Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

This "muzzled scientists" story is a bit overblown. I'm also a muzzled scientist - $LAWYER hired me to do some statistics on $FINANCE_THING and search for $LAWBREAKING. One of the conditions of my employment is that everything I did is legally privileged and I can't say anything beyond what is contained in this post. I was a scientific adviser to $LAWYER, and my job was strictly to help him, his client, and only them understand things better.

In much the same way, certain scientists employed directly by political agencies were held to some nondisclosure rules. I'm not sure I know why this is a story - is there some moral principle that all scientists should disclose everything and you can't hire them for confidential work?

View on HN

> I was a scientific adviser to $LAWYER, and my job was strictly to help him, his client, and only them understand things better.

Looks more like you're wearing an accountant or auditor hat than a scientist hat on this one.

>is there some moral principle that all scientists should disclose everything and you can't hire them for confidential work?

Yes. The search for scientific truth shouldn't be a narrative for the people who pay for it.

>I was a scientific adviser to $LAWYER, and my job was strictly to help him, his client, and only them understand things better.

And when it comes down to it, the client and their representatives (you, $LAWYER, etc) have or will have certain obligations to truth under the law; you might be muzzled but it's more of a reassignment of responsibility to somebody else.

Yes. The search for scientific truth shouldn't be a narrative for the people who pay for it.

So I guess you criticize every corporation who hires scientists to work on proprietary products? Elon Musk is such a fiend!

Look, a much better way to accomplish this is robust intellectual freedom. Rather than expecting every individual scientist to be able to say anything they want, regardless of employer, create a system where any scientist who hasn't chosen to be muzzled can state controversial ideas and expect them to be received with only intellectual criticism. You need far more than just legal protection, you also need a culture where dissenters are tolerated and not socially shunned.

You also need a culture where replication and debunking are given equal respect to finding novel results. The unfortunate fact is that if someone publishes a new result, that gets vastly less prestige than if they replicate (or fail to) an existing study, or spot statistical flaws in someone else's work.

>So I guess you criticize every corporation who hires scientists to work on proprietary products?

Those are engineers, not scientists. Even at that, the whole purpose of the patent system is to publicize developments while protecting those who create it for a short time.

You seem to be placing a lot of stock in the word "scientist" vs "engineer" or "accountant". Could you explain the substantive distinction you are making?

For my part I don't see much of one. In all cases one attempts to learn true facts about the world via careful analysis of data and experiment - the label is just for potential employers.

>>Yes. The search for scientific truth shouldn't be a narrative for the people who pay for it.

>So I guess you criticize every corporation who hires scientists to work on proprietary products? Elon Musk is such a fiend!

Then it's not science. If the scientific community does not participate it's maybe development. There is nothing wrong with it.

But there is something wrong if the public sectors stop doing science and get's castrated to be a thinktank for the current administration.

>Yes. The search for scientific truth shouldn't be a narrative for the people who pay for it.

I don't believe the parent comment is arguing on behalf of "merchants of doubt". He or she is suggesting that it should be possible to enter into a contract with a scientist in which the scientist agrees to investigate a scientific truth without disclosing it publicly in exchange for money. Whether you have herpes is a "scientific truth" a scientist might discover, but it's your prerogative whether that fact is publicly disclosed.

Where does that leave scientists who were already working when Harper showed up and unilaterally muzzled them?

With respect to my comment, it leaves them in a completely different position from the one I referred to, as they were before Harper's term.

I was clarifying that the OP did not appear to be defending the sale of "credentialed" opinions on political issues. The intent behind the "muzzling" matters. There are situations where a contracting party has a legitimate interest in enlisting a scientist to investigate a truth while maintaining confidentiality. Harper's suppression of scientific evidence was not one of these, but my comment addressed the notion that there are no such circumstances.

As a Canadian who was living in Canada at the time the previous government enacted said policy, I don't find this story overblown at all, and am very happy to see the new government moving so quickly to remediate this problem. There was a lot of public outrage at the time, especially given that this "muzzling" was seen as another part of the Harper government's systematic undermining of climate science in Canada.

basically this. I don't think yummyfajitas understands how against the data-driven decision the Harper Government is.

It's like the equivalent if the gvnt (instead of oil companies) studying climate change, and then hiding the results. except that the government is SUPPOSED to be morally engaged beholden to the best interests of society at large.

> is there some moral principle that all scientists should disclose everything and you can't hire them for confidential work?

I think the argument is that released scientific knowledge is generally in the public's interest, and since the research is in fact funded by the public, government scientists should be allowed to release whatever they want. The government is a public institution, so some feel that "confidential government research" should be restricted to very limited things.

That said, I do agree that it is all a bit overblown.

By political agencies, do you mean government agencies funded by the taxpayer?

Yes, government agencies funded by the taxpayer, with scientists directly employed to work for them. In much the same way, I wouldn't expect a person working for the DEA to be allowed to publicly say "legalize it", and I wouldn't be particularly outraged if in fact that is banned.

I use this term to contrast to, e.g., university researchers receiving an NSF (or Canadian equivalent) grant and (in name, at least) given political independence.

So you don't mean scientists, you mean whores who pad out the opinion of their employer.

No wonder you find Harper's policies unobjectionable.

A key difference:

You were employed by a private party. The muzzled scientists were employed by the citizens of Canada.

To make your example comparable, you would have been employed by an attorney on behalf of the attorney's client, and then the information you found would have been withheld from the client who was paying for it. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but it would be a breach of ethics on the part of the attorney to do so. Just as, in this case, it was a breach of ethics for the Canadian government to force scientists to withhold information from the people of Canada.

The government should serve the people, and the scientists should serve the government. Disclosure, as far as is reasonably possible, should be the default and should be transitive down from the government through its various arms. The same principle that makes secret courts, (generally,) a bad idea, makes forcing scientists to toe a party line, (generally,) a bad idea.

A "data scientist" is not a scientist.

In your mind, what is the distinction between the two?

I don't see any way to draw a strong distinction between what I did during my physics days and what I do today. Different math, sure - PDEs vs statistics. But then again the math changes when you go from quantum physics to statistical mechanics also.

You tell things to your hairdresser, and you tell things to your priest, but that doesn't mean your hairdresser is bound by the conventions around the confessional, does it? So you did some maths for a guy and signed an NDA, don't make it something that it's not.

Um, you dodged the question. I didn't ask "what's the distinction between a hairdresser and priest".

Umm, not at all. You are not a "muzzled scientist", a million of us have signed NDAs without making a big song and dance about it.

The question which you have failed to answer is "what is the distinction between data scientist and scientist"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com