Episode 29: Sacred Values

Yoel and Mickey discuss sacred values. How are sacred valued different from other values? What are the hallmarks of values that have become sacrilized? Why does it seem crass, or even offensive, to suggest trading off a sacred value (such as diversity value) against other, more mundane considerations? What does it mean that sacred values are dose insensitive and evidence insensitive?

Bonus: Do scientists who attended conferences sponsored by the late Jeffrey Epstein need to morally cleanse?

Links:

• St. Mary Axe | INDIA PAGAN ALE — A robust pale ale - hazy, juicy and aggressively hopped.
• Divercity Helles Lager – Lost Craft — Divercity is our beer, from Toronto, for everyone.
• What it was like to be a scientist in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle. — The “Girls” Were Always Around
• Opinion | Don’t Mess With My ‘Sacred Values’ - The New York Times
• Thinking The Unthinkable: Sacred Values and Taboo Cognitions — "Many people insist that their commitments to certain values (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviolable – in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought of trading off sacred values against secular ones (such as money) as transparently outrageous – in effect, taboo."
• The psychology of the unthinkable: taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals. - PubMed - NCBI
• Protected Values - ScienceDirect
• Specks of Dirt and Tons of Pain: Dosage Distinguishes Impurity From Harm - Joshua Rottman, Liane Young, 2019 — Levels of moral condemnation often vary with outcome severity (e.g., extreme destruction is morally worse than moderate damage), but this is not always true. We investigated whether judgments of purity transgressions are more or less sensitive to variation in dosage than judgments of harm transgressions.
• I hate open science – [citation needed] — Now that I’ve got your attention: what I hate—and maybe dislike is a better term than hate—isn’t the open science community, or open science initiatives, or open science practices, or open scientists… it’s the term. I fundamentally dislike the term open science.