|
Not a hill I am going to die on, but I really don't support this movement of politicizing science, nor to take these scientists out of their time context and measure them and their legacy according to recent insights and sensibilities. And how long do we wait? Do we ban Galileo after the Church found him guilty of blasphemy? Or wait a 100 years to see if he was ultimately right? I fear it is not going to stop at removing their names from prizes and buildings. I think their data sets or scientific contributions are next. As the philosopher of science states: "consider the man and his data set, too.". We are removing words (blacklist/whitelist, master/slave) and changing names of conferences (NIPS), not because these words are directly sexual or racist, but because some may take them out of context, and they indirectly offend their sensibilities. From the problematic Pearson article on The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children: > The purport of this memoir is to discuss whether it is desirable in an already crowded country like Great Britain to permit indiscriminate immigration, or, if the conclusion be that it is not, on what grounds discrimination should be based. If there is to be discrimination it may be based on purely quantitative considerations-such as largely rule at present admission of immigrants into the United States, where percentages of each racial element only are admitted per month; or it may be based solely on qualitative considerations-all immigrants up to a certain level of mentality, physique or health may be admitted. > Here again the question of standard for admission is a very important one. It may be fixed so high that practically few are admitted, but the few may be those who are so much above the average intelligence of a nation, that they are a national gain. Or a community map admit individuals of special craft capacity, as, for example, the Huguenot silk-weavers, German clockmakers, Italian tunnel-workers, or Dutch engravers. > We cannot disregard the advantages which in the past such immigrants have brought not only to our handicrafts, but to our arts. The argument for the admission of such immigrants has, we fear, been misused in the past in order to obtain a supply of cheap labour, because the foreign immigrants have not been subjected to any rigid entrance tests. Do we want to forbid, downgrade, or demonize such a speech now? |
And in Sims' case, he was explicitly taking advantage of the political climate in the southern US at the time. It was not blind coincidence the research was undertaken there - acquiring his test subjects would not have been so easy in the rest of the world (Southern medical colleges used to advertise this particular grisly advantage). So in the same way, this research is also ties to politics from the beginning.
And WRT the one that includes slurs... I mean, I don't think "don't use slurs" should be political.