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Jul

2011

Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong) | Magazine

When scientists violate moral taboos, we expect horrific consequences. It’s a trope in our storytelling that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: However well-intentioned our fictional scientists may be, their disregard for ethical boundaries will produce not a peer-reviewed paper in Science but rather a new race of subhuman killers, a sucking wormhole in space-time, or a profusion of malevolent goo.

In the real world, though, matters aren’t so simple. Most scientists will assure you that ethical rules never hinder good research—that there’s always a virtuous path to testing any important hypothesis. But ask them in private, perhaps after a drink or three, and they’ll confess that the dark side does have its appeal. Bend the rules and some of our deepest scientific conundrums could be elucidated or even resolved: nature versus nurture, the causes of mental illness, even the mystery of how humans evolved from monkeys. These discoveries are just sitting out there, waiting for us to find them, if only we were willing to lose our souls.

What follows are seven creepy experiments—thought experiments, really—that show how contemporary science might advance if it were to toss away the moral compass that guides it. Don’t try these at home—or anywhere, for that matter. But also don’t pretend you wouldn’t like to learn the secrets that these experiments would reveal.

www.wired.com/...1

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Experiment Research Ethics

Mar

2011

Science-Based Medicine » Skepticism versus nihilism about cancer and science-based medicine

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=11185

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Science Medicine Evidence Experiment

I’m a John Ioannidis convert, and I accept that there is a lot of medical literature that is erroneous. (Just search for Dr. Ioannidis’ last name on this blog, and you’ll find copious posts praising him and discussing his work.) In fact, as I’ve pointed out, most medical researchers instinctively know that most new scientific findings will not hold up to scrutiny, which is why we rarely accept the results of a single study, except in unusual circumstances, as being enough to change practice. I also have pointed out many times that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Replication is key to verification of scientific findings, and more often than not provocative scientific findings are not replicated. Does that mean they shouldn’t be published?
As for pseudoscience, I’m half tempted to agree with Dr. Spector, but just not in the way he thinks. Unfortunately, over the last 20 years or so, there has been an increasing amount of pseudoscience in the medical literature in the form of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) studies of highly improbable remedies or even virtually impossible ones (i.e., homeopathy). However, that does not appear to be what Dr. Spector is talking about, which is why I looked up his references. The second reference is to an SI article from 2009 entitled Science and Pseudoscience in Adult Nutrition Research and Practice. There, and only there, did I find out just what it is that Dr. Spector apparently means by “pseudoscience”:

By pseudoscience, I mean the use of inappropriate methods that frequently yield wrong or misleading answers for the type of question asked. In nutrition research, such methods also often misuse statistical evaluations.
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- Dr. Spector doesn’t really know the difference between inadequately rigorous science and pseudoscience! Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that it’s not always easy to distinguish science from pseudoscience, especially at the fringes, but in general bad science has to go a lot further than Dr. Spector thinks to merit the the term “pseudoscience.” It is clear (to me, at least) from his articles that Dr. Spector throws around the term “pseudoscience” around rather more loosely than he should, using it as a pejorative for any clinical science less rigorous than a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that meets FDA standards for approval of a drug (his pharma background coming to the fore, no doubt). Pseudoscience, Dr. Spector. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Indeed, I almost get the impression from his articles that Dr. Spector views any study that doesn’t reach FDA-level standards for drug approval to be pseudoscience.
- Medical science, when it works well, tends to progress from basic science, to small pilot studies, to larger randomized studies, and then–only then–to those big, rigorous, insanely expensive randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. Dr. Spector mentions hierarchies of evidence, but he seems to fall into a false dichotomy, namely that if it’s not Level I evidence, it’s crap. The problem is, as Mark pointed out, in medicine we often don’t have Level I evidence for many questions. Indeed, for some questions, we will never have Level I evidence. Clinical medicine involves making decisions in the midst of uncertainty, sometimes extreme uncertainty.
- Dr. Spector then proceeds to paint a picture of reckless physicians proceeding on crappy studies to pump women full of hormones. Actually, it was more than a bit more complicated on than that. That was the time when I was in my medical training, and I remember the discussions we had regarding the strength (or lack thereof) of the epidemiological data and the lack of good RCTs looking at HRT. I also remember that nothing works as well to relieve menopausal symptoms as HRT, an observation we have been reminded of again since 2003, which is the year when the first big study came out implicating HRT in increasing the risk of breast cancer (more later).
- I found a rather fascinating editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine from more than 20 years ago that discussed the state of the evidence back then with regard to estrogen and breast cancer:
  
  Evidence that estrogen increases the risk of breast cancer has been surprisingly difficult to obtain. Clinical and epidemiologic studies and studies in animals strongly suggest that endogenous estrogen plays a part in causing breast cancer. If so, exogenous estrogen should be a potent promoter of breast cancer. Although more than 20 case–control and prospective studies of the relation of breast cancer and noncontraceptive estrogen use have failed to demonstrate the expected association, relatively few women in these studies used estrogen for extended periods. Studies of the use of diethylstilbestrol and oral contraceptives suggest that a long exposure or latency may be necessary to show any association between hormone use and breast cancer. In the Swedish study, only six years of follow-up was needed to demonstrate an increased risk of breast cancer with the postmenopausal use of estradiol. It should be noted, however, that half the women in the subgroup that provided detailed data on the duration of hormone use had taken estrogen for many years before their base-line prescription status was defined. The duration of estrogen exposure in these women before the diagnosis of breast cancer was probably seriously underestimated; a short latency cannot be attributed to estradiol on the basis of these data. Other recent studies of the use of noncontraceptive estrogen suggest a slightly increased risk of breast cancer after 15 to 20 years’ use.
- even now, the evidence is conflicting regarding HRT and breast cancer, with the preponderance of evidence suggesting that mixed HRT (estrogen and progestin) significantly increases the risk of breast cancer, while estrogen-alone HRT very well might not increase the risk of breast cancer at all or (more likely) only very little. Indeed, I was just at a conference all day Saturday where data demonstrating this very point were discussed by one of the speakers. None of this stops Dr. Spector from categorically labeling estrogen as a “carcinogen that causes breast cancers that kill women.” Maybe. Maybe not. It’s actually not that clear. The problem, of course, is that, consistent with the first primary reports of WHI results, the preponderance of evidence finding health risks due to HRT have indicted the combined progestin/estrogen combinations as unsafe.

Feb

2011

Rationally Speaking: Studying folk morality: philosophy, psychology, or what?

My colleague Joshua Knobe at Yale University recently published an intriguing article in The Philosopher’s Magazine about the experimental philosophy of moral decision making. Joshua and I have had a nice chat during a recent Rationally Speaking podcast dedicated to experimental philosophy, but I’m still not convinced about the whole enterprise.

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...-folk-morality-philosophy.html

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Experiment Philosophy Inter-disciplinary Demarcation

in the magazine article Joshua mentions several studies of “folk morality,” i.e. of how ordinary people think about moral problems. The results are fascinating. It turns out that people’s views are correlated with personality traits, with subjects who score high on “openness to experience” being reliably more relativists than objectivists about morality (I am not using the latter term in the infamous Randyan meaning here, but as Knobe does, to indicate the idea that morality has objective bases).
Other studies show that people who are capable of considering multiple options in solving mathematical puzzles also tend to be moral relativists, and — in a study co-authored by Knobe himself — the very same situation (infanticide) was judged along a sliding scale from objectivism to relativism depending on whether the hypothetical scenario involved a fellow American (presumably sharing our same general moral values), the member of an imaginary Amazonian tribe (for which infanticide was acceptable), and an alien from the planet Pentar (belonging to a race whose only goal in life is to turn everything into equilateral pentagons, and killing individuals that might get in the way of that lofty objective is a duty). Oh, and related research also shows that young children tend to be objectivists, while young adults are usually relativists — but that later in life one’s primordial objectivism apparently experiences a comeback.
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- This is all very interesting social science, but is it philosophy? Granted, the differences between various disciplines are often not clear cut, and of course whenever people engage in truly inter-disciplinary work we should simply applaud the effort and encourage further work. But I do wonder in what sense, if any, the kinds of results that Joshua and his colleagues find have much to do with moral philosophy.
- there seems to me the potential danger of confusing various categories of moral discourse. For instance, are the “folks” studied in these cases actually relativist, or perhaps adherents to one of several versions of moral anti-realism? The two are definitely not the same, but I doubt that the subjects in question could tell the difference (and I wouldn’t expect them to, after all they are not philosophers).
- why do we expect philosophers to learn from “folk morality” when we do not expect, say, physicists to learn from folk physics (which tends to be Aristotelian in nature), or statisticians from people’s understanding of probability theory (which is generally remarkably poor, as casino owners know very well)? Or even, while I’m at it, why not ask literary critics to discuss Shakespeare in light of what common folks think about the bard (making sure, perhaps, that they have at least read his works, and not just watched the movies)?
- Hence, my other examples of stat (i.e., math) and literary criticism. I conceive of philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular, as more akin to a (science-informed, to be sure) mix between logic and criticism. Some moral philosophy consists in engaging an “if ... then” sort of scenario, akin to logical-mathematical thinking, where one begins with certain axioms and attempts to derive the consequences of such axioms. In other respects, moral philosophers exercise reflective criticism concerning those consequences as they might be relevant to practical problems.
- For instance, we may write philosophically about abortion, and begin our discussion from a comparison of different conceptions of “person.” We might conclude that “if” one adopts conception X of what a person is, “then” abortion is justifiable under such and such conditions; while “if” one adopts conception Y of a person, “then” abortion is justifiable under a different set of conditions, or not justifiable at all. We could, of course, back up even further and engage in a discussion of what “personhood” is, thus moving from moral philosophy to metaphysics.
- Nowhere in the above are we going to ask “folks” what they think a person is, or how they think their implicit conception of personhood informs their views on abortion. Of course people’s actual views on abortion are crucial — especially for public policy — and they are intrinsically interesting to social scientists. But they don’t seem to me to make much more contact with philosophy than the above mentioned popular opinions on Shakespeare make contact with serious literary criticism. And please, let’s not play the cheap card of “elitism,” unless we are willing to apply the label to just about any intellectual endeavor, in any discipline.
- There is one area in which experimental philosophy can potentially contribute to philosophy proper (as opposed to social science). Once we have a more empirically grounded understanding of what people’s moral reasoning actually is, then we can analyze the likely consequences of that reasoning for a variety of societal issues. But now we would be doing something more akin to political than moral philosophy.