Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide.
I don't think science should be censored, scientific inquiry should continue with integrity regardless of what people think. What I think is people who can't handle it should not have access to the truths revealed. I generally believe in unrestricted free information but I've been rethinking that for certain cases.
It's not just gender identity. I've seen similar behavior in other groups such as obese people revolting against the "oppressive" science documenting the numerous risks associated with being overweight because it supposedly causes society to marginalize them.
And that's what led to ethics rules that said you can't do that. You'd think you wouldn't need to write it down, but we did and we do.
> By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]
> The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards,[13] and has been cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history."[16] Its revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP)[17] and federal laws and regulations requiring institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects in studies.
I know about Tuskegee. That's a clear example of what not to do. Just one of many documented cases of criminal abuse of human beings. Stuff like this is the reason why informed consent is an absolute requirement these days.
What I meant to say is I'd think twice before telling a depressed patient with a history of suicide attempts about a diagnosis of terminal illness.
That seems oversimplified. If an individual or organisation collects or creates "information", they could/should consider not only what a thief might do with the information, but what they're collecting it in the first place and why. If they know potential dangers, they share at least some responsibility for future damage. If they haven't considered the dangers, this is negligent (mitigated by the act of sincere consideration, not by what dangers were discovered).
Intention exists separately from information (in this context) but they are not independent, they're connected.
A silly example: Let's say someone at Facebook realises they could predict with high confidence the chance of a user voting in favour of extremist political candidates. This is new information, and Facebook has decided to create it. Once created, it could do harm. At this point, saying "information doesn't kill people, people kill people" is a useless abstraction. Sure, it might be "true" in a limited interpretation, but that interpretation doesn't help anyone.
(From an excess of caution, I've constrained the definition of "information" above as something like "information created or collected by humans and our systems". This is to exclude exotic-but-true consideration of literally anything in the universe as "information" e.g. tumours, magnetars, etc etc.)
This is correct and completely irrelevant in the real world. It is similar to numbers cannot cause harm. Information and numbers are nothing more than interlectual constructs, patterns, or platonic ideas.
But collecting information can enable as much harm as collecting some numbers. For example the Nazis started with collecting information about the racial status of as many people as possible, see [1]. The collected information was later used to decide who to deport and kill.
Although, this is another example of humans causing harm, it also shows why collecting information is not harmless. Although the information itself cannot cause anything. It simply has no agency, so it can neither harm nor heal people. But it can enable both.
I think the "in the wrong hands" part of your statement actually backs up what he was saying. The information by itself is useless unless someone ACTS upon it.
> Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide.
That is arguably, depending in the diagnosis, a good example of a time where suicide may be the good option, where postponing death magnifies suffering, and the only reason to keep the poor patient alive is essentially because we're too busy selfishly thinking about avoiding our own pain of loss to permit them to erase their agony.
I don't think science should be censored, scientific inquiry should continue with integrity regardless of what people think. What I think is people who can't handle it should not have access to the truths revealed. I generally believe in unrestricted free information but I've been rethinking that for certain cases.
It's not just gender identity. I've seen similar behavior in other groups such as obese people revolting against the "oppressive" science documenting the numerous risks associated with being overweight because it supposedly causes society to marginalize them.