harm as collecting some numbers. For example the Nazis started with collecting information about the racial status of as many people as possible, see [1]. The collected information was later used to decide who to deport and kill.

Although, this is another example of humans causing harm, it also shows why collecting information is not harmless. Although the information itself cannot cause anything. It simply has no agency, so it can neither harm nor heal people. But it can enable both.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_certificate

That is just wrong or a very unfunny pun. Lots of info is classified because it would be harmful in the wrong hands.

I think the "in the wrong hands" part of your statement actually backs up what he was saying. The information by itself is useless unless someone ACTS upon it.

No, that is at best a dad joke level pun. Like "Falling from great heights never hurt anyone. Landing on the ground did"

> Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide.

That is arguably, depending in the diagnosis, a good example of a time where suicide may be the good option, where postponing death magnifies suffering, and the only reason to keep the poor patient alive is essentially because we're too busy selfishly thinking about avoiding our own pain of loss to permit them to erase their agony.

> ignorance is never better than knowledge

this is a moral judgement and a strong claim. I can think of a few types of knowledge off the top of my head that aren't making the world a better place

Something like learning how to tie a noose: this is (in most cases) bad knowledge. This isn't something anyone should learn unless they need it for something that isn't its best known purpose

when it comes to something like race/gender/etc, I can't think of one positive usage of that kind of knowledge, if we can even call it that. I'd argue that even the idea of race/gender/etc is against the goal of equality and if we want true equality these ideas need to be discarded

The knowledge of how to tie a noose hurts no one. Knowledge in and of itself is harmless at rest. As with all knowledge it’s what you do with it. Keeping people in the dark is an immoral solution to evil.

What knowledge is "in and of itself" means nothing because it exists in a context, the only thing that matters in the case of knowledge (or anything) is what's done with it and how it is useful

And AR-15s hurt no one. Yet they are purposed to have massive killing power against humans, and massively amplify the damage a single ill person can do. Hypothetically there could be some type of weapon that once discovered could end all life on this planet. If that weapon was trivial to build, it would take 1 person with that knowledge to end eveything. Human knowledge is a human construct, and shouldn’t be thought about in absolutes.

Well, I for one think “the goal of equality” should be discarded. People are to be treated equally and we already have the declaration of universal human rights as a foundational and international document for that.

If you want people to end up all “being equal” to one another you will just end up on the farm, where all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

Also, I think it quite amusing that you call what Fermi said “a strong claim” and a “moral judgement” and a few lines down you have the audacity to say that certain “ideas need to be discarded”. First of all, some of the “ideas” you talk about are indeed facts. And then who on earth do you think you are to tell other people what they may think of?

you're sort of assuming what I mean by "equality"

I'm not talking about leveling, I'm talking about something more like job applications that are completely race-sex-etc blind, where that signal isn't even allowed into the mix. I think that in a truly meritocratic system you'll see a diverse representation. No, it might not be perfectly diverse, but it would lead to more (and fairer) diversity and not less

In the international FIDE list of chess grandmasters, 39 out of 1953 are female. That’s 2%. And while I’m certain that there’s some icky misogynistic men who have made some decisions in that regard, I’m equally certain that we will never see the ratio being fifty-fifty. Not even close.

That being said, I really don’t care what we will see or what the outcome will be in a truly meritocratic system. I’m just interested in the merit.

Could that fact still be published in Nature?

Nah man, it would be hArMfUL.

You are conflating knowledge and arbitrarily constructed definitions. My understanding of knowledge is that it is based in some objective ground rather than a changeable definition.

Race and gender are social constructs, not objective facts of reality. I agree though, discard social constructs.

The noose knot is very similar, if not exactly the same, as several fishing knots[1].

Also, in a rational society, the goal isn't blanket "equality". People are not equal. I'll never have a career as a basketball player.

Equality of opportunity is the goal, not equality of outcome.

Equality of outcome arguments generally boil down to some derivative of "we should take from group a and give to group b, and I should be the one to oversee this".

[1] https://www.knotsforfishing.com/hangmans-knot/

Fermi's quote is not acceptable for publication in Nature according to these new guidelines because he centered on the "men" privileged group and excluded "woman, non-binaries, ..." non-privileged groups.

That might be the finest rebuttal on offer

Also, let's remind the author that quote next time he or she needs surgery: no aenestesia, ignorance is never better than knowledge.

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