So far, the adverse impact of scientific research has mostly been through enabling the construction of more powerful weapons and information-processing tools for states to use in war and similar enterprises. There’s no neutral “we” to assess liability here, only the powerful actors responsible for causing the direct harms in the first place! Asking states to assign themselves yet more power by prospectively punishing scientists for thinking, without assigning some corresponding risk to the state actors or opinion-generators coming up with such proposals, doesn’t seem like it could plausibly improve the relative assignment of risk and power.
What additional personal risk is Owen taking on by (implicitly) arguing for increased central control of idea-propagation, beyond that borne by innocent bystanders? This is a proposal that has already worked out very poorly for very many people in the past.
I’m not saying Owen should under current circumstances bear that risk, but I am saying that any such assignment of risk needs to be in the context of a systematic and symmetrical evaluation of risks rather than ad-hoc, if we want to have any reasonable hope that it’s more helpful than harmful.
So far, the adverse impact of scientific research has mostly been through enabling the construction of more powerful weapons and information-processing tools for states to use in war and similar enterprises. There’s no neutral “we” to assess liability here, only the powerful actors responsible for causing the direct harms in the first place! Asking states to assign themselves yet more power by prospectively punishing scientists for thinking, without assigning some corresponding risk to the state actors or opinion-generators coming up with such proposals, doesn’t seem like it could plausibly improve the relative assignment of risk and power.
What additional personal risk is Owen taking on by (implicitly) arguing for increased central control of idea-propagation, beyond that borne by innocent bystanders? This is a proposal that has already worked out very poorly for very many people in the past.
I’m not saying Owen should under current circumstances bear that risk, but I am saying that any such assignment of risk needs to be in the context of a systematic and symmetrical evaluation of risks rather than ad-hoc, if we want to have any reasonable hope that it’s more helpful than harmful.