It doesn't --- but that's no reason to give up and not hope and work for a world where, though not "owed," more people can have enjoyable and fulfilling lives (including through their work). The world doesn't even "owe" us the air we breath, yet with every breath we claim for ourselves a better life than we "deserve."
But it might not guarantee you a job doing what you actually love doing. Yes, you can enter the Dilbertian world of private industry, and make a nice six figure salary by wearing a suit and spending most of your time shuffling paperwork for scientifically illiterate management. There are a few industry positions that actually focus on exciting, rewarding research --- but they're as rare as tenured professor spots. If you actually love doing academic research (instead of inane corporate ladder climbing), then you're in the same boat as the Literature PhD: likely to spend decades in postdoc and associate professor positions, earning less than the median national wage, with no long-term job stability or prospects.
The software's creator hopes such detection can someday be integrated into devices like Google Glass
so Google can helpfully sell the info on to advertisers about when you're in a maximally receptive/gullible brain state, and serve up ads at just the right times when you're subconsciously most vulnerable to propaganda.
Why are you arguing using numbers for shockwave formation in atmospheric-pressure air? Do you not realize that sound can propagate in a variety of media, with different speeds (thus different thresholds for shockwave generation), and that the early universe wasn't filled with atmospheric-pressure air? Come back when you've re-calculated shockwave conditions in the state of matter prior to recombination; and if you can't do that, then don't flaunt your ignorance by spouting wholly irrelevant numbers.
I'm not quite sure what in my post you are "biting" on. I thought from the context that it was clear that the "claims" made were things that I disagree with (in the form claimed), but that (unfortunately) some vocal ignoramuses might proclaim. My point was that, from the scientific side, such claims become amenable to scientific inquiry (unlike sufficiently vague "God made the universe to operate according to the observed physical laws of the universe" claims, which are untestable), and fail under such scrutiny. I agree with you that from the religious side such claims can also be addressed on theological/scriptural grounds (as you have done, though I might quibble on some minor points), and re-cast in forms that are not scientifically invalidated (what I meant by my own picture of God being "refined/constrained," to work within a framework that need not be antagonistic to scientific observations).
Here is an analogy â" which isnâ(TM)t perfect, but I think it captures the flavor of your question â" itâ(TM)s like being American and hearing international criticism.
Nathan's analogy is just about spot-on, though not (I suspect) for the reasons he thinks.
More often than not these are manifestations of ideological struggles. It is more about what America symbolizes than anything. Most of their angst is directed against the political idea of âoeAmericaâ and what it means in the world rather than tangible acts by individual Americans.
Herp derp, people criticize America because they're ideological zealots who hate the Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity that we stand for. Never because they've seen their own country, friends, and family suffer from American bombs, American torture, American rape, American violent replacement of democracies with brutal dictators --- good ol' peace-and-freedom loving America would never do such things.
Nathan shows the same ignorant imperial hubris about Microsoft: anyone who hates them must be some Luddite who hates progress and success. Nothing to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish," antitrust trials, seeing real innovators being driven out of the market by third-rate Microsoft products. Nope, Microsoft is the bastion of software goodness in the world, so to hate them is to hate progress itself. Herp derp.
Surprisingly, I don't need to wear any corrective lenses, despite that running in my family. As I wrote, “for my daily work,” the most important part of the OSX UI is the Unix-derived command line. Without this, I'd never have switched back away from Linux (using Mandrake Linux with KDE on a Beige G3 a few years before OSX came out). Terminal.app may only be “one program of many,” but it's the one program that allows me to run hundreds of other Unix-style programs that come with the computer (from simple shell utilities to text editors to compilers), plus all the ones I add that completely rely on running in a Unix-style environment. While these features may be “practically nothing” to you and the GGP, they're basically the whole reason I have a computer.
My post above was intended in jest (nonetheless, see Luke 11:5-11 for components of an "annoy the heck out of God to get what you want" theology in one religious tradition). One's "possibility of incurring favor" are very "model dependent," to say the least --- since currying favor with one potential set of gods is likely to be damning idolatry to another. Coming from the Christian tradition (by way of Lutheranism), I personally hold to a perspective in which favor is offered (undeservedly) to us by God, rather than incurred through out own actions; YMMV.
Thus you should at least strive to make sure such a god stays really pissed at you (just below the immediate smiting threshold, but plenty to not slip out of mind).
One can, however, ask for proof for particular claims about a God who defies the apparent "natural" order. When claims are made that, e.g., God created the world 6,000 years ago, with all species as immutable types --- proof, please? God sent a hurricane New Orleans to punish the gays --- proof, please? God will cure your cancer if you pray hard enough --- proof, please? While a God who acts through creating the entirety of empirical and intelligible reality is an untestable proposition, many more specific claims (in which the "finger of God" comes out of the sky to nudge an off-track cosmos back onto course) are often made. I actually happen to believe in God; but, willingness to ask what is amenable to "hard proof" (and noting its consistent resulting lack) considerably refines/constrains my picture of how God operates in the world.
The Panasonic sensor tech in the article will suffer this same effect: the actual purity of color separation in the deflected "red" and "blue" spectra is quite low (these are really "slightly pinkish" and "slightly blueish" being deflected, not red and blue). Add this to the already greater color uncertainty produced by mixing even "perfectly separated" RGB primaries into a W+B,W-B,W+R,W-R sensor, and the result will be very low color sensitivity --- plus the artifacts from Bayer-filter color interpretation. This sensor technology is aimed at tiny, light-starved cellphone cameras, where color is going to suck anyway and a >=2x increase in luminance info is extremely desirable (at nearly any other image quality cost). Unlike Foveon, the Panasonic tech can be added in a layer on top of a "traditional" sensor architecture, with the best available readout electronics (the Foveon sensors seem to be lagging a few generations behind in readout noise, and also don't scale down to the tiny pixel sizes for cellphones).
Compared to Bayer-filtered sensors, Foveon does far better at avoiding spurious color from aliasing artifacts along sharp transitions (which create a "speckling" of wrong-colored spots all over reconstructed Bayer-filtered images). Color accuracy in "smooth" areas (where interpolation between Bayer color sites works well), however, is significantly compromised. Thus, Foveon is much better at portraying fine high-color-contrast detail, but poor for subtle tonal transitions over extended areas (though noise-reduction tricks can hide a lot of this). The sensors are also highly sensitive to the angle of entering light rays from the lens, which makes designing a desirable interchangeable lens system more difficult (lens designs that work fine on Bayer SLRs can be unacceptably non-telecentric for Foveon, causing severe color shifts across the image frame).
The answer is color accuracy, which this chip severely sacrifices for better luminance info. Mixing R+G, B+G, etc. together means that figuring out the correct R,G,B color corresponding to an observed signal requires taking sums and differences between pixels that sums a bunch more noise into the color channels.
Example: Consider sensor (A) with R,G,B-sensing pixels, and (B) with Y=R+G, C=G+B, M=B+R sensing pixels. Suppose light consisting of R',G',B' hits each sensor: sensor (A) directly tells you R',G',B' Sensor (B) requires R' = (Y+M-C)/2, etc., so R picks up the noise associated with all 3 pixels.
1. Deduction A implies that X is true. 2. Deduction A is sound. 3. If X, then torture is wrong. Therefore, 4. Torture is wrong.
There is no assumption X is true. QED: There is an absolute conclusion of "torture is wrong", while having a condition "if", and no assumption that X is true.
All you've managed here is moved the assumption from "X is true" to "A is true, A=>X". How the heck do you call this an argument without assumptions, when you're assuming "Deduction A is sound" (where did you get that from? How do you know it on pure logical grounds?), and also "A => X"? Example: A="The moon is made of cheese," X="The sky is falling". Would you say "The moon is made of cheese, this is true, and implies the sky is falling (which means torture is wrong)" and say that's a sound argument requiring no assumptions but pure logic?
If you're going back to counting Germany's scientific prowess during WWI, then you're ignoring the important fact for understanding Nazi scientific culture that, during the rise of Nazi power and the ramp-up to WWII, there was a mass exodus of many top scientists from Germany (where do you think the US got all those German-sounding names to help in their atomic bomb project?). Under the Nazi regime, it was a bad idea to be caught doing anything that looked like "Jewish science" (you know, all that crazy "Jewish" stuff like Einstein's theory of relativity); scientists uneasy with the idea of formulating scientific ideas in "strong, pure, Aryan-sounding terms" that would fit Nazi philosophy/ideology did not generally stick around.
That's not to say there weren't plenty of competent scientists left, or that many projects managed (despite the top-level pseudo-scientific cultishness of the Nazi party) to succeed, or that similar bad/authoritarian influences didn't exist in other countries. After all, the Soviet Union managed to put mankind into space, while also supporting Lysenkoism (agricultural "science" based on Communist ideology, with assumptions about how good "proletarian" crops employing solidarity in dense planting could out-grow nasty, competitive "capitalist" crops). Germany certainly retained a lot of strong engineering talent; but the Nazi party driven ideological cult (opposing science by measure of "Jewishness" instead of, e.g., reproducible experimental results) was not a "science-friendly" atmosphere.
Sorry, I misunderstood your post (assuming you were using X as a placeholder for potentially different objects, rather than the set of tautological statements "if the sky is yellow, then the sky is yellow"). One might argue that a tautologically generated logical sequence (which reaches no conclusion distinct from the input statements) fails to be a "logical argument" (one step above the "argument" consisting of the empty set of axioms and conclusions). More pedantically, one could argue that "if X then X" is indeed itself an assumption, albeit a basic and widely shared one.
Anyway, you miss a critical distinction: so long as you have the condition "if," you can *never* reach an absolute conclusion of "torture is wrong": that "if" means your strongest conclusion is "if X, then torture is wrong" --- and proceeding from conditional to absolute requires taking up the assumption "X = true". You can't just drop an "if" --- otherwise, you'd be saying I could get away with this: "if X, then torture is wrong" "=> if torture is not wrong, then not X" "=> not X" absolutely !!??! Of course not, the conclusion is still premised on an "if" that I (you) aren't allowed to drop.
I think you're only disproving a straw-man version of the "theory" that does not follow (in any sense that a scientifically minded person would interpret) from the statement "scientific literacy makes people more ethical." Your "disproved" version of the statement appears to be "scientifically literate people are more ethical than non-scientifically literate people," which is not the same. A still "overly strong" interpretation of the statement is that scientific literacy would make any one person more ethical than if they weren't scientifically literate (but they might still be less ethical than someone else who started at a higher level). This interpretation of the statement requires different examples to disprove: you need to find a person with a measured level of "ethicality" before and after becoming scientifically literate, then show they were worse after. Of course, the "obvious" meaning implied by the statement is in some average sense, since only a dysfunctionally pedantic person would fail to supply that expected context.
True, you have constructed a logical argument not relying on prior assumptions. The argument may even be *sound* within an *assumed* framework in which your predicates (If X then X) are true --- this is the first place you need assumptions, but you can often get away with such widely held assumptions to slip past all but the most pedantic logicians. The sticky point for making a "useful" argument, is that all your conclusions end up in the form "if X then X." You can never reach conclusions about external conditions "X" without the conditional "if" --- so you can never logically argue to an absolute conclusion like "torture is wrong," only conditionals such as "if causing pain to another is wrong, then torture is wrong."
The Nazis had plenty of good German engineers, but their overall culture wasn't "highly scientific and cutting edge." Analyzing, for example, Nazi attempts at building an atomic bomb, one finds that they had severe impediments due to a culture that elevated respect for authority above scientific inquiry. If the scientists at the top of the organization chart in an area of study were incompetent, no one would dare challenge them or independently work on more fruitful avenues. Political/ideological infighting and organizational stubbornness completely derailed the Nazi's atomic bomb ambitions.
The most unethical people through history has been highly educated.
Correlation or causation? Insofar as knowledge is power, being highly educated helps people to attain positions of greater power --- and hence greater potential for harm. Plenty of uneducated dumb hicks might be every bit as morally depraved as the famous highly-educated villains of history; they just never rose to a high enough position to cause harm beyond an occasional mugging or spiteful vandalism. Only the combination of ethical failings with massive power (achieved with the aid of education, or at least skills correlated to academic success) distinguish a few as "the most unethical people through history."
In addition to the valid points of the other respondents noting that a few exceptions to the average do not disprove the average, do any of your examples actually show scientists being less ethically minded than their less-scientific colleagues? The truth is a *lot* of people are/were terrible husbands, racist fucks, and hypocritical greedy bastards. Proving that lots of scientists are/were terrible husbands, racist fucks, and hypocritical greedy bastards doesn't mean they don't measure up well compared to the extremely low moral standard set by the broader non-scientific population.
If boards worked like the US political system, there would be two distinct groups of board members: about half wearing neckties, and the other half wearing bow-ties.
Every few years, people would say "those folks wearing bow-ties are completely screwing everything up. Let's kick them out, and replace them with the necktie wearers." A few years later: "those folks wearing neckties are completely screwing everything up. Let's kick them out, and replace them with the bow-tie wearers." And so on...
Meanwhile at the country club, the necktie and bow-tie wearers are enjoying scotch and cigars together, gently ribbing each other for wearing the wrong goofy neck-decorators.
Wait for the noise complaints and just show up to shut things down? That's no fun for the officers --- they don't get to spend their evening rocking out at the hottest parties while getting paid double-undercover-overtime.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't --- but that's no reason to give up and not hope and work for a world where, though not "owed," more people can have enjoyable and fulfilling lives (including through their work). The world doesn't even "owe" us the air we breath, yet with every breath we claim for ourselves a better life than we "deserve."
But it might not guarantee you a job doing what you actually love doing. Yes, you can enter the Dilbertian world of private industry, and make a nice six figure salary by wearing a suit and spending most of your time shuffling paperwork for scientifically illiterate management. There are a few industry positions that actually focus on exciting, rewarding research --- but they're as rare as tenured professor spots. If you actually love doing academic research (instead of inane corporate ladder climbing), then you're in the same boat as the Literature PhD: likely to spend decades in postdoc and associate professor positions, earning less than the median national wage, with no long-term job stability or prospects.
The software's creator hopes such detection can someday be integrated into devices like Google Glass
so Google can helpfully sell the info on to advertisers about when you're in a maximally receptive/gullible brain state, and serve up ads at just the right times when you're subconsciously most vulnerable to propaganda.
Why are you arguing using numbers for shockwave formation in atmospheric-pressure air? Do you not realize that sound can propagate in a variety of media, with different speeds (thus different thresholds for shockwave generation), and that the early universe wasn't filled with atmospheric-pressure air? Come back when you've re-calculated shockwave conditions in the state of matter prior to recombination; and if you can't do that, then don't flaunt your ignorance by spouting wholly irrelevant numbers.
I'm not quite sure what in my post you are "biting" on. I thought from the context that it was clear that the "claims" made were things that I disagree with (in the form claimed), but that (unfortunately) some vocal ignoramuses might proclaim. My point was that, from the scientific side, such claims become amenable to scientific inquiry (unlike sufficiently vague "God made the universe to operate according to the observed physical laws of the universe" claims, which are untestable), and fail under such scrutiny. I agree with you that from the religious side such claims can also be addressed on theological/scriptural grounds (as you have done, though I might quibble on some minor points), and re-cast in forms that are not scientifically invalidated (what I meant by my own picture of God being "refined/constrained," to work within a framework that need not be antagonistic to scientific observations).
Here is an analogy â" which isnâ(TM)t perfect, but I think it captures the flavor of your question â" itâ(TM)s like being American and hearing international criticism.
Nathan's analogy is just about spot-on, though not (I suspect) for the reasons he thinks.
More often than not these are manifestations of ideological struggles. It is more about what America symbolizes than anything. Most of their angst is directed against the political idea of âoeAmericaâ and what it means in the world rather than tangible acts by individual Americans.
Herp derp, people criticize America because they're ideological zealots who hate the Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity that we stand for. Never because they've seen their own country, friends, and family suffer from American bombs, American torture, American rape, American violent replacement of democracies with brutal dictators --- good ol' peace-and-freedom loving America would never do such things.
Nathan shows the same ignorant imperial hubris about Microsoft: anyone who hates them must be some Luddite who hates progress and success. Nothing to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish," antitrust trials, seeing real innovators being driven out of the market by third-rate Microsoft products. Nope, Microsoft is the bastion of software goodness in the world, so to hate them is to hate progress itself. Herp derp.
Surprisingly, I don't need to wear any corrective lenses, despite that running in my family.
As I wrote, “for my daily work,” the most important part of the OSX UI is the Unix-derived command line. Without this, I'd never have switched back away from Linux (using Mandrake Linux with KDE on a Beige G3 a few years before OSX came out). Terminal.app may only be “one program of many,” but it's the one program that allows me to run hundreds of other Unix-style programs that come with the computer (from simple shell utilities to text editors to compilers), plus all the ones I add that completely rely on running in a Unix-style environment. While these features may be “practically nothing” to you and the GGP, they're basically the whole reason I have a computer.
(OSX owes practically nothing to Unix at the UI level).
I'm not so certain about that. The most important part of the OSX UI for my daily work looks something like:
~ femtobyte [482] $
My post above was intended in jest (nonetheless, see Luke 11:5-11 for components of an "annoy the heck out of God to get what you want" theology in one religious tradition). One's "possibility of incurring favor" are very "model dependent," to say the least --- since currying favor with one potential set of gods is likely to be damning idolatry to another. Coming from the Christian tradition (by way of Lutheranism), I personally hold to a perspective in which favor is offered (undeservedly) to us by God, rather than incurred through out own actions; YMMV.
Thus you should at least strive to make sure such a god stays really pissed at you (just below the immediate smiting threshold, but plenty to not slip out of mind).
One can, however, ask for proof for particular claims about a God who defies the apparent "natural" order. When claims are made that, e.g., God created the world 6,000 years ago, with all species as immutable types --- proof, please? God sent a hurricane New Orleans to punish the gays --- proof, please? God will cure your cancer if you pray hard enough --- proof, please? While a God who acts through creating the entirety of empirical and intelligible reality is an untestable proposition, many more specific claims (in which the "finger of God" comes out of the sky to nudge an off-track cosmos back onto course) are often made. I actually happen to believe in God; but, willingness to ask what is amenable to "hard proof" (and noting its consistent resulting lack) considerably refines/constrains my picture of how God operates in the world.
yes.
The Panasonic sensor tech in the article will suffer this same effect: the actual purity of color separation in the deflected "red" and "blue" spectra is quite low (these are really "slightly pinkish" and "slightly blueish" being deflected, not red and blue). Add this to the already greater color uncertainty produced by mixing even "perfectly separated" RGB primaries into a W+B,W-B,W+R,W-R sensor, and the result will be very low color sensitivity --- plus the artifacts from Bayer-filter color interpretation. This sensor technology is aimed at tiny, light-starved cellphone cameras, where color is going to suck anyway and a >=2x increase in luminance info is extremely desirable (at nearly any other image quality cost). Unlike Foveon, the Panasonic tech can be added in a layer on top of a "traditional" sensor architecture, with the best available readout electronics (the Foveon sensors seem to be lagging a few generations behind in readout noise, and also don't scale down to the tiny pixel sizes for cellphones).
Compared to Bayer-filtered sensors, Foveon does far better at avoiding spurious color from aliasing artifacts along sharp transitions (which create a "speckling" of wrong-colored spots all over reconstructed Bayer-filtered images). Color accuracy in "smooth" areas (where interpolation between Bayer color sites works well), however, is significantly compromised. Thus, Foveon is much better at portraying fine high-color-contrast detail, but poor for subtle tonal transitions over extended areas (though noise-reduction tricks can hide a lot of this). The sensors are also highly sensitive to the angle of entering light rays from the lens, which makes designing a desirable interchangeable lens system more difficult (lens designs that work fine on Bayer SLRs can be unacceptably non-telecentric for Foveon, causing severe color shifts across the image frame).
The answer is color accuracy, which this chip severely sacrifices for better luminance info.
Mixing R+G, B+G, etc. together means that figuring out the correct R,G,B color corresponding to an observed signal requires taking sums and differences between pixels that sums a bunch more noise into the color channels.
Example: Consider sensor (A) with R,G,B-sensing pixels, and (B) with Y=R+G, C=G+B, M=B+R sensing pixels.
Suppose light consisting of R',G',B' hits each sensor: sensor (A) directly tells you R',G',B'
Sensor (B) requires R' = (Y+M-C)/2, etc., so R picks up the noise associated with all 3 pixels.
1. Deduction A implies that X is true.
2. Deduction A is sound.
3. If X, then torture is wrong.
Therefore, 4. Torture is wrong.
There is no assumption X is true. QED: There is an absolute conclusion of "torture is wrong", while having a condition "if", and no assumption that X is true.
All you've managed here is moved the assumption from "X is true" to "A is true, A=>X". How the heck do you call this an argument without assumptions, when you're assuming "Deduction A is sound" (where did you get that from? How do you know it on pure logical grounds?), and also "A => X"? Example: A="The moon is made of cheese," X="The sky is falling". Would you say "The moon is made of cheese, this is true, and implies the sky is falling (which means torture is wrong)" and say that's a sound argument requiring no assumptions but pure logic?
If you're going back to counting Germany's scientific prowess during WWI, then you're ignoring the important fact for understanding Nazi scientific culture that, during the rise of Nazi power and the ramp-up to WWII, there was a mass exodus of many top scientists from Germany (where do you think the US got all those German-sounding names to help in their atomic bomb project?). Under the Nazi regime, it was a bad idea to be caught doing anything that looked like "Jewish science" (you know, all that crazy "Jewish" stuff like Einstein's theory of relativity); scientists uneasy with the idea of formulating scientific ideas in "strong, pure, Aryan-sounding terms" that would fit Nazi philosophy/ideology did not generally stick around.
That's not to say there weren't plenty of competent scientists left, or that many projects managed (despite the top-level pseudo-scientific cultishness of the Nazi party) to succeed, or that similar bad/authoritarian influences didn't exist in other countries. After all, the Soviet Union managed to put mankind into space, while also supporting Lysenkoism (agricultural "science" based on Communist ideology, with assumptions about how good "proletarian" crops employing solidarity in dense planting could out-grow nasty, competitive "capitalist" crops). Germany certainly retained a lot of strong engineering talent; but the Nazi party driven ideological cult (opposing science by measure of "Jewishness" instead of, e.g., reproducible experimental results) was not a "science-friendly" atmosphere.
Sorry, I misunderstood your post (assuming you were using X as a placeholder for potentially different objects, rather than the set of tautological statements "if the sky is yellow, then the sky is yellow"). One might argue that a tautologically generated logical sequence (which reaches no conclusion distinct from the input statements) fails to be a "logical argument" (one step above the "argument" consisting of the empty set of axioms and conclusions). More pedantically, one could argue that "if X then X" is indeed itself an assumption, albeit a basic and widely shared one.
Anyway, you miss a critical distinction: so long as you have the condition "if," you can *never* reach an absolute conclusion of "torture is wrong": that "if" means your strongest conclusion is "if X, then torture is wrong" --- and proceeding from conditional to absolute requires taking up the assumption "X = true". You can't just drop an "if" --- otherwise, you'd be saying I could get away with this:
"if X, then torture is wrong"
"=> if torture is not wrong, then not X"
"=> not X" absolutely !!??!
Of course not, the conclusion is still premised on an "if" that I (you) aren't allowed to drop.
I think you're only disproving a straw-man version of the "theory" that does not follow (in any sense that a scientifically minded person would interpret) from the statement "scientific literacy makes people more ethical." Your "disproved" version of the statement appears to be "scientifically literate people are more ethical than non-scientifically literate people," which is not the same. A still "overly strong" interpretation of the statement is that scientific literacy would make any one person more ethical than if they weren't scientifically literate (but they might still be less ethical than someone else who started at a higher level). This interpretation of the statement requires different examples to disprove: you need to find a person with a measured level of "ethicality" before and after becoming scientifically literate, then show they were worse after. Of course, the "obvious" meaning implied by the statement is in some average sense, since only a dysfunctionally pedantic person would fail to supply that expected context.
True, you have constructed a logical argument not relying on prior assumptions. The argument may even be *sound* within an *assumed* framework in which your predicates (If X then X) are true --- this is the first place you need assumptions, but you can often get away with such widely held assumptions to slip past all but the most pedantic logicians. The sticky point for making a "useful" argument, is that all your conclusions end up in the form "if X then X." You can never reach conclusions about external conditions "X" without the conditional "if" --- so you can never logically argue to an absolute conclusion like "torture is wrong," only conditionals such as "if causing pain to another is wrong, then torture is wrong."
The Nazis had plenty of good German engineers, but their overall culture wasn't "highly scientific and cutting edge." Analyzing, for example, Nazi attempts at building an atomic bomb, one finds that they had severe impediments due to a culture that elevated respect for authority above scientific inquiry. If the scientists at the top of the organization chart in an area of study were incompetent, no one would dare challenge them or independently work on more fruitful avenues. Political/ideological infighting and organizational stubbornness completely derailed the Nazi's atomic bomb ambitions.
The most unethical people through history has been highly educated.
Correlation or causation? Insofar as knowledge is power, being highly educated helps people to attain positions of greater power --- and hence greater potential for harm. Plenty of uneducated dumb hicks might be every bit as morally depraved as the famous highly-educated villains of history; they just never rose to a high enough position to cause harm beyond an occasional mugging or spiteful vandalism. Only the combination of ethical failings with massive power (achieved with the aid of education, or at least skills correlated to academic success) distinguish a few as "the most unethical people through history."
In addition to the valid points of the other respondents noting that a few exceptions to the average do not disprove the average, do any of your examples actually show scientists being less ethically minded than their less-scientific colleagues? The truth is a *lot* of people are/were terrible husbands, racist fucks, and hypocritical greedy bastards. Proving that lots of scientists are/were terrible husbands, racist fucks, and hypocritical greedy bastards doesn't mean they don't measure up well compared to the extremely low moral standard set by the broader non-scientific population.
If boards worked like the US political system, there would be two distinct groups of board members: about half wearing neckties, and the other half wearing bow-ties.
Every few years, people would say "those folks wearing bow-ties are completely screwing everything up. Let's kick them out, and replace them with the necktie wearers."
A few years later: "those folks wearing neckties are completely screwing everything up. Let's kick them out, and replace them with the bow-tie wearers."
And so on...
Meanwhile at the country club, the necktie and bow-tie wearers are enjoying scotch and cigars together, gently ribbing each other for wearing the wrong goofy neck-decorators.
Wait for the noise complaints and just show up to shut things down? That's no fun for the officers --- they don't get to spend their evening rocking out at the hottest parties while getting paid double-undercover-overtime.