Then, I don’t use 200,000 kWh per year. What do I know…

In the end, our societies are not ruled by individual pledges. When dishonesty is punished, it is discouraged. That’s why we have laws and police forces. But we also have free speech, and a hopefully fair justice system.

That’s all that the pursuit of science needs: free speech, open debate, and penalties for those who are dishonest. Individual pledges mean nothing.

Trivia item:

Apparently the Hippocratic Oath has been largely replaced by the similar ‘Declaration of Geneva’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

“We, the members of the IEEE, in recognition of the importance of our technologies in affecting the quality of life throughout the world, and in accepting a personal obligation to our profession, its members and the communities we serve, do hereby commit ourselves to the highest ethical and professional conduct and agree:

1. to accept responsibility in making decisions consistent with the safety, health and welfare of the public, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment;
2. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;
3. to be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on available data;
4. to reject bribery in all its forms;
5. to improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences;
6. to maintain and improve our technical competence and to undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training or experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations;
7. to seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work, to acknowledge and correct errors, and to credit properly the contributions of others;
8. to treat fairly all persons regardless of such factors as race, religion, gender, disability, age, or national origin;
9. to avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action;
10. to assist colleagues and co-workers in their professional development and to support them in following this code of ethics.”

WHAT?

If my supervisor or colleague fakes his data, and I know about it, I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut?
If a research topic is a dead end and serves only to keep someone in a job, and I know that, I should be quiet?
If a policy is guided by information I know to be false, I’m expected to be silent?

What a load of horse dung!

So these things are fine if you consider the research ‘unethical’. Many such as Hansen would view research to disprove AGW as unethical.

At best this is pointless politically correct nonsense. At worst a licence to lie and cheat if you don’t like what the science says.

The collaborative decision-makers in the public high school where I taught decided we needed to inoculate students with ethics classes, I suppose because we had a preponderance of lower-class students. This was done, at the expense of time spent covering other things more meritorious. I objected then, and I still feel it was a misdirected waste of time.

I realize that ethics and accountability are at the root of your and Steve’s websites, and the more you can keep such issues in the news the better. I was grateful for those efforts when I heard NPR’s bit last week on underreporting of misconduct in the NIH:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91658116

Do you really want public (or private) institutions demanding that their employees take oaths? I think I so much as I want them to set the right course to begin with: that they make their goals and objectives – their curricula – readily visible to all; that they ask the right questions.

Those questions, and of course the pursuit of answers, say a lot about the questioners – questions like: to what extent can those surface stations really be trusted?

My eldest son has just finished the first year of his MChem degree. One of his favourite tutors has told him that if he goes into research to always follow the consensus as that way he will get the research money. If he has research ideas that are outside the consensus the advice is basically to “forget it, the money will not be forthcoming”.

In its way this is exactly the same as the second part of the “Oath”

Throw in the probable pc world view of the folks who created this (i.e. university intelligensia), and I score it about equal to the “paintballers oath” for oathy goodness.

A better scientific oath might be to tell the truth no matter what the consequences.