zlacker

Art is relatively low stakes. We can always create more art. You should increase the stakes as a thought experiment.

The person who solved global warming/cancer/whatever turns out to be a terrible person? Should we throw away their work, and come to a different answer? Or wait a few generations so people forget and come to the same answer again but the people involved are “pure”?

>>2muchc+(OP)
There is some art that, to some people, is as important as anything else in their lives. For some, the stakes are that the artist who made the art that made them want to keep living after, say, being sexually assaulted, was himself credibly accused of serial sexual assault.

I’m not advocating a decision here, but I wouldn’t call that low stakes.

>>2muchc+(OP)
Fritz Haber has entered the chat. His first paragraph sounds pretty solid:

>Fritz Jakob Haber (German: [ˈfʁɪt͡s ˈhaːbɐ] ⓘ; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives.[4] It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population.[5][6] For this work, Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.[7][8][9] Haber also, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.

The second paragraph gives the context:

>Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement,[10] to develop the Zyklon B pesticide used for the killing of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

>>2muchc+(OP)
We can't just throw art away. Once it's there, it is part of everyone who read/saw it. The idea of doing this (eliminating art from history because we don't like its creator) is not only nonsensical, it is also one step closer to fascism.

>>2muchc+(OP)
For individual people I don't think all art is just throwaway like that. Iconic music like Kanye or Michael Jackson were part of people's happy memories and experience living. They left a lasting impact on music and pop culture.

For your thought experiment, I don't think we as a whole threw away the scientific work of the nazis. We have a concrete answer to that

>>tayo42+U9
I don’t think people are always aware of just how much stuff is built by really terrible people or on the backs of really horrible things.

Sure, some people take art seriously. But throwing it away is super easy. You don’t alter your quality of life much if you burn all your Harry Potter books even if that was a defining part of your childhood. Removing technology from your life on the other hand is hard. Doing something that has little consequence to your life is kinda meaningless in the scheme of things.

>>2muchc+(OP)
Factual work remains true regardless of who discovered it. If they actually found the solution to global warming or cancer, then fine. It remains true and useful regardless of the person. But you might want to consider how to not pay them royalties for it.

The problem with unethical behavior in sciences is that you have to check - which you should be doing anyway, but once someone has been exposed as a fraud the community as a whole needs to go back and clean out all the fraud by checking all their work. Unethical behavior in someone's personal life doesn't necessarily invalidate that.

Although I don't see many people talking about ReiserFS these days.