Saturday, November 1, 2008

Portfolio 5 – Handling Potential Unethical Abuses

The essence of a study or even a research is to discover something new or reconfirm other study or researches. However, it does not mean everything is over when something has been discovered or reconfirmed. What are not less important are presenting the results, and predicts the effects of these results. There is no perfect research. No matter how good it is, there will be a weakness hole to dig. So, it is very important for researchers to minimize bad effects their research may incur.

Basically, the simplest way to handle potential abuses, most commonly unethical abuses, is to conduct a survey or drawing some people’s opinion which are from different backgrounds. We cannot just rely on experts’ view, since many readers are with zero knowledge about our research. Usually this will need a broad and general question, such as “What would you do if you can detect your potential through brain image?” if the research is about brain-scanning to predict human’s potential.

Experts may come with a help also, since they can predict general response to research. For example, experts predict that many parents will compare their child’s brain scans to famous person, and might give up to train or let the child to improve in a particular area. With this, we can do a more specific approach, for example interviewing parents from different background of financial, education, or position.

Both these methods should be able to give better prediction, and will help in handling potential abuses. For example, if a reasonable amount of people say, “I will stop doing anything other than the potential I found through imaging,” we can add some suggestions. For instance, we can emphasize that success is more about hard work. While possessing potential is a good ground to start, but to finish, we need hard work more than potential. More serious way is to cooperate with authority to prevent anyone from forcing someone else to follow only what the brain scans tell, for example parents who forbid their children to play sports merely because the children’s brain scans do not match with those of famous sports stars.

2 comments:

Steven Li said...

Yes, the abuse of ethnical problems is an important issue for many of the researches. It is very important for researchers to minimize bad effects their research may incur. I agree that we should do something in advance for this problem. For example, do surveys. I also agree that sometimes we can ask some experts in this area for help. We must revise our research if there will be a lot of predictable abuse in the future. In the same time, we must put in efforts to let people accept or approbate our research.

Nguyen Sy Nguyen said...

I agree with you that two general methods to avoid potential unethical abuses are conducting the survey and asking some experts. Moreover, I think the government can also help by passing law on the application of particular research.