Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to NBH,
subject to professional sanctions
Ok look you are kind of right but also not. Yes my employer can place restrictions on my behaviour but they only have legal bearing in so much as I can have my employment terminated (subject to labour laws).
Yes my peers can shun me from the journals and choose not to employ me but they cannot prevent anyone from choosing to employ me as a scientist.
And yes the ethics committee can judge whether my planned experiments meet the ethical standards but those standards are either enshrined in the law of the land or in my employers code of conduct and not within some ethical code for scientists.
All that is quite different from the legal or medical profession. In both those cases the professional society has legally enshrined powers to prevent the practice of law (or medicine) by someone they deem to have broken their code of ethics. It is a very special power given to those professions and technically only jobs with such societies should be called professions. But the word has changed it's meaning.
Which is all very interesting but the reality is suggesting that personal morality has no role in law because of the professional code is both daft and something that lawyers insist is important.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
And so how do you explain all those ethics panels at my University?
You should check, but I'm pretty sure their power comes directly from the law. There simply is no code of ethics than has power other than a warm fuzzy feeling. It may be called an ethics committee but what it is actually doing is checking that experiments fit within the legal requirements for harm to animals and humans.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Matthew Poole,
You have a code of ethics
Actually we don't. Unlike the law (and medical) profession, scientists have no (royally decreed) professional society. No lawyer can practice law without being part of that society that restricts behaviours. The same is not true of most other jobs, for most jobs the "code of ethics" is the law.
There simply is no "code of ethics" for scientists that has any strength other than in the individual morality of the scientists themselves. I am moral because I am moral not because of any "code".
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to BenWilson,
The inaction is around what the hell should be done about it, if anything. ... I’m not even convinced there is a scientific consensus around questions toward the more practical end of the debate. You seem to be considerably more open to the prospect of technological solutions than others are, for instance.
There are a couple of interesting issues here. The first is that while there is not as much action as we'd like there is indeed a huge amount of action going on. The push to develop non-polluting energy sources has increased immensely since the recognition that CO2 is affecting the climate. Advances in solar/wind/tide etc generation of electricity has allowed major gains in efficiency - not to the level where they are as cheap as burning coal but an order of magnitude closer than they were a decade ago. Similar gains in the efficiency of transport are happening.
What is not happening is the reduction in fossil fuel use we think we need - because at the moment that would have economic and political costs that the people in power are not willing to pay (worldwide).
As you say I'm technologically bullish. Not because I believe technological solutions are risk-free but because the other solutions are not likely to happen until the shit really hits the fan (too late). I base that belief on observations around other crises that affect the world.
For example everyone knows we produce enough food for everyone on the planet to eat adequately - yet people starve. The solution proposed by many for centuries now has been to change distribution of food. Yet for centuries there has been no change in distribution. Therefore that solution will not work and an alternative solution needs to be tried.
I don't believe the people in power will give up economic and political power simply to save the planet, they never have in the past and I cannot see any indication the population will change the people in power to choose ones who are willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the planet in the future.
From that (deeply cynical) perspective the only viable solution is a technological solution that sidesteps the need for those in power to behave responsibly.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Matthew Poole,
start of a slope
ooo a slippery slope argument.
You know as a scientist I'm also bound by laws, if, like a lawyer, I assumed that anything not prevented by law was just hunky dory then there are a whole bunch of things I could do (legally) that would be morally indefensible.
I realise that lawyers are taught by other lawyers to believe that they should consider themselves simple tools of the law and not act as if they are human beings at all, but frankly I find that stance ridiculous.
And to return to the topic at hand if a lawyer finds themselves attacking the freedom of genuine investigative journalism by sending a bullying letter with no real substance to it, then again frankly, I'd have to wonder about the morality of that particular lawyer. And there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the letter was intended to intimidate the journalists into silence.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
The law is a tool box, and a lawyer uses the tool that is needed to get the relevant job done.
I do understand your point, but it does sound a lot like saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
A parallel argument could be made in my profession that scientists should be allowed to research anything without regard to society or safety. I don't think such an argument is reasonable for scientists and I'm not certain it should stand for lawyers either.
Sorry way off-topic.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m suggesting a framework to make that much easier.
From personal experience in other debates (GMOs) there is not much point in spending your effort on the people who are ideologically opposed (equivalent to the deniers).
In order to change their minds you'd have to break their whole ideological framework - something that is difficult, tiring and IMO kind of a nasty thing to try to do to someone.
But you can spend your time and energy giving data to those in the middle - which is most folks. You give them data and if they need/want it help them understand how to interpret the data - not frame it for them but give them the language and explanations so they can understand for themselves.
If you do that - and if the data actually do support your position - then most folks can and will change their positions.
Again in my experience - arguing long and hard with the extreme deniers/opponents just makes everyone unhappy and changes nobody's positions.
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Speaker: The purpose of science and its limits, in reply to Chris Waugh,
For those finding themselves a little rage deficient this weekend.
Gah. That’s all I’m going to say. There’s just too much to rant about.
Joyce is just enacting for the Universities everything that National have enacted for all the other R&D funded by the taxpayers. Their logic is that we should be able to do more with less if we stop doing things that have no value (as defined by the dollar value of course).
It's Friday night drinks logic. Makes perfect sense after a couple of glasses of wine and especially if you never bother to look for any data to contradict.
Sadly it hasn't worked anywhere that such a directed research path has been followed but the logic looks good enough to avoid having to face the real issue for New Zealand R&D - which is that for the past 20 years successive governments have cut funding in real terms and loaded every research institute with a massive overhead of managers and businessmen intended to make the institutes more efficient. The net result is we have about half the funding in science that NZ needs to keep up with the rest of the world let alone lead it.
Until a minister finally stands up and says "this crap we've been trying for the last 20 years is all bollocks and we should just put more money in if we want more value out", then we're F*d.
I know lets run a series of meetings around the country and fly everyone around and talk about science as if we know what we're talking about then we can rename the funding agencies again and pretend we care about NZs future. Nobody will notice we haven't actually made a bit of difference until its time for some more meetings.
hmmm cynical today I guess
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Che Tibby,
he climate changes we’re on the cusp of aren’t abnormal for Earth. they’re unprecedented for homosapiens.
That isn't quite right. The amount of temperature change has been seen before for the planet but not the rate at which that change is occurring. Such changes in the past appears to have occurred over a very long time frame - time for adaption to occur.
So yeah, the planet will cope and most folks are pretty certain there will be life on the planet (unless we go to full Venus-like hothouse) but there is not certainty that the life that exists will be able to support our civilisation.
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Speaker: The purpose of science and its limits, in reply to Shaun Hendy,
Unfortunately I don’t think the MSM is not going to come to our rescue
I think you're right. And I do think the current batch of voices are making inroads. But it is depressing when we're faced with The Economist reporting a good news story about the reduction in carbon emissions as a result of GM crops with the headline "Frankenfoods reduce global warming"
We’d do well to support these folks as much as we can.
Any time - except raid night :).