There is reason to believe. People have different ethical standards and some standards are more conducive to getting honest useful results. In this case I think free and informed consent is important. But the ethical framework our medical system works to is counterproductive and destructive; so there is reason to believe that the ethical option is to ignore the official rules on ethics under some circumstances. I personally am of the opinion that the single biggest threat to my health and wellbeing is the West's culture of forcing everyone to conform to the highest possible safety standard and paying no attention to the cost-benefit of that. As I measure it, our absurd standards appear to be crippling (with respect to some hypothetical entity that had more reasonable standards) the west's:
* Manufacturing capabilties.
* Energy security.
* Medical research.
So while someone with different ethical standards might also cut corners on the quality of the reporting I find it extremely easy to believe that someone with different standards might just produce better research. We don't all have the same ethical frame.
That’s where the interrelation with following standards regarding honesty, transparency, etc. You can fall afoul of these out of inability to follow the rules rather than duplicity - there are standards for record keeping, statistical rigor, etc, which are prescriptive and fairly inconvenient. If you can’t follow the ethics rules because you find them inconvenient per your cost benefit analysis, what about rigorous record keeping? Not ignoring inconvenient outliers? What calculus do you use that lets you choose which inconvenient rule you won’t follow? As someone who doesn’t know your standards, how do I trust you’re making well informed decisions that don’t skew results in your favor in your convenience calculus?
A simpler way is hold a standard and rules and when you vary you assume variance exists everywhere.
This is science, not business. Science isn’t just about discovering results, it’s about conveying your results in a rigorous and believable way following high standards that build confidence others can build ontop of your work. Cutting corners damages your reputation on all dimensions.
I would also note these standards come about for a real reason it’s not just a bunch of anti progress bureaucrats devising ways to make everything expensive from a “western” culture perspective. These are best practices derived from observations of real and genuine horrors. They are absolutely restrictive. But when the rules don’t exist, some jackass somewhere does something inhuman and gets rewarded for it. Maybe it creates progress, but it leaves real victims whose lives are destroyed. This being unacceptable isn’t a western culture thing. It’s a human thing. No one wants to be the victim, and most people agree it’s not ok to exploit and harm people for your benefit. The difference is some societies (not cultures) have weak systems that protect the individual over profit, power, and greed. One could make the argument that the current society in China doesn’t prioritize human rights very highly, but I think it’s wrong to say Chinese culture doesn’t. There’s a difference between a people and their government.
Starting with a milder example :
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-how-to-be-...
Followed by a more... radioactive one :
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-sausage-factory-of-p...
BTW for this last one, HN seems to be outright blocking submissions, with the dreaded (and in this case disingenuous) "you are posting too fast" error. Now I'm willing to leave some benefit of the doubt that this is done in order to minimize flamewars, but it does still leave a bad taste...
But to conclude, some wise (??) words :
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...
(The links to Paul Graham's and Scott Aaronson's takes are also worth reading.)
I've long assumed that if China continues to invest in its research culture, eventually (probably even now) there is research being published in Chinese (I assume that means Mandarin, but I am not knowledgeable on specifics) that would be extremely valuable. Areas like material sciences, optics, EE, MEMS, etc.
But I think since the US has so much cultural exchange with China, and so many Chinese-speaking residents, that probably any really important stuff will get translated.
Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, etc are spoken languages (or dialects, or varieties), but the writing system is common to all of them, albeit in two major forms -- Simplified and Traditional. If I write 恭喜发财, a Mandarin speaker will read that aloud as gongxi facai, a Cantonese speaker as gung hei faat coi, and a Hokkien speaker as kiong-hi hoat-chai, though I left off tone markings even though they're important. In that sense, unless something's romanized, written materials are pretty much just written in 'Chinese', and not any particular variety.
Learning Chinese is funny that way: the spoken language has very simple, regular grammar, but then you also need to learn how to read, write, and pronounce ~3,000 characters to read a newspaper, with a well-educated reader in the language typically recognizing between 8 and 15 thousand characters of the 80,000-100,000 or so that have ever existed (including obscure characters, obsolete characters, regional characters, and variant characters).
It's similar to how if you show a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German and a Pole '456', they'll all know the meaning even if the Englishman thinks "four-hundred fifty-six", and the Frenchman thinks quatre cent cinquante-six.
Most Chinese speakers can understand (written) Mandarin, but all the spoken languages can be written in theory. Mandarin was just the first one to have been popularly written and it was the official dialect, so it became the de-facto standard (before it became de jure).
People in Hong Kong for example have been writing Cantonese for decades, albeit more often recently than before. But if you looked you'd find published works written in Cantonese 100+ years ago. That said, if you only knew Mandarin it will probably only take you a couple days to get the hang of reading Cantonese since it's not that different when written.
(Written Cantonese basically uses Hanzi, but the situation of Taiwanese is more complicated [or maybe I don't understand it enough]. You can check out the link above.)
At least eg. Hannas - far from an impartial voice on the subject, mind - clearly distinguishes the written standard as a separate language from dialect speakers' native ones:
"By the same token, the 'unity' that Chinese characters allegedly impart to the language by allowing speakers of different 'dialects' to read a common written language turns out to be an illusion. These so-called Chinese dialects have less in common than the Romance languages of Europe, meaning that speakers of nonstandard Chinese (some 30 percent of the Han population) are not reading their own language or even a common language, but what is to them a Mandarin-based second language written in Chinese characters. Granted the characters allow non-Mandarin speak- ers to read segments of written Mandarin in their own regional pronuncia- tions. But, far from unifying Chinese, this practice only perpetuates differences that would have been leveled out long ago under the influence of a phonetic script."
— Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, Ch.8, Appropriateness to East Asian Languages
Let the Chinese authorities burden themselves with questions of DNA markers and ethnic groups
Eugenics has not done anyone any good, and when used as a means of controlling populations it goes to very dark places
If the whole stack is not kept ethical, it is not ethical at all. If not ethical then it tends to evil
This is such a naive, borderline illiterate take. How much of modern human biological knowledge is built upon a foundation of unethical practices?
Which is to say, if you care about advancing science in the long term rather than merely in the short term, you must care about ethics. Accusing others of naivete here is a bad look.
Ethics? AI research today is plainly not ethical, yet its full steam ahead.
Whats a bad look is some idealized notion that everything can be perfect and ethical and there are no gray areas. That is plainly magical thinking.
Cause I don't know any.
Absolute statement, then relativism.
I'm convinced.
At this point I have no idea what your opinion is.
It's reduced genetic defects in the population. For example in many countries you can abort babies with Down syndrome up to the time of birth.
A) accurate B) reproducible
Even in Western journals it's frequently suspect.