Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Late last night, a thoughtful reader in Billings sent me a long email on the technical and ethical problems created by the Meddle in Montana project of the faculty researchers at Stanford and Dartmouth. He reached the heart of the matter in this particularly astute paragraph:
That relates to the biggest problem, which is both an ethical issue but also the bottom line problem with this flyer as research. It brings to mind the Prime Directive on Star Trek: they weren’t supposed to mess with the civilizations they ran across. I was a history major, not a poli-sci major, at Stanford, but I’m sure there is a counterpart in the social sciences to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in the hard sciences. If your means of observing behavior and collecting data interfere with what you are measuring, then you will not get a valid measurement, and you can’t be certain that what you saw would have happened if you weren’t looking. [Links added by Flathead Memo.]
The mailers introduced partisan information into an election that is nonpartisan. I thought the mailers were intended to help conservative candidate Lawrence Vandyke by inviting voters to conclude that Mike Wheat is too liberal for Montana. So did others, who complained to Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices. Whatever the researchers say they intended, that was the effect. Worse, they used the Great Seal of Montana to make the card appear to be an official publication of the State of Montana. If not fraud in the criminal sense, it certainly was fraud in the moral sense. Had these academics been aboard the Enterprise, Captain Kirk would have instantly beamed their behinds back to Star Fleet.
Although the alarum about their mischief has sounded, the professors can’t unring the gong they struck. The mailers cannot be retrieved, nor can the information they conveyed be erased from the memories of the voters who read them. Do the professors even realize, let along care, that they violated the Prime Directive?
Stanford’s apology is of the “Gee, mister, I’m sorry I killed your dog” genre. Stanford may be contrite, but Fido remains dead.
And Lawrence Vandyke remains the prime beneficiary of the mailers.