• About

Bespoke Blog

~ Science! Culture! Computational Engines!

Bespoke Blog

Tag Archives: experiments

Fun With Ethics: 4 Immoral Experiments to Advance the Frontiers of Science

16 Tuesday Dec 2008

Posted by nfitzgerald in school

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

ethics, experiments, morality, neuroscience, psychology, science, sociology

mad_scientistNow that exams are over, I have time to reflect on the material I’ve covered over the last 4 months. From Cognitive Systems and Philosophy of Perception to Functional Programming, I’ve had an extremely varied curriculum. A strong common theme which ran through all my school work this term was the ethical practices and ramifications of scientific work: from discussions of the bioethics of genetic modification, to more abstract debates over what rights, if any, we should afford to a hypothetical True AI.

As good as this has all been, and as much as I believe that ethics should be given a more prominent place in all undergraduate science programs, one simply cannot escape the fact that when it comes to advancing the frontiers of scientific knowledge, ethics can be a big ol’ wet towel. How much more advanced would our civilization be if we weren’t guided by our silly moral principles? How many more answers would be within our grasp if we didn’t have to give so much thought to the rights or general physical well being of our fellow man?

In order to answer that hypothetical, I’ve compiled a short-list of unethical experiments which would genuinely advance our scientific knowledge:

Continue reading →

January 2023
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Mar    

Ben’s Tweets

  • RT @OJ_Astro: A blog post by physicist Syksy Räsänen (@SyksyRasanen), who has published with us twice, about why overlay journals are an an… 1 day ago
  • RT @JokesAstro: If the Islands of Hawaii were very massive stars, Kauai would be going supernova soon. https://t.co/NEboP6FRWd 2 days ago
  • RT @AnicaSeelie: @gauravmunjal Imagine if there was a duck but it had human ears 2 days ago
  • RT @jfmclaughlin92: Friendly reminder that if you're at a public university, your institutional email can be searched basically whenever. B… 2 days ago
  • @rcrain_astro Academia has a lot of problems. Precarious employment, massive overworking of junior researchers, poo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago

Nicholas’ Tweet’s

  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! Retrieval-augmented models are expensive. Make them faster by partially pre-computing passage representations. W… 5 days ago
  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! We propose FiDO, an improved version of Fusion-in-Decoder with faster inference and better performance. Work don… 1 month ago
  • @_julianmichael_ @LukeZettlemoyer @emilymbender @nlpnoah @ssshanest Congrats! 5 months ago
  • RT @michielsdj: Now accepted to @iclr_conf! 🎆 1 year ago
  • @mjskay Yeah, I feel a major point people were missing is that an endless spiral into the drain is actually the perfect visual metaphor. 1 year ago

Top Posts

  • Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

Tags

100daychallenge advertising astronomy bash biology blogs BMC books browsers Bulshytt calligraphy canada coding cognitive computers computer science css EEE elvish ereaders ethics evolution experiments facebook google government html humor humour ICP I hate this class iliad internet explorer irex java javascript lego letter libraries marketing materialism matplotlib maze mindstorms mods morality mysql networking neuroscience pens philosophy philsophy php Pilish prime minister programming psychology reading review robots science SENG servers sociology steampunk stupid technology time ubc UNIX url vim web web design writing

Blogs We Read

  • Bad Astronomy
  • Boing Boing
  • Rationally Speaking
  • Terry Project (UBC)

RSS Nicholas’ Terry Posts

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 162 other subscribers

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Join 74 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...