this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If you're talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.

They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn't, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.

It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.

From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.

[–] hikuro93@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Exactly. Society should never conflate knowledge driven by curiosity and knowledge as an excuse for sadism.

There's a difference between experimenting by following rules, and then observing the results vs giving in to base forbidden desires just to see what happens or trying to bend reality to confirm one's bias - I mean, just look at how people tried to justify until decades ago a black person's 'inferiority' and their discrimination by coming up with all sorts of anatomical observations. That's the danger.