Quick, hide the data
Oyyy.
Uh, yeah, because that’s the whole point.
“Prominent torturer Fiendy Painmaker has refused to publish data from a study of torture, fearing that the results will be weaponized by critics of torture.”
Listen up, Johanna Olsen-Kennedy: the whole point of medical studies (as of course you know perfectly well) is to determine whether they are beneficial or the other thing. If a study finds out that X is the other thing, aka harmful, it’s not your job to hide the data on the grounds that critics of X will cite it in order to prevent further harm. You’re not supposed to want to keep perpetrating harm.
The researcher’s claim that the subjects started with great mental health and stayed stable is in conflict with the observation that one quarter were suicidal, too.
This is what happens when you start promoting a treatment before studies have shown it to be beneficial. You convince yourself it is beneficial and then you see any indication that it isn’t as some kind of fluke, that mustn’t be allowed to turn people away from “treatment”.
I saw the same phenomenon in a dutch documentary, where a researcher claimed it would be unethical to do double blind research into gender treatment, because that would mean a group of people wouldn’t get the treatment and withholding some people treatment would be unethical.
There are days when I just wish I could tell someone to hand over their science card. There’s always been bad science (especially in medicine and social ‘sciences’ frankly), but the neoliberal trashing of universities, research institutions and education to make nearly all science demonstrate a commercial applicability or to have regular output has been especially corrosive. Now, if you don’t publish on the regular you’re toast. If you publish negative or ambiguous results, you’re toast. If your work is interesting, but doesn’t have a commercial application, you’re toast. It’s resulted in not just fraudulent work, but a massive rise in sloppy, poorly thought out work designed to produce quickly produced small papers that appear to show a good or promising result, but require further study. It’s about career continuity, not quality of thought. A side effect is that there is far less fundamental and pure exploratory research being done in pretty much every field of endeavour. That’s a shame because many of our greatest leaps forward have been built on such seemingly abstract work, and then sometimes years or decades later. Knowledge does have an intrinsic value.
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