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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (9789)	3/26/2001 7:37:31 PM
From: thames_sider	Respond to of 82486

Actually, this is not really one of my quandaries. I dislike the conclusions Shockley has drawn... but if they can be proven, then that is fact. By proven, I mean that others can work on the same data and draw the same results, and that predictions made on the basis of his findings can be experimentally verified. Social science, of course, does depend on individuals - we're dealing with statistics rather than 'either-or', which is going to make it more subjective. Any scientific subject can still be researched. Whether humans choose to fund or encourage such research is another matter. I don't think it's so much that answers would be 'unacceptable to the scientific community' as unacceptable to the community as a whole, or that the research itself is sufficiently distasteful (in what it might be seen to be seeking to prove) to be discouraged... But it's important to note that science does not require behaviour as a result of its findings. If you want to, you can disbelieve in gravity, and step off a very high building trusting in your disbelief - science says nothing about the wisdom of such, just what it predicts will happen to you if you do... In other words, even supposing that some research did 'prove' that a certain race (or culture, or gender, or whatever) was on average inferior to another - especially against some specific and perhaps innately biassed criterion - then the research itself does not say what should be done as a result... that's down to opinion and human decision. [BTW, I don't know enough about Shockley or his research to answer more specifically - sorry...]