Government watchdog files 30 ethics complaints against Trump administration

Julia Manchester
The Hill
Originally posted March 26, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

"The bottom line is that neither Trump nor his administration take conflicts of interest and ethics seriously," Lisa Gilbert, the group's vice president of legislative affairs, told the network.

" 'Drain the swamp' was far more campaign rhetoric than a commitment to ethics, and the widespread lack of compliance and enforcement of Trump's ethics executive order shows that ethics do not matter in the Trump administration."

NBC News reports Public Citizen filed complaints with the White House Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Commerce and Interior, among others.

Trump signed an executive order shortly after he took office in 2017 that was aimed at cracking down on lobbyists' influence in the U.S. government.

The order allowed officials who departed the administration to lobby the government, except the agency for which they worked, and permitted lobbyists to enter the administration as long as they didn't work on specific issues that would impact former clients or employers for two years.

The article is here.

Authors of premier medical textbook didn’t disclose $11 million in industry payments

Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky
www.statnews.com
Originally published March 6, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

“These findings indicate that full transparency of [author conflicts] should become a standard practice among the authors of biomedical educational materials,” according to the authors, whose study appears in the journal AJOB Empirical Bioethics.

McGraw-Hill, which publishes Harrison’s, did not respond to STAT’s requests for comment.

Financial disclosures have become de rigueur in scientific journals, where many of Harrison’s authors also publish and are subject to guidelines for such disclosures. Textbooks, however, have typically not required disclosures — and that means they’ve fallen even more behind standard practices.

The researchers, led by Brian Piper, a neuroscientist at the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton, Pa., acknowledge that simply looking at patent awards and fees from biomedical companies doesn’t prove the existence of biased work. But they note that medical textbooks are enormously influential due to their perceived authority and the wide readership they receive.

The article is here.

Mental Health Crisis for Grad Students

Colleen Flaherty
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published March 6, 2018

Several studies suggest that graduate students are at greater risk for mental health issues than those in the general population. This is largely due to social isolation, the often abstract nature of the work and feelings of inadequacy -- not to mention the slim tenure-track job market. But a new study in Nature Biotechnology warns, in no uncertain terms, of a mental health “crisis” in graduate education.

“Our results show that graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression and anxiety as compared to the general population,” the study says, urging action on the part of institutions. “It is only with strong and validated interventions that academia will be able to provide help for those who are traveling through the bioscience workforce pipeline.”

The paper is based on a survey including clinically validated scales for anxiety and depression, deployed to students via email and social media. The survey’s 2,279 respondents were mostly Ph.D. candidates (90 percent), representing 26 countries and 234 institutions. Some 56 percent study humanities or social sciences, while 38 percent study the biological and physical sciences. Two percent are engineering students and 4 percent are enrolled in other fields.

Some 39 percent of respondents scored in the moderate-to-severe depression range, as compared to 6 percent of the general population measured previously with the same scale.

The article is here.

The Academic Mob and Its Fatal Toll

Brad Cran
Quillette.com
Originally published March 2, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

In her essay “The Anatomy of an Academic Mobbing,” Joan Friedenberg states that “most mobbers see their actions as perfectly justified by the perceived depravity of their target, at least until they are asked to account for it with some degree of thoughtfulness, such as in a court deposition, by a journalist or in a judicial hearing.”

The flip side to the depravity of the target is the righteousness of the mob. What makes members of the mob so passionately inhumane is that their position as righteous becomes instantly wrapped up in the successful destruction of the target. As Friedenberg writes “An unsuccessful account leaves the mobber entirely morally culpable.”

Moral culpability creates fear and stokes irrational behavior, not within the target but within the mob itself. If a mob fails to cast out the target then eventually the mob will have to come to terms with the rights of the person they tried to destroy and the fact that all people, regardless of manufactured depravity, are deserving of humanity and basic fair treatment.

Every effort will be made to increase the allegation count, magnify the severity of each accusation, reinterpret any past actions of the target as malicious, and wipe away any sign that the target ever had a single redeemable quality that could point to the fact that they are undeserving of total destruction and shunning. For this reason “bullying” is a common accusation levelled against mobbing targets.

The article is here.

"My Brain Made Me Do It" Is Becoming a More Common Criminal Defense

Dina Fine Maron
Scientific American
Originally published March 5, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

But experts looking back at the 2007 case now say Hodges was part of a burgeoning trend: Criminal defense strategies are increasingly relying on neurological evidence—psychological evaluations, behavioral tests or brain scans—to potentially mitigate punishment. Defendants may cite earlier head traumas or brain disorders as underlying reasons for their behavior, hoping this will be factored into a court’s decisions. Such defenses have been employed for decades, mostly in death penalty cases. But as science has evolved in recent years, the practice has become more common in criminal cases ranging from drug offenses to robberies.

“The number of cases in which people try to introduce neurotechnological evidence in the trial or sentencing phase has gone up by leaps and bounds,” says Joshua Sanes, director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. But such attempts may be outpacing the scientific evidence behind the technology, he adds.

“In 2012 alone over 250 judicial opinions—more than double the number in 2007—cited defendants arguing in some form or another that their ‘brains made them do it,’” according to an analysis by Nita Farahany, a law professor and director of Duke University’s Initiative for Science and Society. More recently, she says, that number has climbed to around 420 each year.

The article is here.

Neuroblame?

Stephen Rainey
Practical Ethics
Originally posted February 15, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Rather than bio-mimetic prostheses, replacement limbs and so on, we can predict that technologies superior to the human body will be developed. Controlled by the brains of users, these enhancements will amount to extensions of the human body, and allow greater projection of human will and intentions in the world. We might imagine a cohort of brain controlled robots carrying out mundane tasks around the home, or buying groceries and so forth, all while the user gets on with something altogether more edifying (or does nothing at all but trigger and control their bots). Maybe a highly skilled, and well-practised, user could control legions of such bots, each carrying out separate tasks.

Before getting too carried away with this line of thought, it’s probably worth getting to the point. The issue worth looking at concerns what happens when things go wrong. It’s one thing to imagine someone sending out a neuro-controlled assassin-bot to kill a rival. Regardless of the unusual route taken, this would be a pretty simple case of causing harm. It would be akin to someone simply assassinating their rival with their own hands. However, it’s another thing to consider how sloppily framing the goal for a bot, such that it ends up causing harm, ought to be parsed.

The blog post is here.

Bill to Bar LGBTQ Discrimination Stokes New Nebraska Debate

Tess Williams
US News and World Report
Originally published February 22, 2018

A bill that would prevent psychologists from discriminating against patients based on their sexual orientation or gender identity is reviving a nearly decade-old dispute in Nebraska state government.

Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks of Lincoln said Thursday that her bill would adopt the code of conduct from the American Psychiatric Association, which prevents discrimination of protected classes of people, but does not require professionals to treat patients if they lack expertise or it conflicts with their personal beliefs. The professional would have to provide an adequate referral instead.

Pansing Brooks said the bill will likely not become law, but she hopes it will bring attention to the ongoing problem. She said she hopes it will be resolved internally, but if a conclusion is not reached, she plans to call for a hearing later this year and will "not let this issue die."

The state Board of Psychology proposed new regulations in 2008, and the following year, the Department of Health and Human Services sent the changes to the Nebraska Catholic Conference for review. Pansing Brooks said she is unsure why the religious organization was given special review.

The article is here.

Non cogito, ergo sum

Ian Leslie
The Economist
Originally published May/June 2012

Here is an excerpt:

Researchers from Columbia Business School, New York, conducted an experiment in which people were asked to predict outcomes across a range of fields, from politics to the weather to the winner of “American Idol”. They found that those who placed high trust in their feelings made better predictions than those who didn’t. The result only applied, however, when the participants had some prior knowledge.

This last point is vital. Unthinking is not the same as ignorance; you can’t unthink if you haven’t already thought. Djokovic was able to pull off his wonder shot because he had played a thousand variations on it in previous matches and practice; Dylan’s lyrical outpourings drew on his immersion in folk songs, French poetry and American legends. The unconscious minds of great artists and sportsmen are like dense rainforests, which send up spores of inspiration.

The higher the stakes, the more overthinking is a problem. Ed Smith, a cricketer and author of “Luck”, uses the analogy of walking along a kerbstone: easy enough, but what if there was a hundred-foot drop to the street—every step would be a trial. In high-performance fields it’s the older and more successful performers who are most prone to choke, because expectation is piled upon them. An opera singer launching into an aria at La Scala cannot afford to think how her technique might be improved. When Federer plays a match point these days, he may feel as if he’s standing on the cliff edge of his reputation.

The article is here.

Did Iraq Ever Become A Just War?

Matt Peterson
The Atlantic
Originally posted March 24, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

There’s a broader sense of moral confusion about the conduct of America’s wars. In Iraq, what started as a war of choice came to resemble much more a war of necessity. Can a war that started unjustly ever become righteous? Or does the stain permanently taint anything that comes after it?

The answers to these questions come from the school of philosophy called “just war” theory, which tries to explain whether and when war is permissible, and under what circumstances. It offers two big ways to think about the justice of war. One is whether it’s appropriate to go to war in the first place. Take North Korea, for example. Is there a cause worth killing thousands—millions—of North and South Korean civilians over? Invoking “national security” isn’t enough to make a war just. Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons pose an obvious threat to South Korea, Japan, and the United States. But that alone doesn’t make war an acceptable choice, given the lives at stake. The ethics of war require the public to assess how certain it is that innocents will be killed if the military doesn’t act (Will Kim really use his nukes offensively?), whether there’s any way to remove the threat without violence (Has diplomacy been exhausted?), and whether the scale of the deaths that would come from intervention is truly in line with the danger war is meant to avert (If the peninsula has to be burned down to be saved, is it really worth it?)—among other considerations.

The other questions to ask are about the nature of the combat. Are soldiers taking care to target only North Korea’s military? Once the decision has been made that Kim’s nuclear weapons pose an imminent threat, hypothetically, that still wouldn’t make it acceptable to firebomb Pyongyang to turn the population against him. Similarly, American forces could not, say, blow up a bus full of children just because one of Kim’s generals was trying to escape on it.

The article is here.