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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

> That surely has to be the greatest PR coup in human history.

Or, we've noticed the above, thought that it was an outrage, and fixed it. In fact these days some argue we've swung to the opposite side, and the barriers to even harmless research have gotten onerous.

Trust isn't optional in a society. If you don't trust the "establishment", then somebody has to take its place, and they've got all the same problems, only in modern society they're all worse. People like Twitter celebrities and youtubers will gladly sell you all sorts of crap because a sponsor asked them to, and shield themselves behind "not financial advice", or a small "Sponsored by NordVPN" in the corner.

Some have their very non-neutral agenda, some have sponsors, some just get taken advantage of, some have a good presentation but reached the limits of their knowledge, and some are chasing audience numbers. Pretty much none of them have any real oversight on their content.

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> Or, we've noticed the above, thought that it was an outrage, and fixed it.

Where can I read about the Nuremberg-style trials where the perpetrators of that outrage were brought to justice?

Because if those trials didn't happen, we didn't "fix" anything.

It is ironic that you mention Nuremberg trials as a way of justice against human experimentation. The people that did Bad Things in WW2 on the German and Japanese side were not tried in a court at all if the research they did seemed interesting enough to get in US hands. Those that did Bad Things on the US side we likely haven't even heard of, and they definitely weren't put through a court.

When how interesting your research was were what made you innocent then it was a sham. Nuremberg was strictly a propaganda tool for the masses and had nothing to do with justice. If justice had a say most of the men that were imported to the US would all have been hanged.

I agree with your first paragraph, but the statement that The Nuremberg Trials were only a propaganda tool is just false and an insult to those who brought many to justice. It certain was a propaganda tool as well but justice is not all-or-nothing. Certainly some justice was had.

Even with Nuremberg style trials that would still only have been a PR stunt. German police still has yearly reports about the issues they have with right wing nuts and racism in the force. You would have to replace both the entire chain of command and institute checks to keep things from repeating, one alone is not enough.

> that would still only have been a PR stunt

I strongly disagree. Symbols matter, a lot. Such a mass trial (with potentially thousands of defendants – those doctors didn't cook up all of that by themselves, after all) would have sent a strong message that such behavior will not be tolerated under any circumstances, and that medical professionals and other authority figures who believe themselves to be above the law are gravely mistaken.

What happened instead is that everything was swept under the rug and when it all became public, people were told that the profession had moved on and those things wouldn't happen anymore. Which sends the exact opposite message.

The problem with generalizing across time and space is that you can never know where to draw the line. Taking your original comment as a starting point, who should not be trusted? American doctors? Americans? Doctors? Back then? Now? Forever?

The past is an indicator, not the only indicator.

So you are comparing idiots that fall for "financial advice" on youtube to pregnant women who were given a radioactive cocktail without knowing about it? You seem to confirm that everyone has different sort of values...

I'm saying that if you don't trust the "establishment", then other people will very gladly take its place.

The only solution I see is to fix the "establishment", because the alternative seems to be mostly a free-for-all where everyone tries to convince you that they have your best interests at heart, and I don't see how not being part of the government suddenly makes one trustworthy.

Blind trust in a centralized authority is by no means necessary. You can for example just not put blind trust in other people, and teach your children to understand other people's lack of aligned incentives. A free-for-all is called free speech and freedom of association, where people are responsible for their own choices. You are responsible in the end anyway, since none of these central authorities will be there for you when they fuck up.

> Blind trust in a centralized authority is by no means necessary.

Definitely not blind. The trust has to be earned, and there has to be oversight.

> You can for example just not put blind trust in other people, and teach your children to understand other people's lack of aligned incentives. A free-for-all is called free speech and freedom of association, where people are responsible for their own choices. You are responsible in the end anyway, since none of these central authorities will be there for you when they fuck up.

I don't think this is viable long-term. I see it as a defect, in some measure.

You can't be an expert on computers, and engineering, and food safety, and economics, and health. Each of those subjects is completely gigantic in modern times, and we can't expect the population at large to figure out how to tell which restaurant will poison them.

Those are valuable skills, but IMO in society at large they're at best a contingency measure. We specialized for a reason, and that means that all of us will have huge holes in our knowledge somewhere.

Sure, trust in centralized hierarchies as much as you like. IMO, the problem is more linked to missing accountability then trust in whatever system is called establishment. A single doctor is enough to do a lot of harm. If we, as a society, are not able to enforce heavy penalties even for those who seem priviledged, we are lost. Because a few bad apples can do whatever they want, without fearing repercussions. And people like you will come up and point "Hey, the establishment isn't at fault" and pretend nothing happened.

No, my point is that the establishment is at fault, but the only real solution isn't to reject it and seek non-establishment alternatives, but to fix it.

> I don't see how not being part of the government suddenly makes one trustworthy.

Blatant strawman.

I see this kind of reply all the time.

"Fine, you guys were right, the gov fucked up - but at least we learned, fixed it and moved on."

Narrator: Nothing was fixed, and they did not learn.

To claim that nothing was fixed, you need to present us with some proof of further fuckup. Please proceed to do so.

What about the claim that it was fixed? Does that require no further evidence?

You can show evidence of that without being all knowing. We know it didn't get fixed, so there's no need.

Okay then.

>From April 1945 to July 1947, 18 men, women, and children were injected with plutonium by doctors working with the Manhattan Project

And then...

>In 1952, Chester M. Southam, a Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher, injected live cancer cells, known as HeLa cells, into prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary and cancer patients. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy females were injected with live cancer cells without being told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it might cause cancer.

And then from 1953...

>Project MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.

And yet again....

>In 1963, 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York City were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison.

There are hundreds of examples that we know of. There's even more than one Wikipedia article full of them.

That is true, my question was however about _actual_ cases, because 1950's USA is not 2020's USA (neither Germany, nor Iran, nor whatever country). Because I'm not arguing bad stuff never happened (or happens), I'm arguing that measures to make this less likely to happen have been and are taken continuously. Are those measures enough though? Without examples I cannot judge in good faith.

Or measures to hid these things have gotten better?

Who, exactly, "changed" things? Who are enforcing these "measures?" This wasn't an isolated instance of rogue doctors running amok. The same people supposedly setting the standards are the same people doing this stuff to begin with. Are we to assume that one day, they had a big epiphany that killing people is bad, or something?

Where's the Wikipedia article? It would be good to see some more recent examples, and by a more diverse set of perpetrators.

There's one here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

What do you mean nothing? Organizations like the FDA famously got a lot more powerful after incidents like with Thalidomide -- a big enough screwup seems to result in very considerable change.

Why here it's also not rare to see people complain about the onerous regulations on nuclear power, guess where those came from?

Thalidomide, Three Mile Island, etc. were accidents – caused by negligence and poor standards, sure, but accidents nonetheless.

These doctors deliberately poisoned people for a sick experiment while lying about it.

If you really can't tell the difference, and if it isn't obvious to you that the latter can't be "fixed" simply with stricter regulation, I don't know what to tell you.

> If you really can't tell the difference, and if it isn't obvious to you that the latter can't be "fixed" simply with stricter regulation, I don't know what to tell you.

I don't see a fundamental difference. Harm was done, rules should be put in place to prevent it in the future. Whether it was negligence or intentional is just a detail.

I don't see what's different about intentional harm that's not preventable with regulation. You put more people in the loop. You ensure that whoever breaks the rules sees no benefit. You can't prevent everything of course, but you can cut down a lot on it.

It was always illegal to poison people. These doctors didn't care.

Incidents eventually resulted in the creation of Institutional Review Boards. All research on human subjects must now pass an IRB, and these are not rubber stamp organizations.

> Or, we've noticed the above, thought that it was an outrage, and fixed it. In fact these days some argue we've swung to the opposite side, and the barriers to even harmless research have gotten onerous.

Ah yes, the illusion of moral progress. Guess what--the early 20th century progressives who were doing this and stuff like eugenics also thought they had "fixed" their ancestor's shortcomings.

It used to be common knowledge that a great™ ruler is the one who conquers new lands and kills his enemies, and it used to be common practice to kill or enslave most civilians upon occupying a settlement. These things have changed, wouldn't you say?

How much of that is moral progress and how much is technological and economic change? Do you need to conquer land when you could use drone strikes and economic sanctions to maintain hegemony? And did we stop enslaving people because people found Jesus—which I’d like to think is true—or because mechanization rendered unskilled slave labor much less valuable?

I don't think separating these is that relevant here. People get told that certain things are good and right, which they then mostly do, these things have changed over time, I would claim to the better, and this is the claim I'm debating.

Generally, such memetic evolution arises from competing drives to be adversarial or cooperate with others. Over time, people have found that cooperation is better in a vast variety of environments and economic or technological conditions. We are very slowly solving the Prisoner's dilemma.

Even if the goal of maintaining hegemony doesn't change, the people being occasionally bombed with drones will still prefer that situation to being conquered by Gengis Khan. Maybe one day the hegemon will only need to brainwash them using propaganda instead of bombing them, and then maybe one day just have a reasonable discussion with them and still be able to achieve the goals. This in my view constitutes progress.

Neither am I claiming that this progress is monotonous, eternal or inevitable. It's an observation about human history.

> Trust isn't optional in a society. If you don't trust the "establishment", then somebody has to take its place...

Do you mean that, for an individual, they must replace the "establishment" with some other authority as a general tendency? Or do you mean that, for society, we must have some authoritative source of truth?

I disagree with both, but I assume you're talking more about the first. Although the first sentence quoted, I suspect, could be used to talk about 'low/high trust' societies, when such a concept (low- or high-trust societies) has very little to do with news media. In any case, even if I lean conservative, I tend to be very distrustful of 'conservative' e-celebs (e.g., Stephen Crowder). I'm distrustful of pretty much any second- or third-hand account unless it's court documents or police reports (and less so the latter if it concerns police brutality). I wish more people had a similar model regarding how much they trust what they hear on the news.

All that said, I'll still take sponsored by NordVPN over sponsored by Pfizer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2LQW1TY0lY, and yes, I know this is from "The Daily Caller", it's the first source I found that compiles these 'sponsored by' cuts, although only the first minute, then it goes into Tucker Carlson ranting).

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