Director's Notes: Ep 212 - The Campus

A few months ago, Jeffrey and I were discussing the upcoming year of Night Vale. “It feels like it has been a while,” I said, “since we’ve had a real antagonist.” This may or may not be related to today’s episode.

Science is one of those things that we talk about all the time without quite knowing what we mean by it. “In this house, we believe science.” But of course, science isn’t really something you believe or disbelieve. It’s a tool, that can and should be used. And it is the best way we have to come to certain kinds of answers, like, say, what’s a good vaccine for the novel coronavirus? But the work of Josef Mengele was also science. 

Science, like any tool, is value neutral. It can be used in good and bad ways.

One way I think about it is this: science is able to tell us whether a person has cancer. It can tell us where the cancer is, what kind of cancer, and some treatment options for the person. But science cannot tell us whether cancer is good or bad. “Good” and “bad” are not words that have meaning for science. It’s not a deficiency, it’s just not what the tool is designed to do. We have to bring our knowledge that cancer is bad from other parts of the human experience, ones where there are no objective measures.

A scientist without a strong ethical basis is a dangerous thing. A person with a chainsaw can be cleaning up a fallen tree or they can be murdering a cabin full of campers. The tool is only a tool.

Misc. note:

Jeffrey and I were hanging out backstage during a live show in Woodstock, NY. We were talking about how we never did horoscopes in the podcast anymore, because they took up too much of the episode. By the time you’ve covered every sign, boom there’s like a quarter of your script right there. Still, talking about it made me want to try again. I just did my best to make every horoscope short and snappy.

-Joseph Fink