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Comment by Clanan | Hacker News Reader

Nothing you said refutes my claim. All research requires some sort of funding. Humans have biases which can affect their judgment/work. If you think potential conflicts should automatically make a paper worthless, then you're basically excluding the vast majority of scientific work. Read the paper and decide whether its methodology and results are valid and correct. Don't just look at a list of sponsors and walk away - that's just intellectual laziness.

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> Don't just look at a list of sponsors and walk away - that's just intellectual laziness.

Is everyone supposed to personally fully read every individual scientific study? That doesn't scale.

The only way it works is to have experts you trust to give you the truth, which is what the scientists are supposed to be, but the funding source undermines the trust.

Nah, you’re just lazy. You’re not supposed to read every single piece of research in existence. No one person does that. Not even the scientists.

But if the topic interests you enough for you to comment about it and there is a research paper that you can read, then just read the dang paper or let other people make decisions for you. Nobody has to give you the truth. And, on top of that, even if the results of research are quantified, there may not even be an unquestionable “truth” — the implications of the research can still be up to interpretation.

> Nobody has to give you the truth.

Then you have to figure it out for yourself. For everything. Which, again, doesn't scale.

At some point you do need to trust some people to make some decisions for you. But what kind of fool trusts someone with a conflict of interest?

Lots of research requires funding. And of course the funders will have a reason to part with their money. People aren’t going to pay for things they have no reason to pay for. Simply deciding whether a piece of research is valid after only looking at who funded it is a major fallacy that betrays the basis of the scientific method itself.

Science isn’t a matter of trust, it’s a matter of verifiable results. The results of a scientific research paper must be repeatable by a third party following the same methods. Go see the merits of the research: it’s methodology, its results. If everyone simply looked at a list of funders and went “welp... this research is biased and invalid”, then we would have hardly any “valid” research.

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