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0 pointsDylan168073y ago0 comments

The only definition for "early" they're giving is the line that is currently set by FDA regulation! They're treating it all exactly the same, as long as it's currently not allowed.

They have not given any other information on where to draw the line.

> even give a hypothetical example to illustrate this

No they didn't. They gave an analogy about how murder is bad. Which is no more helpful than "the most extreme possible interpretation of what the neurosurgeon said would be bad". They haven't given any examples of experiments that are okay or not okay.

All they've said is that a super extreme early experiment is bad, and then acted like the neurosurgeon said they wanted to do that. They are either ignoring the possibility of less extreme examples, or acting like everything the FDA doesn't allow is exactly the same.

I can't tell you which it is, so if you insist it's not the latter then it must be the former. That's just as bad. It's a strawman.

If they gave a non-strawman non-FDA explanation of where to draw the line, then I must be blind, so please quote it.

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foldr3y ago· 2 in thread

The point of the hypothetical example was just to illustrate that whether or not something is ethical is a separate question from whether or not something is in line with the regulations (or the law, in the analogy). This is why it’s so odd that you seem to think the OP was saying that the current regulations define what’s ethical.

> All they've said is that a super extreme early experiment is bad

Correct. Or any early experiment on humans (‘extreme’ or not), as the potential benefits don’t justify the risks.

> and then acted like the neurosurgeon said they wanted to do that.

Yes - that’s the impression I get from what the neurosurgeon said.

I don’t understand why you are asking me or OP where to draw the line. You don’t have to know exactly where to draw the line in order to know that certain things are on one or other side of it.

Dylan16807OP3y ago

> Or any early experiment on humans (‘extreme’ or not), as the potential benefits don’t justify the risks.

Well that's just it. If 'early' is automatically bad, and 'early' just means anything not currently allowed, then you're using the FDA's definition.

Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical? That's definitely not the meaning of 'early' the neurosurgeon was using!!

The neurosurgeon wants to do 'early'. But 'early' is a vast swath of scenarios, covering orders of magnitude of safety and preparedness. Which is why I think using very extreme examples does more harm than good to having a conversation about this.

I don't think letting people sign up to do a test moderately earlier than they currently can is a huge ethical problem. Even if we assume it's a bad idea, it's not Evil. That's my real objection to the original point. A medium-size change to current regulations is nowhere near "capital E Evil".

I don't think we need to have exact discussions about where the line is, my point is that the great-whatever parent was assuming some kind of crazy extreme and acting like that was the only possible meaning for the sentence. And my asking them where the line is was a way of trying to make that clear, that they're neglecting more mundane scenarios.

foldr3y ago

>and 'early' just means anything not currently allowed,

Well no, it doesn't mean this. It means testing a treatment that's still highly experimental and a long way from being approved. In other words, a treatment that is in the EARLY stages of its development (in the normal English sense of the term). Listening again to the relevant portion of the interview, I think the claim that the interviewee was using 'early' to mean 'whatever the FDA regards as early' is pretty clearly false. They say 'we can't do early stage testing on humans because the FDA bans it', but that obviously doesn't mean that they define the meaning of 'early' by FDA regulations. That would be as erroneous as saying "the law bans murder, therefore the meaning of 'murder' is defined by the law".

>Or when you use the term 'early', are you defining 'early' based on what is ethical?

No - of course I'm not. How do you come up with these bizarre misreadings?

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