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Comment by stevenhuang | Hacker News Reader

> you can often find multiple studies supporting its use and multiple studies saying it's harmful.

While true and I get your point, there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. We should expect and welcome research with the awareness of vested interests.

Afterall it's not surprising for a substance to be beneficial in certain ways yet harmful in other ways. Research from opposing groups will help identify all interesting attributes of a substance. Until we learn all there is to learn, you should approach these papers more as additional clues pointing to a certain direction and not anything conclusive about the substance in question.

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I work for a biotech company that publishes peer-reviewed science. We use scientific publishing for marketing purposes, to influence the regulatory environment in our favor, and to look better than our competitors. Some of it is done to a very high standard. But in general, doing science with such predefined strategic objectives results in a corpus of scientific output that is hard to interpret. Essentially this sort of stuff pollutes the scientific literature and we should be ashamed that as a society we can't even let the technical content of the scientific literature be free from corporate interests.

> free from corporate interests

That won't help. All research is subject to the bias of the researchers. For example, many researchers have been caught fabricating results so they'll get famous. And just because someone is being funded by the government hardly means the government doesn't have a biased interest in the result. Everyone running the government has an agenda that isn't exactly altruistic.

This is funny.

Just a while back there was an article posted about how studies SHOULD start out with defined objectives. The argument was that academics are so desperate to publish positive results that they'll draw any positive conclusion, even if it wasn't what the study started out trying to accomplish.

Indeed. What you are describing is p-hacking

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

Thank you! I didn't know there was a term for it.

Are you directly involved in this? If so - how do you justify it to yourself?

(if not then ignore the question - I'm just curious about the mindset of people who do ethically-questionable work)

I think in the current research climate, you can replace "biotech company" with "university department" and most of your statements still hold true.

Many purely academic studies are done with predefined strategic objectives of advancing one's own prestige, only publishing positive results that fit "your narrative", and indeed polluting the literature with results that are at best incremental improvements, at worst regressions made up to look like improvements.

Second that

If p hacking wasn’t so prevalent I would agree with you. Otherwise the researchers funded by MEGA COFFEE will just keep running trials until they get lucky and publish the positive coffee result without mentioning all of the other failed attempts.

>We should expect and welcome research with the awareness of vested interests.

No, we should ban vested interests from funding research studies and reduce the SnR.

You mean push them into second order vested interest funding?

No, I mean harsh criminals penalties if they can be connected to higher-order vested interest funding too...

GP just means that effectively that's what will happen. just like wow churches push money through think tanks and orgs that donate to political campaigns. The money will never go away it will just get darker and darker and darker.

Who could possibly not be a vested interest? It's hard to think of more than a few cases where I've personally wanted to learn about something and didn't, at some level, hope for one answer or outcome over another. "Ban vested interests" is an impractical policy. stevenhuang's suggestion to be aware of them is much more practical and has the benefit that "vested interests" who truly do wish to fund an objective study aren't stopped from doing so.

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