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Short summary (a scientist erred/falsified results in heart disease treatments, up to 800,000 died):
Full Vox link
I find the Vox article somewhat disturbing. They spend most of the article talking about whether criminalization is the answer. 800,000 dead, or some number in the high thousands and they feel it's necessary to spend so much time justifying and proposing? Why should they be carefully peeping their heads over the parapet, wary of sniper fire? If ever there was someone to cancel and demonize, it's this guy.
I have an internal feeling of justice that calls for extremely severe penalties for these people. I guess I'm in the minority, since it doesn't happen. The EcoHealth gang, Daszak and the Bat Lady of Wuhan are still living the high life. Meanwhile, scientists who dare to have sex with coworkers get their lives derailed.
I suppose that most people have their feelings of justice heavily weighted towards direct things like killing with knives, selling faulty goods or being mean. That makes sense, we didn't evolve to care about the probabilistic harms caused by institutional malpractice over many years. This is why I think we should have extra-strong prohibitions on this kind of non-obvious harm. Even a hardened EcoHealth researcher might have qualms about massacring 10-20 million people with guns and blades. It's a lot easier to do exciting, fun research and be a little slack on all those tedious safety checks. It doesn't feel so wrong, which is why they need to feel fear to counter it.
In the past I've made this sort of argument and been rebuffed by some people on the grounds that if we imposed very severe punishments then people would just double down on lying and blaming others to escape liability. Plus it would disincentivize people from taking up important roles.
However, when it comes to mechanical engineering, we've learned to build bridges that stay up. We appreciate that some kind of consequence should fall upon you if you adulterate food with plastic or replace the concrete with cardboard (or cardboard derivatives). Back in the early Industrial Revolution nobody particularly cared about safety, there were plenty of bridge failures. We slowly had to evolve systems that corrected these problems but we got there in the end.
Indeed, negligence is a big part of law. Mostly it works on the assumption that the harm-causing party is a big corporation or someone with lots of money. From a broad evolutionary point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Proving guilt and getting to the bottom of things takes a lot of effort, you want to be sure that there will be a pay-off. It's like how creatures might evolve fangs to pierce flesh and get at that juicy meat. Entities that can cause lots of harm tend to have lots of resources.
However, academia gives us cases where there are no clear, direct, short-term links between the cause of harm and the victims. The cause of harm might be a few moderately well off scientists. The harm itself might be hazy, there might be no ironclad proof of the magnitude and exact nature. Think how long it took to prove that cigarettes caused cancer. We had the statistical proof long before the exact causal mechanism was ironed out and the costs of delay were phenomenal. Biology is the most obvious case where this happens. There was another case where Alzheimer's research was thought to be fraudulent, wasting many years and billions of dollars. I say slash and burn, take their money away, give them humiliating tattoos and make them work at McDonalds somewhere far away from all their friends, or worse. Normal criminals couldn't do that much harm in a lifetime.
AI likely falls into the same category, though it can probably be dealt with via more traditional negligence systems since it's mostly advanced by big companies. I am worried that it will take far too long for people to realize the danger posed by AI or those who wield them, there isn't enough time to develop seriousness.
Anyway, I think it would be wise to develop ways to target and severely punish biologists who fraudulently or negligently allow harm (perhaps also praising and granting boons to those who uncover their fraud). This would be a positive incentive for singularitarian scenarios and virtuous in itself. We need to get out of the mindset of waiting for our market-Darwinist-legal system to fix things and attack problems pre-emptively. Or at least with a minimum of megadeaths.
Remember the scientists convicted of manslaughter for earthquake predictions? If you severely punish scientists for harming someone, you're going to get tons of cases like this. A lot of scientists don't have political connections and therefore are easy scapegoats. Don't think "well, we could have been able to catch these scientists who really were responsible for lives" but rather "what else would we be enabling, by making it easier to catch these scientists?" (Yes, they were exonerated later, but the point still stands.)
Also, pretty much anything you do on a large scale involves lives. Approve a drug a little late and lives are lost if people couldn't get the drug. Approve a drug a little early and lives may be lost to side effects or displacing better drugs from the market. Support cars that run on fossil fuels and get dinged for all the lives lost to pollution or global warming. If you punish scientists for things that they do on a large scale that cost lives, you will no longer have scientists, because everything on that scale costs lives if you do it wrong and no human is 100% perfect.
Human wisdom is surely capable of distinguishing between imperfection, negligence and fraud.
For instance - software is released that's buggy = imperfection. Crowdstrike bricks tens of millions of computers = negligence.
No it isn't. That's why I gave that example.
There's also the question of malicious actors. You not only need the ability to distinguish between those, you need the ability to distinguish between those when faced by a hostile actor who is deliberately blurring them. You may know what negligence is, but if some politician looking for a scapegoat pointed to imperfection and said "that's negligence", would you be able to prove the politician wrong?
Well if human wisdom is so hard to find, why don't we torch the whole legal system? It has been misused by bad actors from time to time, I think we could both find examples of this.
The cost of not having a legal system (anarchy) is greater than the cost of having a legal system. I suspect that the cost of introducing more rigour to high-impact academic research would be much less than the anarchy we have today and its associated megadeaths.
There are systems in place that prevent politicians from calling each other foreign traitors, paedophiles and fraudsters and then having everyone credulously believe them, guaranteeing their victory. Human wisdom is first and foremost amongst them.
As a lawyer, much of it is in need of torching, or at least disassembly and reconstruction.
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The "system" that prevents this is the "everyone" part. A politician who calls a scientist a fraudster under your system doesn't have to convince everyone--he just needs to convince the police and a judge.
If you can convince the police and the judge, you can already have someone whisked off to prison or shot dead.
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Everything also costs lives if you do it right. We just try to balance the net costs and benefits of things and try as best we can to figure out which option gets us in the green.
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