On the other hand, I think much medical progress is stalled by too high safety standards. I don’t want to get into a political discussion here, but am interested in what this says about the general point.
I think it’s mostly just that bad treatments aren’t locked in forever, and good treatments have a lot of upside; but if you destroy the world then that’s that.
I think safety standards (in the sense of preventing experiments from being ran on the basis of potential adverse effects) are very different from scientific research standards. The first wants to limit bad effects of the act of research, the second wants to ensure the things you learn and communicate actually approximate truth.
If you run a study with bad methodology, your conclusions are unreliable, and no amount of arguing tradeoffs will make them reliable
On the other hand, I think much medical progress is stalled by too high safety standards. I don’t want to get into a political discussion here, but am interested in what this says about the general point.
I think it’s mostly just that bad treatments aren’t locked in forever, and good treatments have a lot of upside; but if you destroy the world then that’s that.
I think safety standards (in the sense of preventing experiments from being ran on the basis of potential adverse effects) are very different from scientific research standards. The first wants to limit bad effects of the act of research, the second wants to ensure the things you learn and communicate actually approximate truth.
If you run a study with bad methodology, your conclusions are unreliable, and no amount of arguing tradeoffs will make them reliable