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Remember the scientists convicted of manslaughter for earthquake predictions? If you severely punish scientists for harming someone, you're going to get tons of cases like this. A lot of scientists don't have political connections and therefore are easy scapegoats. Don't think "well, we could have been able to catch these scientists who really were responsible for lives" but rather "what else would we be enabling, by making it easier to catch these scientists?" (Yes, they were exonerated later, but the point still stands.)
Also, pretty much anything you do on a large scale involves lives. Approve a drug a little late and lives are lost if people couldn't get the drug. Approve a drug a little early and lives may be lost to side effects or displacing better drugs from the market. Support cars that run on fossil fuels and get dinged for all the lives lost to pollution or global warming. If you punish scientists for things that they do on a large scale that cost lives, you will no longer have scientists, because everything on that scale costs lives if you do it wrong and no human is 100% perfect.
Human wisdom is surely capable of distinguishing between imperfection, negligence and fraud.
For instance - software is released that's buggy = imperfection. Crowdstrike bricks tens of millions of computers = negligence.
No it isn't. That's why I gave that example.
There's also the question of malicious actors. You not only need the ability to distinguish between those, you need the ability to distinguish between those when faced by a hostile actor who is deliberately blurring them. You may know what negligence is, but if some politician looking for a scapegoat pointed to imperfection and said "that's negligence", would you be able to prove the politician wrong?
Well if human wisdom is so hard to find, why don't we torch the whole legal system? It has been misused by bad actors from time to time, I think we could both find examples of this.
The cost of not having a legal system (anarchy) is greater than the cost of having a legal system. I suspect that the cost of introducing more rigour to high-impact academic research would be much less than the anarchy we have today and its associated megadeaths.
There are systems in place that prevent politicians from calling each other foreign traitors, paedophiles and fraudsters and then having everyone credulously believe them, guaranteeing their victory. Human wisdom is first and foremost amongst them.
As a lawyer, much of it is in need of torching, or at least disassembly and reconstruction.
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The "system" that prevents this is the "everyone" part. A politician who calls a scientist a fraudster under your system doesn't have to convince everyone--he just needs to convince the police and a judge.
If you can convince the police and the judge, you can already have someone whisked off to prison or shot dead.
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Everything also costs lives if you do it right. We just try to balance the net costs and benefits of things and try as best we can to figure out which option gets us in the green.
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