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I think using the example of Nazi research weakens greatly the point you’re trying to make.

Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...

Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/

To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.



Exactly, exactly, people feel it very uncomfortable to lean on results of Nazi researchers, no matter what objective scientific truth this research may have uncovered. It's like "objective" and "scientific" wane and disappear, because "Nazi" and "truth" are utterly incompatible in the post-war Western culture. We're lucky Nazi-tainted scientists did not discover something fundamental.

Under a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.




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