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’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.)