I really appreciate you replying to this, and I read (I think) all of your blog posts on IRBs, and they are all to the best of my knowledge informative and accurate. My point is much more just that “bioethicists” seem to be a bad way of framing a bunch of these issues. As for:
I think this is correct, but I still think it can be useful to try to get along, all else equal. As I briefly mentioned, it is possible that if bioethicists had better priorities they could make some indirect difference at least, and this is probably the best criticism of the field as it is now. Aside from this, I guess I just also don’t like it when a group gets what I see as unfair criticism, even if it doesn’t backfire. I focused more on that issue in the first draft, but wound up cutting it for brevity.
War is maybe a bit of a dramatic word for it, but I guess what I more mean is if it comes down to a very public “it’s us or them” between EAs and bioethicists on important issues, I see the EAs losing. If the public largely agreed about the foibles of bioethicists it would be another story, but our group is weird in both our priorities, and our apparent vitriol against “bioethicists”.
Glad you didn’t see any factual error in the posts!
#1, Yeah, you’re totally right that “bioethicists” is the wrong target. Will try to use “institutionalized research ethics” going forward. It is much more explicit about what the problem is and more fair to bioethicists.
re #2, sort of agreed. I tend to think the public doesn’t like weird ideas in general, but there was a recent paper showing higher public support for challenge trials than traditional trials. So I’m not sure what counts as weird to the public as a whole. It might be the case that the public has surprisingly EA-ish ideas on medical ethics, at least on this specific issue. Not sure.
I hope the public is generally receptive to EA-style thinking, and there is some indication of it at least. I do still worry that when it comes to appeal-to-authority type reasoning, the public will find “bioethicists” more trustworthy, even if they are relatively disposed to agreeing with our ideas. I could be wrong on that, it is a fairly speculative harm.
I really appreciate you replying to this, and I read (I think) all of your blog posts on IRBs, and they are all to the best of my knowledge informative and accurate. My point is much more just that “bioethicists” seem to be a bad way of framing a bunch of these issues. As for:
I think this is correct, but I still think it can be useful to try to get along, all else equal. As I briefly mentioned, it is possible that if bioethicists had better priorities they could make some indirect difference at least, and this is probably the best criticism of the field as it is now. Aside from this, I guess I just also don’t like it when a group gets what I see as unfair criticism, even if it doesn’t backfire. I focused more on that issue in the first draft, but wound up cutting it for brevity.
War is maybe a bit of a dramatic word for it, but I guess what I more mean is if it comes down to a very public “it’s us or them” between EAs and bioethicists on important issues, I see the EAs losing. If the public largely agreed about the foibles of bioethicists it would be another story, but our group is weird in both our priorities, and our apparent vitriol against “bioethicists”.
Glad you didn’t see any factual error in the posts!
#1, Yeah, you’re totally right that “bioethicists” is the wrong target. Will try to use “institutionalized research ethics” going forward. It is much more explicit about what the problem is and more fair to bioethicists.
re #2, sort of agreed. I tend to think the public doesn’t like weird ideas in general, but there was a recent paper showing higher public support for challenge trials than traditional trials. So I’m not sure what counts as weird to the public as a whole. It might be the case that the public has surprisingly EA-ish ideas on medical ethics, at least on this specific issue. Not sure.
I appreciate it!
I hope the public is generally receptive to EA-style thinking, and there is some indication of it at least. I do still worry that when it comes to appeal-to-authority type reasoning, the public will find “bioethicists” more trustworthy, even if they are relatively disposed to agreeing with our ideas. I could be wrong on that, it is a fairly speculative harm.