Thank you so much for taking the time to read my article! I truly appreciate it. Above all, I must thank you for your insightful question and comments. I will try to address them to the best of my ability and I will try to address the specific examples you have provided. Thank you for making me think as well.
Do the ends justify the means?
I think the problem of “ends justifying the means” can be dealt with by having a sufficiently super-ordinate system of operation where the maintenance of that system of operation is the ultimate end — the most valuable end, such that the “means” and the “end” are one and the same. Such that the maintenance of this process makes certain “ends” completely unattainable or undesirable.
It brings us to this incredibly uncomfortable situation of having to decide what we should value most above all, sacrificing everything else.
Do we value human lives more than freedom? Plenty of Nazis, human beings, were killed during WWII.
Do we value human lives more than the lives of lab rats or other animals? Discoveries made because of experiments conducted on rats have saved millions of lives.
In the case of the cold war : Do we value being right about our particular system of government more than the world existing?(i.e If we can’t win, we should destroy the playing field).
What should we not do even though we can do it?
Given that we do not have infinite resources, what do we put at the top of the Christmas tree ?
I think we have largely been trying to answer these questions of value over the years with varying degrees of success. For example, in the soviet union we tried putting equality of outcome near the top and it ended very badly. The Nazi’s put purity of race near the top and that ended very badly too. The west ( and other countries like Hong Kong) put free and open trade near the top, buttressed by all the necessary values to enable such policy, and that worked out rather well. It’s also important to consider that it might not necessarily be the case these values were in and of themselves “better”. It might have been that they are abstractions off of a deeper value that, when prioritized, generates better outcomes for everyone. For example, for free and open trade to work , the community as a whole has to be okay with the idea of competition — winning and losing honorably.
Your point hits at the core of what I think is the deeper problem (correct me if I’m wrong) : how do we decide what we value? I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that question but I will endeavor to find out.
Nazis and Scientists
In my opinion, comparing scientific research to nazi experiments is not fair. In that statement is the presupposition that Nazi experiments were indeed in the name of “truth”. While it is possible that there is a certain subset of scientists that enjoy inflicting suffering on animals I’d say it’s very, very, very tiny minority where as it’s not as easy to say so about Nazis that ran cruel “experiments”. Lab mice have been used for experiments as analogues to humans since the 16th century. Why did the Nazi’s use humans?
We have to think : What do we define as an experiment?
There are many underlying presuppositions that are involved in what we consider experiments. For example, I’m not sure about the exact procedure but as I understand it, taking anything to clinical human trials is a tremendously long, careful and expensive process. Couched in that arduous process is the idea that there is something intrinsically valuable about a human life such that we do not get to test on humans before we show promise in a culture or animal model (i.e we value human life more than the life of a mouse).
In the case of Nazis in general and Hitler in particular, it’s safe to say that they essentially treated human beings worse than most scientists treat lab mice. I believe the entire process of “experiments” was corrupt in the sense that what they were aiming at was something terrible, based on values that were murderous. It moved the needle towards torture and away from experiment in a feedback loop that spiraled out of control.
I’d say that encapsulated in the word “experiment” , as you and I mean it, is a certain specific aim driven by specific values. It’s a very thin line between experiment and torture and I think the line is drawn by the values we hold. I’d caution against assuming that Nazi torture was aimed at finding the truth about anything. You must consider the entire process of acquiring their “test subjects”. From being dragged out of their homes, packed into train carriages like sardines in a can, hauled across the country in sub-zero temperatures, housed in their own feces to finally being put on an operating table. That entire process, from home to table, is rife with deceit especially at the individual level to him or herself. I fail to see the search for truth in any of that.
On citations and Corruption
I agree with you on the point of group-think, careerism and politicized research results in western academia. I am not making the claim that this phenomenon is specific to eastern countries. However, I do disagree with your claim that the countries in yellow are every bit as corrupt as ones in the red. To highlight the point, I’ve shown an image of the countries that receive the vast percentage of foreign aid. These countries fail to show development year after year. Why?
While I do recognize the limitations in the CPI, looking at the regions with most retracted papers, corruption perception index and the scientific excellence map show a fairly convincing image wouldn’t you say? If you look at a map of GDP it would be fairly similar as well.
To me it appears that number of citations is an indication to the degree to which the paper and research in question was useful to other researchers in that area. I’d say this is a fairly good indicator of the quality (which includes relevance) of the research being conducted. It is however predicated on the idea that the people who are citing the articles in turn are being honest in their analyses and not propagating clearly falsified research to further their own twisted goals which may happen occasionally but I’d say not enough to the point of racking up thousands of citations.
In my article I’ve used the best publication ranking showing the probability that a paper will be published in a reputable journal in the images provided. I do recognize that there are lot of factors that go into the selection of articles to be published but I see being able to trust that the researchers have done their due diligence is a big part of it. In certain regions of the world, it has become the case that science is a means to an end , as you stated and not the “end” in itself. I think it would be better to think of science as not so much a tool but a way of being and thinking which I believe is characterized and mythologized by the hero. I think we are all guilty of teaching the “how” of science without teaching the “why”.
