This was exactly what I expected. The problem with the field of bioethics has never been the papers being 100% awful, but how it operates in the real world, the asymmetry of interventions, and what its most consequential effects have been. I would have thought 2020 made this painfully clear. (That is, my grandmother did not die of coronavirus while multiple highly-safe & highly-effective vaccines sat on the shelf unused, simply because some bioethicist screwed up a p-value in a paper somewhere. If only!)
The actual day-to-day churn of publishing bioethics papers/research… Well, HHGttG said it best in describing humans in general:
This was exactly what I expected. The problem with the field of bioethics has never been the papers being 100% awful, but how it operates in the real world, the asymmetry of interventions, and what its most consequential effects have been. I would have thought 2020 made this painfully clear. (That is, my grandmother did not die of coronavirus while multiple highly-safe & highly-effective vaccines sat on the shelf unused, simply because some bioethicist screwed up a p-value in a paper somewhere. If only!)
The actual day-to-day churn of publishing bioethics papers/research… Well, HHGttG said it best in describing humans in general: