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[CABL]

The new Malwarebytes update fucked up the in-program fonts on my Win7 notebook. Note that the fonts are okay on my Win10 PC.

It's in the WTF thread because I didn't expect fucked up fonts on 1920x1080 of all resolutions.

[TamerVirus]

The anti-malware has become the malware
What a twist!

[pikachu17]

I just learned that worshipped is incorrect, and that it is worshiped instead.

[EnigmaticHat]

I just learned that worshipped is incorrect, and that it is worshiped instead.

*warshipped

[Frumple]

Kancolle gets enough of that without adding more of a religious angle, thank you.

In other wtf news, today we discarded a book (on shelves for half a decade with no checkouts) that reviews described as, paraphrasing, sapphic plant erotica. Major plot point was a lesbian getting knocked up by alien plants.

... name of the book was pollinators of eden, for the curious. Something like 1960s sci-fi.

[Eschar]

A headline asked, "should we use the results of Nazi research if it could save lives?" and some people said no.

Why TF not?
I have a hard time understanding why the data's association with Nazis would be a big deal. Specifically, I don't understand why some see it as validating Nazis. Nazis didn't invent any phenomena they discovered. Nature existed and did its own thing whether Nazis studied it or not. I support condemnation of their unethical experiments, but any information gleaned from those experiments (although there wasn't much) is entirely separate from the experiments! And if the usable information can save lives, people who hesitate (from concerns over the data's associations, as opposed to concerns of its truthfulnes) are being harmfully negligent.

[Lord Shonus]

Apart from the fact that very little of the research the Nazis gained via questionable methods is worth anything at all - it was as much a way for that sick fuck Mengele and his sort to "play" as it was anything approaching real study -, the concern is that embracing information gained unethically would encourage unethical behavior in the future. Our own research has crossed that line too many times to treat it as anything but a stone wall.

[Draignean]

I'm with Eschar on this one. Real Nazi data is, as Shonus said, pretty much worthless. I don't need to know how long it takes a woman in labor to die from exhaustion when you belt her legs together. However, if that same scientist also did groundbreaking work on some esoteric disease (perhaps by equally horrific methods) that was rigorous and valuable, then I believe it should be used to save lives. Yes, the man who did it was awful. Yes, his work, if conducted by any individual of the present age would result in (at best) his permanent imprisonment. However, it is not necessary to bury all the good with his bones if we don't have to.

When we discover that a wealthy and influential individual is integrally corrupt, a pedophile, a rapist/molester, or even a murderer, we do not immediately go back through the IRS history of their charitable donations and reverse them - even if they made the money that they donated through graft and corruption.
 
In this case the reality of the situation is even worse because you're valuing your personal moral cleanliness above someone's life. If you want to take the road that pre-existing information should not be used because of its provenance, then you must be able to look someone in the eye and tell them that you're going to let them die because the alternative would make you feel icky inside.

The main precedence from not using the fruit of the poison tree comes from the law, where the reality is a bit different. In that case, it is forbidden to enter something as evidence to a legal dispute when that something was obtained illegally. In that circumstance doing otherwise would result in a paradox of the system - a system of Law in which definitional injustice could determine the outcome of justice. For science, there is no such inherent paradox, and the nearest analog would be using methods which were not held up by the scientific method in order to validate new findings.

I know there is a moral uncleanliness to this, but I do not believe that information should be wasted just because of the current perception of the man who uncovered that information. The information should be evaluated on its own merits. If it was rigorously obtained and has the potential to be a benefit to humanity, then why lock it away with every other evil thing its creator did? Salvage what little good existed from an evil man's life.

[pikachu17]

Yes, I agree very much. Not only on its own grounds, but also because its basically looking at the victims subjects and saying "You know what? So what if you suffered/died for this? Because I don't want to feel icky, I'm going to invalidate any good that can come from that."
Can you imagine being someone who was tortured for research, and then finding out that people are refusing to use that information to save lives?

And besides, if you are going to never use information from unethical research, how the hell are you going to get that information? Are you just going to fence off that stuff for the rest of human existence? Do the research again and pretend it was the first time? What?

[EnigmaticHat]

Worth pointing out that to obtain unethical research that would pass the modern review process, you'd have to hurt a lot of people.  I think there's a danger of going like, oops, our psychology study was traumatizing to the patients.  Well that sucks but well we might as well use the data right?  Cue it happening again because it worked the first time.  Rich sociopaths in the US have demonstrated before that they're willing to suffer lawsuits that totally fuck up their finances... as long as its years in the future.

In a way Mengele as an example is biased towards accepting the research, because no surviving nation or reputable scientist was complicit in his activities.  A better example I think would be Unit 731 from Japan.  We got useless research AND we were complicit in letting the criminals off the hook.  IIRC a member of Unit 731 ended up rising to some super high position in the post-war Japanese government like prime minister or cabinet member.

Likewise, MKultra.  Since the research was classified and carried out by the CIA the culprits were never going to be punished, and if something similar happened again they wouldn't be punished again.  So using the research here would provide a motivation for future CIA officials to do it again.

[heydude6]

I think I get your argument, but what are you really going to do about that? How will not using unethically obtained research make a difference? The CIA clearly demonstrated that they don't give a fuck by performing the research so why would they give a fuck about using their own findings? If the issue is about whether other parties will look at the CIA's research, then the problem is that these other parties aren't the ones performing the unethical experiments. The CIA will still be incentivized to conduct unethical experiments even if every other scientist and institution decided to ignore their findings, simply because the CIA was performing these experiments for their own benefit in the first place.

The only reason why we can have a debate like this is because the institution that was performing these experiments was crushed. If the Nazi government was still around, we wouldn't be worried about how using their research may lead to unethical experiments in the future because we'd be more focused on stopping the unethical experiments that were going on right now.

Assuming the institution performing the experiments was stopped, then using their research will only motivate people outside of it. "Brave", "kind", "generous" souls who are willing to sacrifice their freedom (and other people's lives) to further the areas of science that mankind is afraid to explore. These are the people our choices are affecting, not the existing institutions that are already performing unethical shit. Stopping those institutions is still a priority, but it requires different means and is thus a different debate.

[WealthyRadish]

Saying that the results of unethical research have a compelling possibility of "saving lives" if only it were allowed to be "used" doesn't make much sense. Will the results of an insane Nazi torture study ever be the irreplaceable tipping point between a scientific breakthrough having enough evidence to be accepted or rejected? It doesn't seem like much of a dilemma if the data is useless without the possibility of (ethical) corroboration anyway, and if for some reason the unethical research does point in the right direction, that right direction should be self-evident by other means.

[wierd]

^

Look into the data on hypothermia and drowning.  Look into the initial data sources, since prior to that, there was no solid data on the phenomenon. (Which is why the nazis did the study.)


Better sources have since been created, but those studies were formed using insights gathered from analysis of the nazi drowning/hypothermia experiment data.

[Rolan7]

Worth pointing out that to obtain unethical research that would pass the modern review process, you'd have to hurt a lot of people.

This.  You'd have to repeat the research to actually "obtain" it.  The core of scientific rigor is that we- anyone- can test the results.

It's an interesting abstract question: Is knowledge from evil sources somehow tainted?

But in reality, knowledge can only be verified if it's independently verifiable.

[wierd]

The big thing is that the Nazis would have been perfectly "OK" with repeating the experiments as many times as needed.  They kinda killed 6 million people, because they wanted them gone. They had absolutely no problems with how that killing was done; Killing the people was a desired outcome.  Because it was a desired outcome, they did not take much care at all on other variables in their "studies". Such as subject health, fitness, mental condition, etc.  Likewise there was no attempt at diverse subject populations (because it was ethnic cleansing!), so any anomalous results that might be present in a wider human population were not given any attempt at being tested for, etc.  The studies were just plain shit. If you want a reason not to use this data, this is the reason you should reach for first. They were poorly constructed, BECAUSE they sought to kill the subject, and made no efforts to control for the host of biological processes and effects they were introducing into their experiments through such systemic maltreatment. Because they were conducted this way, they are garbage. End of story.

The philosophical question of "taint of evil" in anything that comes from that research is moot; All subsequent studies were informed by what was learned in that study, and that knowledge was used to STRUCTURE the more ethical, better designed, and more informative trials, which give more modern (and reproducible) data.

As a consequence, if we ascribe to the "taint" philosophy, *ALL* hypothermia data, (unless you can prove that your researchers have lived under a proverbial log, and learned everything independently) from all later trials are contaminated, no matter how ethically they were performed.

It's an insane position to take. 

Don't use the nazi studies because they were poorly controlled, and irreproducible.  There are better datasets that are less ethically dubious and of higher quality. Use those instead.

But taint of evil? No, that's bullshit.  It's about process, not magical hoodoo.