Experimental ethics and observational data
April 14, 2011 — February 11, 2022
communicating
mind
probability
statistics
Suspiciously similar content
Challenge trials, ethics approvals, and surveillance.
1 Overt experimental ethics
TBD
2 Pub test experimental ethics
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics:
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.
3 Observational data and surveillance
- OMFG Exogenous Variation! Or, Can You Find Good Nails When You Find an Indonesian Politics Hammer and
- Cosma Shalizi’s Review of Ashworth, Berry, and Bruno de Mesquita, Theory and Credibility.
- interaction effects are probably what we want to know
- Everything Is Correlated
- Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation
4 Incoming
- COVID Challenge trial (Killingley et al. 2022)
- I got dysentery so you don’t have to | Eukaryote Writes Blog
Knit these together with observational data to argue that experimental ethics imply the demand for a pervasive surveillance state.
5 References
Athey. 2017. “Beyond Prediction: Using Big Data for Policy Problems.” Science.
Cooper, and Abrams. 2021. “Emergent Unfairness in Algorithmic Fairness-Accuracy Trade-Off Research.” In Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
Dreger. 2015. Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science.
Killingley, Mann, Kalinova, et al. 2022. “Safety, Tolerability and Viral Kinetics During SARS-CoV-2 Human Challenge.”