Recent events highlight an unpleasant scientific practice: ethics dumping

Science and Technology

The Economist

Originally published January 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Ethics dumping is the carrying out by researchers from one country (usually rich, and with strict regulations) in another (usually less well off, and with laxer laws) of an experiment that would not be permitted at home, or of one that might be permitted, but in a way that would be frowned on. The most worrisome cases involve medical research, in which health, and possibly lives, are at stake. But other investigations—anthropological ones, for example—may also be carried out in a more cavalier fashion abroad. As science becomes more international the risk of ethics dumping, both intentional and unintentional, has risen. The suggestion in this case is that Dr He was encouraged and assisted in his project by a researcher at an American university.

The info is here.

Escape the echo chamber

By C Thi Nguyen
aeon.co
Originally posted April 9, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Epistemic bubbles also threaten us with a second danger: excessive self-confidence. In a bubble, we will encounter exaggerated amounts of agreement and suppressed levels of disagreement. We’re vulnerable because, in general, we actually have very good reason to pay attention to whether other people agree or disagree with us. Looking to others for corroboration is a basic method for checking whether one has reasoned well or badly. This is why we might do our homework in study groups, and have different laboratories repeat experiments. But not all forms of corroboration are meaningful. Ludwig Wittgenstein says: imagine looking through a stack of identical newspapers and treating each next newspaper headline as yet another reason to increase your confidence. This is obviously a mistake. The fact that The New York Times reports something is a reason to believe it, but any extra copies of The New York Times that you encounter shouldn’t add any extra evidence.

But outright copies aren’t the only problem here. Suppose that I believe that the Paleo diet is the greatest diet of all time. I assemble a Facebook group called ‘Great Health Facts!’ and fill it only with people who already believe that Paleo is the best diet. The fact that everybody in that group agrees with me about Paleo shouldn’t increase my confidence level one bit. They’re not mere copies – they actually might have reached their conclusions independently – but their agreement can be entirely explained by my method of selection. The group’s unanimity is simply an echo of my selection criterion. It’s easy to forget how carefully pre-screened the members are, how epistemically groomed social media circles might be.

The information is here.

The Misunderstood Higher-Order Approach to Consciousness

Richard Brown, Hakwan Lau, & Joseph E. LeDoux
PsyArXiv Preprints
Originally posted January 7, 2019

Abstract

Critics have often misunderstood the higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models, such as first-order local recurrency theory. The criticism that HOT overintellectualizes conscious experience is inaccurate because in reality the theory assumes minimal cognitive functions for consciousness; in this sense it is an intermediate position between GWT and early sensory views, and plausibly accounts for shortcomings of both. Further, compared to other existing theories, HOT can more readily account for complex everyday experiences, such as of emotions and episodic memories, and make HOT potentially useful as a framework for conceptualizing pathological mental states.

The paper can be downloaded here.

Are groups more competitive, more selfish-rational or more prosocial bargainers?

UlrikeVollstädt & RobertBöhm
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
Available online 14 December 2018

Abstract

Often, it is rather groups than individuals that make decisions. In previous experiments, groups have frequently been shown to act differently from individuals in several ways. It has been claimed that inter-group interactions may be (1) more competitive, (2) more selfish-rational, or (3) more prosocial than inter-individual interactions. While some of these observed differences may be due to differences in the experimental setups, it is still not clear which of the three kinds of behavior is prevailing as they have hardly been distinguishable in previous experiments. We use Rubinstein’s alternating offers bargaining game to compare inter-individual with inter-group behavior since it allows separating the predictions of competitive, selfish-rational and prosocial behavior. We find that groups are, on average, more selfish-rational bargainers than individuals, in particular when being in a weak as opposed to a strong position.

From the Conclusion section:

From these four results, we could infer that groups are not more competitive than individuals since being more competitive would mean making higher first round demands and needing more rounds than individuals in both discount factor combinations. Nevertheless, it was not clear
whether the observed behavior was more rational or more prosocial.

A pdf can be downloaded here.

Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs

Daryl Cameron, Cendri Hutcherson, Amanda Ferguson,  and others
PsyArXiv Preprints
Last edited January 25, 2019

Abstract

Empathy is considered a virtue, yet fails in many situations, leading to a basic question: when given a choice, do people avoid empathy? And if so, why? Whereas past work has focused on material and emotional costs of empathy, here we examined whether people experience empathy as cognitively taxing and costly, leading them to avoid it. We developed the Empathy Selection Task, which uses free choices to assess desire to empathize. Participants make a series of binary choices, selecting situations that lead them to engage in empathy or an alternative course of action. In each of 11 studies (N=1,204) and a meta-analysis, we found a robust preference to avoid empathy, which was associated with perceptions of empathy as effortful, aversive, and inefficacious. Experimentally increasing empathy efficacy eliminated empathy avoidance, suggesting cognitive costs directly cause empathy choice. When given the choice to share others’ feelings, people act as if it’s not worth the effort.

The research is here.

Relational Ethics in Therapeutic Practice

Kenneth J. Gergen

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 2015, 36, 409–418

Abstract

A therapist’s ethical values will not always match those of his/her clients; nor may the values they share be congenial with those central to their acquaintances outside. To whose values should a therapist then be responsible?  Here it is useful to think in terms of first and second order ethics. First order ethics are those common to everyday life; they are under continuous production, and may or may not be fully articulated. They are also in frequent conflict, inciting animosity and hatred. A second order ethic, however, is one that places the supreme value on the relational process from which all ethics spring. It is thus an ethic that prizes those actions that can bring multiple and conflicting voices into productive communication. Illustrative therapeutic practices are provided.

Here is part of the conclusion:

As I am proposing, the ethical posture of the therapist extends far beyond the therapeutic relationship. The therapeutic life-world ripples across an extended sea of relationships. It is in this respect that the relational ethic explored here is also one that incorporates – without condoning – all traditions of moral value. It seeks to move beyond the local worlds in which we dwell and to build bridges among them. This does not mean sacrificing one’s values as a therapist, nor sympathising with all those
proclivities from which clients draw satisfaction. But it does mean resisting the temptation to be right; to know the good. It means enabling the process by which multiple worlds become mutually infused.

A pdf can be downloaded here.

Do People Believe That They Are More Deontological Than Others?

Ming-Hui Li and Li-Lin Rao
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
First published January 20, 2019

Abstract

The question of how we decide that someone else has done something wrong is at the heart of moral psychology. Little work has been done to investigate whether people believe that others’ moral judgment differs from their own in moral dilemmas. We conducted four experiments using various measures and diverse samples to demonstrate the self–other discrepancy in moral judgment. We found that (a) people were more deontological when they made moral judgments themselves than when they judged a stranger (Studies 1-4) and (b) a protected values (PVs) account outperformed an emotion account and a construal-level theory account in explaining this self–other discrepancy (Studies 3 and 4). We argued that the self–other discrepancy in moral judgment may serve as a protective mechanism co-evolving alongside the social exchange mechanism and may contribute to better understanding the obstacles preventing people from cooperation.

The research is here.

Google is quietly infiltrating medicine, but what rules will it play by?

Michael Millenson
STAT News
Originally posted January 3, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Other tech companies are also making forays into fields previously reserved for physicians as they compete for a slice of the $3.5 trillion health care pie. Renowned surgeon and author Dr. Atul Gawande was hired to head the still-nascent health care joint venture between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan. Apple recently hired more than 50 physicians to tend its growing health care portfolio. Those efforts include Apple Watch apps to detect irregular heart rhythms and falls, a medical record repository on your iPhone, a genetic risk score for heart disease, and a partnership with medical equipment manufacturer Zimmer Biomet aimed at improving knee and hip surgery.

Google is hiring physicians, too. Its high-profile hires include the former chief executives of the Geisinger Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic. The company’s ambitious health care expansion plans reportedly encompass everything from the management of Parkinson’s disease to selling hardware to providers and insurers.

To be clear, I’ve connected the dots among separate Google companies in a way Google might dispute. However, there are some concerns about how and whether any separation of information will be maintained. In November, Bloomberg reported that plans in the United Kingdom to combine an Alphabet subsidiary using artificial intelligence on medical records with the Google search engine were “tripping alarm bells about privacy.”

The info is here.

Are scientists’ reactions to ‘CRISPR babies’ about ethics or self-governance?

Nina Frahm and Tess Doezema
STAT News
Originally published January 28, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The research community widely agreed that He and his colleagues crossed an ethical line with the first inheritable genetic modification of human beings. Gene-editing experts as well as bioethicists described the transgression as being conducted by a “rogue” individual. But when leading voices such as NIH Director Francis Collins assert that He’s work “represents a deeply disturbing willingness by Dr. He and his team to flout international ethical norms,” what are they actually expressing concern about? Who determines what are the ethics of altering human life?

We believe that the alarm being sounded by the scientific community isn’t really about ethics. It’s about protecting a particular form of scientific self-governance, which the “ethics” discourse supports. What are currently treated as matters of research ethics are in fact political and social questions of fundamental human importance.

Key decisions about when and how it will be appropriate to make inheritable changes to human beings currently lie in the hands of scientists. Although ethics are repeatedly invoked, the most prominent condemnations of He’s actions don’t actually address whether it’s ethical to tinker with human life through gene editing. A largely ignored part of the story are the five “draft ethical principles” of He’s lab at the Southern University of Science and Technology of China. If the outcry from scientists was truly about ethics, we would be seeing a discussion of the relative merits of He’s ethical principles, engagement with their content, and perhaps an exploration of how to jointly achieve a better set of operating principles. Instead, the ethics of using CRISPR for germline gene editing have apparently been determined and settled among scientists, closing down a meaningful debate about the limits and opportunities of genetic engineering.

The info is here.