Researchers Who Exposed VW Gain Little Reward from Success
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Just like the resources, knowledge and skills required to detect Cancer is very different from what is required to treat it, which is very different from what is required to cure it.
The healthy way to go about it involves understanding the gaps(usually from someone/group with experience) and then picking an issue.
"Optimize for a simplistic world Or satisfice for a realistic one"
Employees who can tell that a problem exists, aren't necessarily as profitable as employees who can resolve that problem. Or in some cases, they may be more profitable. Either way, it is not an identical task.
A person who can identify fraud is very useful in an accounting firm. Not so much in an engineering firm.
Just my attempt at interpreting the downvoted comment.
> The center he runs received $70,000 in 2013 from an environmental group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, to conduct the study that eventually exposed how Volkswagen had rigged vehicles to deceive regulators. The original purpose of the research was to show that carmakers were capable of meeting more rigorous limits on emissions of harmful nitrogen oxides. The work was more complicated than expected, though, and Mr. Carder had to make up a $20,000 or $30,000 shortfall from other sources.
> Over time, the researchers noticed that emissions from the vehicles — a Volkswagen Jetta and a Passat — were much higher than they should have been. But they attributed the discrepancies to technical defects or design flaws in the cars rather than deliberate wrongdoing.
> Mr. Besch presented the team’s findings at an industry conference in San Diego in early 2014, still not realizing they had uncovered a scandal. The data piqued the interest of officials in the audience from the California Air Resources Board. CARB, as the agency is known, worked with the West Virginia group before and had let the team use state labs to calibrate equipment for the Volkswagen tests.
It sounds like they were just doing their jobs, they found it by accident, and the insight actually came from CARB.
This history behind this is interesting, it's good they found it, and Dr. Thiruvengadam seems to be advancing in academia, so I think what recognition they got seems fair.
But you don't prove this. Let's see these rewards. No, a grant of $70k in 2013 isn't it.
Perhaps a bit off topic, but it seems like the poor guy has to spend a lot of time not doing research.
I personally left research mostly for this reason, I was asked to spend more and more time not doing actual research but finding funding and I suck at it and I don't like it.
On the other hand we reward the people who actively cheat and exploit the world with large sums of money.
Ask any old person whether they would prefer a pile of gold or a good night sleep, a fat bank account with vultures circling overhead or a comfortable feeling that they did good.
The latter can’t buy the former (although the former often happens anyways...life is funny). The former can never buy the latter and most oldsters I know grow to think the latter is the only thing that ever really mattered.
It's called survivorship bias, and it means that these very romantic ideas cannot be trusted without compensating for the bias. Those with too little resources died before you could ask them.
Indigent old people stuck recycling cans to make ends meet probably don't have this worldview.
"I still have sleepless nights trying to figure out how I’m going to pay the guys the next pay cycle"
I don't believe they do in general, and without having a bigger understanding of a lot of things, a lot of individuals are prone to magical, conspiratorial thinking, lacking in rigour.
For VW, you have very smart people, very self aware (i.e. able to read their own data), probably smart enough to snoop out what the law is, backed by an institution with integrity.
It's a classical case Whistleblowing type findings of the good kind.
'Random Employee Bob' may have access to a treasure trove of data they think is 'evidence' when in reality it's nothing of the sort.
Case and point: Manning with the cable leaks. Manning did not know what was on the cables, and turns out, there was nothing damming in them.
The other leak at the time - the video showing the deaths of freelance journalists probably isn't 'evidence' either. It's a shocking video, but the military misidentifying armed, unknown, unregistered individuals in a war-zone, moving towards friendly forces ... is a tragedy but probably not a crime. Though that leak is more contentious.
There are a lot of confused people in the world, who misconstrue their ideology for the more commonly agreed upon versions of what is right and wrong, and vast numbers of individuals in the press who are as much suited to narrative as they are to truth.
If you hop onto OAN right now, you'll see a delightfully despicable and shocking number of individual 'whistleblowers' who have 'evidence' that the election was 'stolen' by nefarious parties, and millions of people reading it believing that it's true.
Their incentive is clicks, Rudy Giuliani's is his pardon, or $20K/day. Which is why I implied 'crazy' incentives ...
It takes 'rigour' to counteract one's own impulses which usually amount to things like 'I disagree with the war, it was wrong, ergo, any leaking regarding it must be whistleblowing' - or - 'I agree with the war, therefore any leakage is treason'.
Manning 'cable leaks' exposed no US crimes, not even any wrongdoing on the part of the US and the questionable nature of 'whistle blowing' is compounded by the fact that he didn't even know what he was leaking in the first place.
Manning's 'exposure' didn't result in anyone being prosecuted except for himself, which was done by law (under a 'Democrat' political regime FYI).
Just the opposite, it demonstrated a US diplomatic corps trying to do a their very difficult and grinding jobs in a very complex and totally corrupt Middle East political situation.
What was the result of the leaks?
Mass protests against America?
No - it was the Arab Spring - Arabs on Main Street protesting, and in some cases overthrowing their own governments - because they were informed by the cable leaks.
So Manning, upset with his own government, leaks 'private information' - which materially has the opposite of the intended reaction: highlighting US diplomatic corps doing their jobs - and the entirety of the ME in deep corruption - highlighting the very underlying cause of external intervention in the first place.
The populist narrative of Manning being an absolute whisteblower is clearly wrong, mostly promoted by those who simply hate the fact the US was involved in a military capacity.
If Manning is a hero, it's to Tunisian and Egyptians, not to Americans.
Edit: for an example of material 'whistleblowing' relating to the war in Iraq, refer to Joe Darby [1], i.e. Abu Gharib.
Don't confuse the silly state-imposed fines with "value" of the researchers' findings.
I think your post is downvoted because it stakes a contrarian position, but doesn't provide supporting arguments / evidence.
Why were the new emissions targets the "right" ones? Why not make them half again and save even more lives? The answer is that they are numbers pulled out of the ass of some CARB or EPA bureaucrat.
In reality it's impossible to say that "1200 early deaths" were caused by VW emissions. It's statistical smoke and mirrors and doesn't even show up as a blip in the normal variation of total mortality of any given year.
How many early deaths were caused by California's refusal to allow or perform proper forest manangement, resulting in this year's devastating wildfires and the pollution they caused? Sorry for the whataboutism. Deaths are deaths.
Of course not. What changed is that in addition to being wrong, what VW did after the laws were changed was also illegal.
> Why were the new emissions targets the "right" ones? Why not make them half again and save even more lives?
Eventually they will, I hope. Change to a carbon-neutral and clean-air future takes time, and we’re in a transition period right now.
> In reality it's impossible to say that "1200 early deaths" were caused by VW emissions.
I mean sure, 1200 is an estimate based on assumptions you could probably quibble with. We know air pollution kills people and we know VW’s cheating significantly increased air pollution. While acknowledging uncertainty, its still important to reason about how many people VW killed.
> doesn't even show up as a blip in the normal variation of total mortality of any given year.
This argument proves too much, by this reasoning nothing that kills less than 100k people/year is real.
> How many early deaths were caused by California's refusal to allow or perform proper forest manangement?
A lot!! And that’s really bad! But it’s an entirely different problem from this one.
The reason why we talk about it so little is that so many own cars and that it's not popular to say that a carowner kills a freigthenly high fraction of a person each year. Whataboutism will always ensue.
Fixing a misbehaving car manufacturer is easier than fixing decades of forest mismanagement. Once the VW thing is over they can concentrate on that (unfortunately they still don't). The forest fire problems are also unique to California. Car emissions are a problem everywhere.
Regulations happen in the real world, where we face untidy compromises between moral goods like "people should be prosperous" and "people should be healthy". There is no good answer to the question, "What is the right level of pollution," but it's still a question we must answer. And then enforce.
If they didn't set out with that goal, then there's little point in rewarding them, because it would not necessarily incentivize similar outcomes in the future.
Rewards will incentivize some people.