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:
I expected to find them mostly trash. I updated strongly in two ways: 1. A surprising proportion seemed like a reasonable use of time (as a topic to investigate or seek improvements in. Maybe 1⁄4) 2. Of that 1⁄4, a few seem high impact enough that it’s worth the other 75% being crap.
I’m sort of surprised other people are surprised that bioethics is not uniformly trash. (This includes people on Facebook and elsewhere where this has come up.)
I know that bioethics has a terrible reputation around these parts and also know there do in fact exist lots of terrible bioethics takes (e.g. I want to personally fight the author of paper #31), but even though I had not previously actually looked at a sample of bioethics papers, I somewhat strongly suspected that rationalists who railed against bioethics were overgeneralizing.* It’s not impossible for an academic field to have such bad epistemic standards and Overton windows for that generalization to be accurate, and obviously the bioethics Overton window is different from the rationalist Overton window (and I mostly prefer the latter), but “these terrible takes are within the bioethics Overton window” is not very strong evidence for “these terrible takes are representative of bioethics as a whole”, and I would have been moderately surprised if it had turned out that all or even most of the takes were that flavor of terrible.
(Unfortunately I did not register this prior anywhere; I mostly did not try to argue with people about it because I had not actually looked at enough bioethics to be well informed about it or have strong arguments to make. I realize it’s kind of bad form for me to be like “I predicted this!!” when I did not say that anywhere, sorry. I don’t really want people to update on my correctness from this, anyway, my point is mostly that I think local discourse on this topic has been too unnuanced.)
*For that matter, sometimes people saying such things even agree when pressed that they’re overgeneralizing; there’s a sort of motte-and-bailey that I’ve seen (with both this and other examples) that’s like “bioethicists suck” “not all bioethicists” “well of course I don’t mean ALL, I mean too many”. But apparently a community in which people generalize about bioethicists in this way is also a community in which people are surprised when a sample of bioethics papers is not uniformly trash?
(I guess that part might be kind of unfair of me since possibly the people who agreed they were overgeneralizing would have expected something like 80% of papers to be very terrible, in which case it’s both true that they’re overgeneralizing and that this actual sample is a notable update.)
I had an interesting emotional experience of a sense of relief: after getting used to so many shouting-matches about controversial topics on social media, I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to witness a community of people actually doing careful and nuanced ethical thinking. “Had my faith in humanity restored” is a bit of a silly cliché but for a moment it did feel like that.
It looks like the average academic bioethicist is ok (with high variance), and is not having much effect outside academia.
Like lawyers, the bioethicists we hear about the most are the ones defending the least ethical clients.
Are the less conspicuous bioethicists doing the equivalent of mundane, mildly beneficial lawyers who write contracts? Or are they mostly engaged in intellectual masturbation?
I’m unclear on why I’d hire a bioethicist unless I was trying to defend behavior that looks unethical. Which suggests that there isn’t much demand for bioethicists to do constructive things.
I’m unclear on why I’d hire a bioethicist unless I was trying to defend behavior that looks unethical. Which suggests that there isn’t much demand for bioethicists to do constructive things.
From the LessWrong perspective most of the complaints about bioethics seems to be about them standing the the way of research. If you could hire a bioethicist to green-light your vaccine challenge study it seems to me like the bioethicist would do constructive work.
The idea is that people hire bioethicists because they are rent seeking and have pushed for certain decisions to require input of bioethicists.
These papers were mostly unoffensive and not that terrible in contrast to expectations. At the same time, I do not get any impression of relevant expertise either such that I feel good about this group being in a privileged position regarding any kind of ethics decision. They aren’t bad, just… not good enough.
I do notice (from comparing to the circa 2000 batch of papers) that value drift makes older papers seem much much worse than they would’ve seemed at the time. I expect 80s or 90s era papers would produce the kind of revulsion many folks were expecting.
At the same time, I do not get any impression of relevant expertise either such that I feel good about this group being in a privileged position regarding any kind of ethics decision.
Yeah, that’s pretty on the nose. Even suppose you trust your philosophers and ethicists work through the merits of all the possible ethics frameworks we could use. Let them pick the best one, specify how different utilities should be framed; they’d still never be the right people to implement it in any specific decision. Real world ethics problems are still 95% other problem domains and 5% ethics.
The interview does beg more questions than it answers though. Obviously consequentialist ethics have some traction among philosophy experts. Is bioethics different for some reason? Are the vocal people shouting down these (obviously correct given consequentialist ethics) ideas on twitter and in the news even in any relevant field? Does the consensus of the field, if any, bear any relation to public policy whatsoever, or are experts merely being cherry picked to toe the party line as needed and lend credibility after a decision is made?
I think part of the explanation is ‘most consequentialists in professional philosophy dislike utilitarianism’ and ‘there are lots of deontologists too (in general, somewhat more deontologists than consequentialists)’.
You’re right again I think. As far as dislike of utilitarianism not entirely without cause in some cases; while “make ethics math” is a really good idea it seems surpisingly difficult to formalize without wierd artifacts—as a not insubstantial volume of posts on this site can attest. I imagine at least some of that resistance goes away as soon as someone perfects a formalism that doesn’t occasionally suggest outlandish behavior and has all the properties we want.
Speaking specifically to the difference between the newer and older batch of papers. Neither are good. In my admitedly breif skim, the older ones have an extra layer of dissonance for the same reason 20 year old TV and movies can come across as unexpectedly cringey.
I’m struck by how different people have such different responses to the list. Kaj felt like zir faith in humanity was restored; I rolled my eyes really hard and may have sighed or groaned. This caused me to moderately update in the direction of “I was being uncharitable”.
2 - philosophy of religion; loud angry Twitter arguments
1 - Scientology propaganda
First, some people may have higher expectations than others. Maybe (making up numbers) Kaj and you both now think bioethics is a 5, but previously Kaj expected it to be a 4 while you expected it to be a 5, so he comes away with a happy surprise while you come away exasperated with the social-psych-tier shoddiness.
Second, some people may have higher standards than others. If your standard is ‘better than Twitter’ (say, ‘above 2.5’), then counting up to 5 might feel downright refreshing. If your standard is ‘meeting the bare-minimum level of econoliteracy and quantitativeness to not yield norms and institutions that cause millions of unnecessary COVID-19 deaths or the senseless death and disability of hundreds of infants’, then you’re applying a different test to the papers.
I think there are also different orientations to take here, like ‘bioethics has a job to do; are they getting the job done?’ versus ‘bioethicists are human beings with thoughts and ideas; how interesting do I find the thoughts and ideas?’. I think both frames should be in the mix: even if you come away from this still thinking bioethics is a diseased discipline, seeing the sausage get made makes it clearer how smart, well-intentioned people could end up in a situation like that.
It’s less “othering”; I could imagine friends of mine in philosophy and social science starting a field that ends up causing similar problems in society.
As an aside, I find it bizarre that Economics gets put at 9 - I think a review of what gets done in top econ journals would cause you to update that number down by at least 1. (It’s not usually very bad, but it’s often mostly useless.) And I think it’s clear that lots of Econ does, in fact, have a replication crisis. (But we’ll if see that is true as some of the newer replication projects actually come out with results.)
I guess I was thinking of 9⁄10 as a relatively low bar in the grand scheme of things (“pretty good”), and placing it so far from journalism (etc.) to express my low regard for the latter more so than my high regard for econ. But it sounds like it may belong lower on the scale regardless.
Yeah, I might have spent a bit too much time on Twitter recently so my comparison point was around 2-3.
More specifically, I think I got the reaction while reading abstract #4, comparing commercially-assisted and physician-assisted suicide. What I felt so strongly was the contrast of
1) seeing a paper calmly working through all the relevant facts and concluding that if you think physician-assisted suicide is okay, you should also consider commercially-assisted suicide okay
vs.
2) my mental image of the Twitter mob you might summon if you even considered the possibility that commercially-assisted suicide might be okay
Sounds like we need a social media site where all top-level posts must just be links to papers, and you can only reply to top-level posts, not to other replies. :)
This is a much better response than my comment deserved! I feel embarrassed about the disparity (not your fault; don’t stop leaving great comments just because the OP half-assed it). I think I’m still trying to find the right balance between “volume of comments and posts ~ liveliness of overall discussion” and “bulletproofness of comments and posts ~ quality of overall discussion”.
Interested to hear people’s high-level takeaways (even if they’re only provisional), things that did and didn’t surprise you, etc.
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:
I expected to find them mostly trash. I updated strongly in two ways: 1. A surprising proportion seemed like a reasonable use of time (as a topic to investigate or seek improvements in. Maybe 1⁄4) 2. Of that 1⁄4, a few seem high impact enough that it’s worth the other 75% being crap.
I’m sort of surprised other people are surprised that bioethics is not uniformly trash. (This includes people on Facebook and elsewhere where this has come up.)
I know that bioethics has a terrible reputation around these parts and also know there do in fact exist lots of terrible bioethics takes (e.g. I want to personally fight the author of paper #31), but even though I had not previously actually looked at a sample of bioethics papers, I somewhat strongly suspected that rationalists who railed against bioethics were overgeneralizing.* It’s not impossible for an academic field to have such bad epistemic standards and Overton windows for that generalization to be accurate, and obviously the bioethics Overton window is different from the rationalist Overton window (and I mostly prefer the latter), but “these terrible takes are within the bioethics Overton window” is not very strong evidence for “these terrible takes are representative of bioethics as a whole”, and I would have been moderately surprised if it had turned out that all or even most of the takes were that flavor of terrible.
(Unfortunately I did not register this prior anywhere; I mostly did not try to argue with people about it because I had not actually looked at enough bioethics to be well informed about it or have strong arguments to make. I realize it’s kind of bad form for me to be like “I predicted this!!” when I did not say that anywhere, sorry. I don’t really want people to update on my correctness from this, anyway, my point is mostly that I think local discourse on this topic has been too unnuanced.)
*For that matter, sometimes people saying such things even agree when pressed that they’re overgeneralizing; there’s a sort of motte-and-bailey that I’ve seen (with both this and other examples) that’s like “bioethicists suck” “not all bioethicists” “well of course I don’t mean ALL, I mean too many”. But apparently a community in which people generalize about bioethicists in this way is also a community in which people are surprised when a sample of bioethics papers is not uniformly trash?
(I guess that part might be kind of unfair of me since possibly the people who agreed they were overgeneralizing would have expected something like 80% of papers to be very terrible, in which case it’s both true that they’re overgeneralizing and that this actual sample is a notable update.)
I had an interesting emotional experience of a sense of relief: after getting used to so many shouting-matches about controversial topics on social media, I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to witness a community of people actually doing careful and nuanced ethical thinking. “Had my faith in humanity restored” is a bit of a silly cliché but for a moment it did feel like that.
It looks like the average academic bioethicist is ok (with high variance), and is not having much effect outside academia.
Like lawyers, the bioethicists we hear about the most are the ones defending the least ethical clients.
Are the less conspicuous bioethicists doing the equivalent of mundane, mildly beneficial lawyers who write contracts? Or are they mostly engaged in intellectual masturbation?
I’m unclear on why I’d hire a bioethicist unless I was trying to defend behavior that looks unethical. Which suggests that there isn’t much demand for bioethicists to do constructive things.
From the LessWrong perspective most of the complaints about bioethics seems to be about them standing the the way of research. If you could hire a bioethicist to green-light your vaccine challenge study it seems to me like the bioethicist would do constructive work.
The idea is that people hire bioethicists because they are rent seeking and have pushed for certain decisions to require input of bioethicists.
These papers were mostly unoffensive and not that terrible in contrast to expectations. At the same time, I do not get any impression of relevant expertise either such that I feel good about this group being in a privileged position regarding any kind of ethics decision. They aren’t bad, just… not good enough.
I do notice (from comparing to the circa 2000 batch of papers) that value drift makes older papers seem much much worse than they would’ve seemed at the time. I expect 80s or 90s era papers would produce the kind of revulsion many folks were expecting.
I’ve cross-posted a relevant excerpt from Julia Galef’s Feb. 2021 interview of Matt Yglesias here: Julia Galef and Matt Yglesias on bioethics and “ethics expertise”.
Yeah, that’s pretty on the nose. Even suppose you trust your philosophers and ethicists work through the merits of all the possible ethics frameworks we could use. Let them pick the best one, specify how different utilities should be framed; they’d still never be the right people to implement it in any specific decision. Real world ethics problems are still 95% other problem domains and 5% ethics.
The interview does beg more questions than it answers though. Obviously consequentialist ethics have some traction among philosophy experts. Is bioethics different for some reason? Are the vocal people shouting down these (obviously correct given consequentialist ethics) ideas on twitter and in the news even in any relevant field? Does the consensus of the field, if any, bear any relation to public policy whatsoever, or are experts merely being cherry picked to toe the party line as needed and lend credibility after a decision is made?
I think part of the explanation is ‘most consequentialists in professional philosophy dislike utilitarianism’ and ‘there are lots of deontologists too (in general, somewhat more deontologists than consequentialists)’.
You’re right again I think. As far as dislike of utilitarianism not entirely without cause in some cases; while “make ethics math” is a really good idea it seems surpisingly difficult to formalize without wierd artifacts—as a not insubstantial volume of posts on this site can attest. I imagine at least some of that resistance goes away as soon as someone perfects a formalism that doesn’t occasionally suggest outlandish behavior and has all the properties we want.
I don’t think ‘value drift’ is the explanation for this.
Speaking specifically to the difference between the newer and older batch of papers. Neither are good. In my admitedly breif skim, the older ones have an extra layer of dissonance for the same reason 20 year old TV and movies can come across as unexpectedly cringey.
I’m struck by how different people have such different responses to the list. Kaj felt like zir faith in humanity was restored; I rolled my eyes really hard and may have sighed or groaned. This caused me to moderately update in the direction of “I was being uncharitable”.
There are two sources of variance that make it a bit hard to update on others’ impressions. Imagine a Scholarly Goodness scale like this:
First, some people may have higher expectations than others. Maybe (making up numbers) Kaj and you both now think bioethics is a 5, but previously Kaj expected it to be a 4 while you expected it to be a 5, so he comes away with a happy surprise while you come away exasperated with the social-psych-tier shoddiness.
Second, some people may have higher standards than others. If your standard is ‘better than Twitter’ (say, ‘above 2.5’), then counting up to 5 might feel downright refreshing. If your standard is ‘meeting the bare-minimum level of econoliteracy and quantitativeness to not yield norms and institutions that cause millions of unnecessary COVID-19 deaths or the senseless death and disability of hundreds of infants’, then you’re applying a different test to the papers.
I think there are also different orientations to take here, like ‘bioethics has a job to do; are they getting the job done?’ versus ‘bioethicists are human beings with thoughts and ideas; how interesting do I find the thoughts and ideas?’. I think both frames should be in the mix: even if you come away from this still thinking bioethics is a diseased discipline, seeing the sausage get made makes it clearer how smart, well-intentioned people could end up in a situation like that.
It’s less “othering”; I could imagine friends of mine in philosophy and social science starting a field that ends up causing similar problems in society.
As an aside, I find it bizarre that Economics gets put at 9 - I think a review of what gets done in top econ journals would cause you to update that number down by at least 1. (It’s not usually very bad, but it’s often mostly useless.) And I think it’s clear that lots of Econ does, in fact, have a replication crisis. (But we’ll if see that is true as some of the newer replication projects actually come out with results.)
I guess I was thinking of 9⁄10 as a relatively low bar in the grand scheme of things (“pretty good”), and placing it so far from journalism (etc.) to express my low regard for the latter more so than my high regard for econ. But it sounds like it may belong lower on the scale regardless.
Yeah, I might have spent a bit too much time on Twitter recently so my comparison point was around 2-3.
More specifically, I think I got the reaction while reading abstract #4, comparing commercially-assisted and physician-assisted suicide. What I felt so strongly was the contrast of
1) seeing a paper calmly working through all the relevant facts and concluding that if you think physician-assisted suicide is okay, you should also consider commercially-assisted suicide okay
vs.
2) my mental image of the Twitter mob you might summon if you even considered the possibility that commercially-assisted suicide might be okay
Sounds like we need a social media site where all top-level posts must just be links to papers, and you can only reply to top-level posts, not to other replies. :)
This is a much better response than my comment deserved! I feel embarrassed about the disparity (not your fault; don’t stop leaving great comments just because the OP half-assed it). I think I’m still trying to find the right balance between “volume of comments and posts ~ liveliness of overall discussion” and “bulletproofness of comments and posts ~ quality of overall discussion”.