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Comment by TheSwordsman | Hacker News Reader

The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate.

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That's life, my man. If you think you're going to get the same access as Raj Chetty is, you're in for a rude surprise. The society of academia is built on trust and since people abhor providing information, academics who have other means of demonstrating trustworthiness will be the ones with access.

This is true of everything from IRS data to a startup's data. I worked at a company which shared data extensively with researchers. But we weren't idiots. We gave it to people we trusted. Not every clown claiming to be an independent researcher. That's just sensible.

> The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate.

Today, data is gold. Companies may give it to academic institutions for free, but that's mostly because they hope the academics will publish their work and cite to the original source data, effectively free marketing.

From their perspective, it's a way of offloading the otherwise large amount of work needed to evaluate a given researcher. Universities have reputations to protect, and so have things like deans and provosts and IRBs. Whereas any random interested person could be the next Cambridge Analytica. So like so much regulation, it's unfortunate but made necessary by jerks.

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