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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

> The entire foundation of science is based upon empirical observation and asking hypothetical questions

True, but it’s possible to ask questions that sway public opinion. Look at all the “studies” tobacco companies paid for. Or the racist scientific theories that attempted to justify slavery.

If you’re asking questions about a lab leak out of genuine scientific interest, that’s perfectly legitimate.

But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.

There are plenty of actors on both sides, using the same tool of scientific inquiry for good and for ill.

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If China screwed up and didn’t follow proper first world standards for their research and directly caused 2 years of hell for the rest of the world then they deserved everything that would have come their way. To hell with the future of science in China, some fuck ups are too big to sweep under the rug. Sometimes you need destructive anger. Sometimes you need raw political backlash.

It’s really bizarre to me that western scientists would feel more obligated to defend the future of scientific progress in a foreign communist country (especially one that’s currently engaging in an ethnic cleansing not seen since WWII) over their obligation to their own country and more importantly, than their obligation to the truth. These people have taken scientific and technological progress as their god and it’s impossible to understand their actions if you haven’t.

It's not really bizarre. Money talks.

And nothing brings in the money like political clickbait.

Your examples don't match the point you were making. The bent studies from tobacco companies were falsifying answers, not just asking questions, and the racist theories were operating on a hazy pseudoscientific level that can't even be called "falsification," but were also, by another means, giving false answers.

There may have been a time in history when asking questions alone has been used maliciously, but it's neither of those.

They’re the end result of asking biased questions then manipulating answers to fit those biased questions. My point is that if you ask biased questions it won’t be long until someone provides biased answers.

You need to ask unbiased questions to get unbiased answers.

"Does tobacco smoking cause cancer," isn't a biased question... What's biased is answering it with a "no."

Right but when asked by biased people, with biased intent, it solicits biased answers. It looks innocent on the surface but it’s anything but.

If it's the people and their intent then I think we're agreeing that it's not the questions themselves, but the ways they can be biased-ly answered.

You're simplifying too much. The tobacco company example illustrates very well how you can distract and lead astray by asking biased questions. Leading (smoking) statisticians like Fisher continued to point out there may be confounding causes. He did not falsify data. Even a spurious discussion about a "smoking gene" was created. Asking questions may seem innocent but it can be done strategically and can hinder drawing the right conclusions. Eventually the scientific method would correct those views, but it took more than 40 years even though the statistical data was available from the start.

Judea Pearl dedicates a whole chapter (Ch. 5) of his The Book of Why to this example.

> If you’re asking questions about a lab leak out of genuine scientific interest, that’s perfectly legitimate.

> But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.

The trouble is that it's often both.

Suppose proof of a lab leak is bad for party A and good for party B. If no investigation takes place, people will assume it didn't happen. If we don't actually know the answer then party A is politically motivated to refuse to investigate and party B is politically motivated to demand an answer to the question better than "we don't know because we didn't look."

There may not be any party C who is completely disinterested and unbiased. You either investigate it or you don't. And either choice is politically charged.

There always will be someone trying to win political points from scientific questions asked by others. It's not a reason not to ask.

Motivation might go to bias. But, ultimately, if the science is good, the motivation should be irrelevant. Science and exploration, regardless of what motivates it has value.

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