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Dictatorships for science!
Jul. 18th, 2010 03:41 pmI can't be the first person to have thought of this, but I feel like sharing it anyway.
There are still plenty of totalitarian governments around the world, and although we Western people would like it if everyone became a democracy and then held hands and sang kumbaya, it doesn't look like most of them are going anywhere anytime soon. China is the most obvious, and its control over its population is pretty impressive. At one point they moved a million or three people to make space for a dam, and then of course we have the Great Firewall which is scary in that by and large it works, and the One Child Policy, which could be taken as an awesome opportunity to study family dynamics, the effects of children on the economy, and all sorts of other stuff just by getting all that data from Chinese families and comparing it to regular multi-child families/economies/whatever in other places*.
So why not take it a step further? They have a billion people living there, after all, and the majority of them are uneducated rice farmers, so there's no shortage of potential research subjects. And their government has no qualms about telling them what they are and aren't allowed to do.
So, organisations and other countries could pay China (and other totalitarian places that have large populations and are willing) to carry out large-scale experiments on their behalf, experiments which can't be done in democracies due to pesky obstacles like freedom of speech and action. Want to study qualia by preventing people from seeing the colour purple for the first ten years of their life? China could provide two million-strong groups to compare, one with and one without exposure to purple. Or want to find out how much language really does effect thought? Hire the use of a few hundred thousand Chinese children and get them immersion-schooled in the languages of your choice. The possibilities are endless! And that's without getting into the highly unethical experiments you could pay them to conduct on the sly. Want to try the Forbidden Experiment**? You could probably buy the use of a few thousand unwanted girl babies and some mute women to take care of them, plus the hush money to make sure no one else gets their hands on the documentation. You could even try small-scale eugenics by sequencing a few thousand people, getting the government to order them to procreate in certain ways, then see how the babies turn out. Again, the possibiies are nigh-endless, all we need to do is outsource all this morally shady stuff over to this government who's willing to do relatively horrible things to their people in the name of profit (Most of our electronic junk ends up there, and apparently those things give out LOTS of toxic fumes when they're being destroyed, not to mention contamination of nearby water sources and so forth. But it's not like the people who have to deal with that are important, right?)
Basically, all I'm saying is that we're missing out on an opportunity here. An opportunity, I might add, that may not be around for much longer since any of these totalitarian places could become democratic any day now.
*yes, there would have to be lots of control stuff going on to take into account other factors. But most studies have to control for lots of confounding factors already, so I think it could be done
** It's when a bunch of linguists and sociologists get some very young children and throw them in a room together for the first X years of their life, with minimal human contact and no language contact. Then they study them as the years go by to see what (or if) aspects of language and culture emerge spontaneously. The creolist Derek Bickerton once came close to actually carrying out an experiment like this: he found a bunch of families with young kids from places that didn't have any languages in common with each other and got them to agree to be relocated to a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific for some number of years. He was then going to study the kids to see what happened to them linguistically, but at the last minute before the families were actually moved he got shut down by the Ethics Board and his grant money was revoked. When I heard the interview where he described this, he was still really bitter about the whole thing even though it was decades ago.
There are still plenty of totalitarian governments around the world, and although we Western people would like it if everyone became a democracy and then held hands and sang kumbaya, it doesn't look like most of them are going anywhere anytime soon. China is the most obvious, and its control over its population is pretty impressive. At one point they moved a million or three people to make space for a dam, and then of course we have the Great Firewall which is scary in that by and large it works, and the One Child Policy, which could be taken as an awesome opportunity to study family dynamics, the effects of children on the economy, and all sorts of other stuff just by getting all that data from Chinese families and comparing it to regular multi-child families/economies/whatever in other places*.
So why not take it a step further? They have a billion people living there, after all, and the majority of them are uneducated rice farmers, so there's no shortage of potential research subjects. And their government has no qualms about telling them what they are and aren't allowed to do.
So, organisations and other countries could pay China (and other totalitarian places that have large populations and are willing) to carry out large-scale experiments on their behalf, experiments which can't be done in democracies due to pesky obstacles like freedom of speech and action. Want to study qualia by preventing people from seeing the colour purple for the first ten years of their life? China could provide two million-strong groups to compare, one with and one without exposure to purple. Or want to find out how much language really does effect thought? Hire the use of a few hundred thousand Chinese children and get them immersion-schooled in the languages of your choice. The possibilities are endless! And that's without getting into the highly unethical experiments you could pay them to conduct on the sly. Want to try the Forbidden Experiment**? You could probably buy the use of a few thousand unwanted girl babies and some mute women to take care of them, plus the hush money to make sure no one else gets their hands on the documentation. You could even try small-scale eugenics by sequencing a few thousand people, getting the government to order them to procreate in certain ways, then see how the babies turn out. Again, the possibiies are nigh-endless, all we need to do is outsource all this morally shady stuff over to this government who's willing to do relatively horrible things to their people in the name of profit (Most of our electronic junk ends up there, and apparently those things give out LOTS of toxic fumes when they're being destroyed, not to mention contamination of nearby water sources and so forth. But it's not like the people who have to deal with that are important, right?)
Basically, all I'm saying is that we're missing out on an opportunity here. An opportunity, I might add, that may not be around for much longer since any of these totalitarian places could become democratic any day now.
*yes, there would have to be lots of control stuff going on to take into account other factors. But most studies have to control for lots of confounding factors already, so I think it could be done
** It's when a bunch of linguists and sociologists get some very young children and throw them in a room together for the first X years of their life, with minimal human contact and no language contact. Then they study them as the years go by to see what (or if) aspects of language and culture emerge spontaneously. The creolist Derek Bickerton once came close to actually carrying out an experiment like this: he found a bunch of families with young kids from places that didn't have any languages in common with each other and got them to agree to be relocated to a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific for some number of years. He was then going to study the kids to see what happened to them linguistically, but at the last minute before the families were actually moved he got shut down by the Ethics Board and his grant money was revoked. When I heard the interview where he described this, he was still really bitter about the whole thing even though it was decades ago.
