• ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I once had a chemistry professor who used to work as a senior drug researcher at a major pharmaceutical company. He often joked about how the company treated the monkeys used for testing far better than the PhDs. If a monkey suffered a negative reaction there was a major investigation. I’m incredibly surprised Musk can be killing monkeys left and right and hasn’t been thrown in jail.

  • DrVortex@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    You are confusing taking a class with actually having ethics. No amount of attending a lecture about ethics will convince you if you do not, as a basic premise agree with the ethical principle that loss of life is a bad thing. And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Classes don’t solve the problem entirely, but they’re a start and without them in this case a company so large and powerful that it has a space program and foreign policy planks is being guided by nothing but the intuition of someone who grew up spending money earned by child slaves and who thinks that scuttling an army’s mission in-progress is pacifism

  • mommykink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I went to a major medical university and studied humanities. The amount of soon-to-be doctors and nurses complaining about why they needed to study things like ethics, philosophy, or history astounded me, it’s like these people didn’t want to deal with the human aspect of medicine and instead just wanted to make money.

    I wouldn’t be shocked if more medschool students dropped out from the humanities courses than the medical ones, they hated it

      • Siv@lemmy.praxis.red
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        1 year ago

        Recognition that animal testing is actually pretty fucked up would be a good start toward funding research into alternatives, such as biological computer simulations.

        We can simulate complex/chaotic systems, like weather, in nearly real-time, so biosim research is mainly a funding and staffing problem at this point.

        Probably we’ll still need animal testing for the final phase before human trials, but we can at least reduce the need for it to bare minimums.

    • Lt_Cdr_Data@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I absolutely would. I’d not line up to be among the first, but controlling devices via a brain interface is an inevitable step of technological evolution.

      It will provide such an immense performance boost, that many professions may become unattainable without having one. Possibly within our lifetime.

  • Floey@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I personally enjoy ethics as a subject, but has it been shown that studying ethics in uni actually leads to people behaving more ethically? I agree that ethics should be applied to science, but science should also be applied to ethics to determine the effective approach.

    • rjs001@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Not really possible to be scientific in that regard because of the fact that it wouldn’t be possible to quantify “behaving ethically” and there isn’t really a way to determine that in an objective manner

  • TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com
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    1 year ago

    Because then you’ll be able to dismiss the ethics while being aware of the implications of your research.

    Disregarding the ethics while not knowing them grants you no extra points, whilst deliberately ignoring the ethical ramifications but understanding them gets you all the points

  • SwampYankee@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Funny story, the only ethics required in my engineering degree was a 2-day unit on our professional code of ethics. We had a 20-question true/false homework on it, and the thing about a professional code of ethics is it’s not super intuitive. Most of the class thought they could gut feel their way through it, but you actually had to read the code because the wording was very specific sometimes. When it turned out that everyone failed the homework, the professor let us try again.

    Ethics!