Unethical human experimentation in the United States | Hacker News Reader

Unethical human experimentation in the United States

en.wikipedia.org

5 pointsMrBra14 comments

1. Please do not write your own headlines!

Your title: "Human experimentation in the United States"

The article title: "Unethical human experimentation in the United States"

Notice the crucial missing word?

2. The article unfortunately left out pre-frontal lobotomy, a disastrous procedure that was almost always administered without informed consent.

You are right but I did not do that on the purpose of alterning the original meaning, I just copied it straight off the link url which is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_experimentation_in_the_Un... Then when I noticed it, I thought that even in this form it evocates an unpleasant feeling...

You'll see that it says "redirected from ...". If Wikipedia redirects you from X to Y it will still use the URL for X. To get the canonical name for the page, I click on "Talk" and then back to "Article."

Human experimentation is extremely common. Why does it give you an unpleasant feeling? I volunteer for a couple experiments while in psychology class in college. I've done human factors studies on people. Both of these are human experiments. In both, the experiments follow ethical practices, like informing the subject that they can quit at any time.

When the city tests out different traffic light patterns, perhaps to improve traffic flow, it's also doing experiments on humans. A/B testing of a web site is yet another common form of human testing.

These are all acceptable and ethical examples of human experimentation. That's why you need to include "unethical" in your statement.

My answer is.. implicitness through common sense.

"Human Experimentation" commonly evocate something wrong, and guess why?

That's exactly because of what you can read in that article..

Or more generally because of the kind of world we live in, which, I am sad to remind you, it's not perfect.

So I guess there is nothing wrong in titling something for what's commonly expected to refer to.

Nonetheless I've edited the title :)

I think you might mean 'evoke'.

yes thanks for correcting me

We need ways to do human experimentation. Without it, medical research would be dead, as would many other fields. For that matter, a chef wouldn't even be able to get others to do a taste test.

That's why we've thought long and hard about the ethics of the topic. There are supposed to be policies in place, like an institutional review board, with the goal of protecting human subjects from physical or psychological harm, ensuring privacy, and making sure that the human subjects can make an informed consent.

That's not saying the system is perfect. There's the worry that "many for-profit IRB's routinely approve the design and conduct of clinical trials for clients without adequately monitoring the safety of patients", like Coast IRB.

Academic researchers working on humans and animals must go through the IRB process. This does help instill a strong sense of caution whenever humans subjects are involved. Here's a recent posting to show how strong that sense might be:

http://boundarylayerphysiology.com/2013/02/17/why-im-worried...

This is how things should be... But the whole point in posting a link to that wikipedia page is not condemning ethical and risk free human experimentation but the following: are sure that in this exact moment the american government isn't carrying on any other crazy human experimentation? I would spend a minute thinkin about that, instead of playing with words... (not trying to be offensive, but the topic is of such importance that this whole argumentation just feels redundant...) Again, think about what the goverment (togheter with private entities) could be doing RIGHT NOW.

By not including the important word - Unethical - in the original title you weaken that argument, because you commingle ethical and unethical experimentation. Most human experimentation is done under rules to help keep them ethical.

By focusing only on the "human experimentation" part, it is you playing with words.

I gave a link to an example of how a private company RIGHT NOW might be doing things which are not ethical, under the rules for academic and pharmaceutical research.

Quoting myself (you seem to have missed a part of what I said):

Implicitness through common sense. "Human Experimentation" commonly evokes something wrong, and guess why? That's exactly because of what you can read in the article I linked. __So I guess there is nothing wrong in titling something for what's commonly expected to refer to.__

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I am not weakening it, because the expression "human experimentation" is commonly already firing an alarm-bell given what happened and the resonance it's getting.

So I'm sorry but get your mind over it.. while your terminology is, in its whole, perfectly appropriate to describe the subject we are discussing, times have changed in a way that simply dropping off word from it doesn't weaken the message it's sending, at least to a generic audience, which also makes up for a context (HN not being a niche-academic-medical-research website). So given humans interpret things based on context, I'd guess that the majority of HN readers would get along with that title, again given the moment in time we are living.

But there is much more... and I thank you for letting me think about it:

I came to the conclusion that the most big and implicit reason that made me avoid the "unethical" word is that even in a civil and modern society, ethics is questionably subjective, to an extent. So adding that word I could have put off some readers whose ethics threeshold is lower than average, who could have then not given enough attention to the article, thinking: "yea, here comes another human rights hippie.."

Instead, whoever does not consider these experiment unethical is to my eyes not an human being, so yea, no need to add "unethical"... it's clear already that these experimentations are so, and you (any reader) should agree with that. Otherwise I made you waste 10 seconds of browsing for something you didn't want to by tricking you, because you need to learn.

My deepest worry is: I hope that in your arguments there isn't a little black spot in where you are trying to hide the fact that part of you (maybe due to professional figure, are you a medical researcher?) tends from time to time to be a bit more tolerating toward some borderline experimentation.. and a bit pissed off by those "human/animal right hippies".. (or a given IRB resolution)

If that's the case, say it clear, don't be scared... Don't turn around with words, make your full and whole point about this matter... Of course, if you think it's good for you...

If that's not the case, IMO the first part of my argument is still valid to explain how a word can be omitted and still point to its original meaning, based on social events affecting the meaning of words, and context.

I wonder why the Milgram Experiment made the list but not the Stanford Prison Experiment...

The Milgram Experiment does happen to shine a bright light on collectivism (it only takes one person to do the right thing, for everyone else to follow their example), while the Stanford Prison Experiment shines a darker light (or violet i guess?) on collectivism.

Maybe it could have been omitted due to a bias, or the editors just didn't think to add it?

The book[1] "Men who stare at goats" gives an insight into some of the, uh, unusual programs the US military ran.

[1] Not the film, which skips a lot of the detail.

unbelievable.. gives chills, we need not to forget these atrocities and spread these reports over and over and again and again.

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