How Industry Weaponizes Science and Sows Doubt to Serve Their Agenda
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Any time "science" supports large corporations making a lot of money, you should look more carefully. It doesn't mean that the science has been bent or broken, but it's a warning sign.
I think it should be clear that now more than ever that big corporations have the "means" to influence politicians, media, scientists and the general public in fantastic and dreadfully successful ways. If this influence will result in their profit, you have the "motive".
How to unwind this mess is a bit more or a puzzle - looking for solutions.
Near the end of this conversation piece, that point is noted:
“The CTR [Council for Tobacco Research] would say, “Publish whatever you want.” But the bias was built in to the selection of problems in the first place. And that’s a general principle that historians and philosophers need to pay more attention to: Problem selection and funding shape what kind of science gets done. One of the more general points about agnotology is that there are infinitely many things you might know, and that whatever in fact becomes known is only a tiny sliver of what might be known — infinitesimal really. What this means is that when you’re shining a light on something, almost everything else remains in the dark. And sometimes that darkness is deliberately kept dark; the darkness itself may be created, maintained, exaggerated, inflated, and reinforced, sometimes even by the very power of the light itself (think flashy fish lures or Donald Trump). I think there’s an assumption in a lot of thinking about science that there is some finite quantum of knowledge humans might acquire. Maybe we’ll never get it all, but at least we’re moving forward, vanquishing the darkness. But darkness has many friends, and often deep pockets as well. And darkness can easily grow as fast as (or faster than) the light. So it’s much more a constructive or organic metaphor that we need.”
Is there anything, any issue, that doesn't involve large corporations making lots of money? If we second-guess science just because it profits some corporation with a product to sell then we won't ever get around to making real changes. California just halted sales of small IC engine (leave blowers and the like). That's a boon for all sorts of battery makers. But it is still a small step in the right direction.
Preventative health practices, especially those utilizing simple, unpatentable, natural tools and techniques.
Progress is inevitable, and so is the damage from it.
This article is a guide on how to stay out of the way and avoid being trampled by its wheels.
The idea of universities funding basic research really took off in the postwar era when we funneled trillions of dollars into universities, massively expanding them and reshaping them. Prior to that, universities were much smaller and did not have a substantial body of faculty doing research, they focused on education and training. In modern universities, the faculty focuses on research and teaching is done by teaching assistants and non-tenured faculty, often working on short term contracts. That is all a consequence of the flood of government grants unleashed after the 1940s. Prior to the 1940s, most research was done by private enterprise or the military.
Not just the corporate world but also the political world has a "checkered" history in relation to utilizing science.
Governments are large corporations with a monopoly on force.
Again it doesn't prove the science is wrong, but it should cause you to put your skeptic hat on and take a deeper look.
Assuming the science is not wrong, keep in mind that the framing could be questionable or if there's a problem there may be solutions that are not being discussed because they do not benefit money or power.
Case in point: The pharmaceutical industry.
So, whoever can drive science, can drive politics and consumer choices. Politicians, lobbies and companies have understood it long ago. So, there is such a pressure on “science” to deliver some results, that the processes cave and give in to influence, at least by the simple fact that one side is funded and the other not.
It's a sick inversion of the conspiracy theory dynamic. In the mm-wave cell network case, industries, governments and academics are spelling out the plan and implementing it in broad daylight.
But if you speak critically of the plan, you don't know what you're talking about because you're no science expert. Well and even if you have a PhD in science, it's in the wrong field so you must be crazy.
Anyhow, a lot of the most interesting stuff gets relegated to the fringes, especially when it has the potential to stir up dominant social or political perspectives.
It's gaslighting by orthodoxy.
Other than attenuation caused by rain-drop scattering and atmospheric absorption, I couldn’t find much information about the downsides of using EHF EMR in the context of cell networks. Can you recommend any good summaries of developments in this area and its associated risks (privacy or otherwise)?
GP is probably thinking of privacy risks like:
"Using WiFi to see through walls" https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133936-using-wifi-to-see...
The frequencies GP is talking about are higher than current WiFi, but a bit lower than the frequencies used for the terahertz radar that can show exactly what you look like naked.
So, mm wavelengths ought to be adequate to show size, position, movement, posture, gestures (probably including finger and jaw movement), sightlines, and so on, more than enough to create deepfake video reconstructions of the interior of almost any dwelling and their inhabitants, though probably not quite enough detail to be able to tell that you gained a couple of pounds this week, and definitely not enough to reconstruct facial expressions.
Letting your own devices detect all that with active sensing would be bad enough, but being able to get the same info with passive sensing from outside is seriously creepy.
Some keywords for Google Scholar: "Passive localization", "mm-wave antenna array", "device free localization", etc.
I collected a few relevant articles in this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444
But I'm afraid every time I look there are more I haven't seen before, using different variations on the lingo, such as "passive sensing" and all kinds of different stuff.
Here's a video that really drives it home for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBFMsY5ZP0o
If science is a set of methods and tools to discover truth, it does make sense that there are self-interested "parasites" which feed off this reputation for their own ends. Sadly, it does seem these parasites are bad for us: smoking, sugar, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, low-fat diet lies, not to mention cottage industries of fake internet reviews, bots, trolls, paid shills, who go on forums and social media to sell their snake oil.
I'm actually struggling to articulate the concept simply because I lack the ability to cleanly categorize these things. To put it another way, a study published in an Evolutionary Psychology Journal is not as 'true' as Evolution itself. Despite this, the study benefits from all the clout established by the broader field.
"Hard Sciences" refers to scientific inquiry that is empirical in nature and has results that can be reproduced and confirmed independently. eg: most physics and chemistry
"Soft Science" refers to the rest. eg: psychology
I'm not sure making a distinction like that is particularly useful, in any case. I think perhaps that people who have studied a lot of science can already make the distinction fairly easily, and having phrases like hard and soft science just serves to create assumptions where they needn't exist.
Another categorization is the "natural sciences" and the "social sciences". Natural science is often split into "life science" and "physical science", again because biology is difficult.
Contrast that with 'Principle Science' in which studies are not affected by nearly as many uncontrollable variables and is more closely related to demonstrable cause-and-effect phenomena. The best examples are chemistry and physics. Biology is tricky to categorize in this because I see elements of both in it. For instance, a study investigating whether or not taking an increased dose of Vitamin B helps energy would most certainly belong in Instance Science, but the underlying mechanism of how Vitamin B is involved in the Krebs Cycle is Principle Science.
This idea is still in it's infancy and I'm curious to know people's thoughts on this distinction I'm trying to elaborate on.
There's "hard science" there but to throw a rope around the whole field is more of an exercise in faith, that there is One True Diet for All People.
The fact that there are too many variables and that it’s overly challenging to adequately measure them, coupled with challenges in studying people (ethics, self-assessment blind spots, laws against various options) makes nutrituon a squishy science, neither soft (people stuff like economics or psych) nor hard.
In any case, I was attempting to make the point that hard science and soft science are anything but settled categories, which seems borne out by the responses.
> empirical in nature and has results that can be reproduced and confirmed independently
All sciences conform to this. It's just that reproducing results in physics and chemistry is much, much easier and feasible than in the other sciences.
I just don’t think they’re useful terms. In many ways, physics and chemistry are the low hanging fruit of science.
Personally, I believe that psychology could be a hard science if it weren't for the limitations of our tools.
It's not a category that is immovable.
not sure if that categorization is possible.
> Despite this, the study benefits from all the clout established by the broader field.
here an example of AI and tech mumo-jumbo co-opted by psychologists and sold as "fact" to an audience of psychologists (I stumbled over this today while browsing the Psychology section of Springer):
"Chatbots to Support Mental Wellbeing of People Living in Rural Areas" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41347-021-00222-6
>> Gamification could be used within the chatbot to increase user engagement and retention. Content within the chatbot could include validated mental health scales and appropriate response triggers, such as signposting to external resources should the user disclose potentially harmful information or suicidal intent. Overall, the workshop participants identified user needs which can be transformed into chatbot requirements.
>> In addition to supporting those with mental ill health, digital technologies are also considered to have potential for preventing mental health problems and for improving the overall mental health of the population
>> Further research is necessary to try to equip chatbots with an understanding of emotion-based conversation and appropriate empathic responses, to adjust their personality and mimic emotions
a classic example because it even ignores that there is little to no research within psychology about the effects of when we condition vulnerable groups to pour emotions into these robotic "empathy sinks".
Science, as practiced, is a process that consumes dollars and PhDs and outputs peer reviewed papers.
Take a government funding basic research, with some hope there will be profit from this. Take an industry which damages public health and funds lies to cover this up.
Both have motives beyond curiosity, yet I think that there is at least a chance that the government-funded research is objective.
In practice, we all have material interests in the world. I think it's much more useful to think of "objective" not as a binary or a destination that one arrives at. But more a direction, like "up", that one moves in.
I mean, yes, be very skeptical of publications that justify an outcome their funders' wanted. But why should that stop at industry? Should we be so naive as to think that all the other science funders and fundees up to and including NSF itself don't have their own "agendas", not necessarily aligned at all with figuring out what's true and what's not?
Top of the agenda of all institutions is to survive, and second is to grow. In industry, that means making more money and making it more efficiently. In academia? Here our currency is "impact". In government? Here our currency is "power". "Impact" is really just another word for power.
The desire for power, for relevance, and for status are just as potent, and just as corrupt when compared to what you might consider an "ideal science", one whose practitioners are motivated by something like "curiosity." How much has our Science been influenced from these directions? It's a disturbing question, right?
I mean, can you even imagine that article? "How Scientists Weaponize Science to Create Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones and Serve Their Agenda (moar sinecures and grant money)". "How Bureaucracy Weaponizes Science and Sows Compliance to Serve Their Agenda (moar sinecures, bigger slice of the budget pie)". Seems crazy, right?
But is it? A Minister of Truth is a bureaucrat with a bureaucrat's salary, and has no real interest in "profits" beyond holding onto his position and advancing in the ranks. Such an organization is basically outside the realm of the market and profit-motives, and yet, would you trust such a ministry to produce good science? If not, why not?
Of course, we do not have an official ministry of truth, but if you adjust the telescope lens to bring into focus the constellation of universities, government agencies and other funding apparatus, it is rather difficult for me to distinguish what we do have from that one unified ministry. "They're the same picture." The org-chart is just more complicated.
If what you're saying is that the same corrupting influences from industry act on governments, then that's obviously true. If you're saying that the corruption of government emanates from somewhere other than the interests of business (or rather, the owners of business), I'd almost accuse you of dualism.
Grants, budgets, and sinecures are also handed out by the owners of industry/finance using the tool of government. Following the money always leads to the same place.
edit: all we can do is attack corruption loudly and specifically when we see it, and trust nothing until we have to. The result of that is anti-vax and a return to flat-eartherism, but what can you expect from a system that prioritizes the desires of tiny elites over truth?
Which means I don't trust almost anything in psychology, social sciences, or quirky health, nutrition and lifestyle recommendations if they don't sound like something somebody from 1000 years ago could have done.
Some people don't understand skepticism, and get muddled up in Occam's razor or something (which is just modus tollens of the similarly dubious "where there's smoke, there's fire"; a good starting point perhaps, but nothing to draw conclusions from), and they think that if they can't prove something, it must be false. That's not correct either. If you there is no proof, it could be either way.
We're in this bizarre zeitgeist where everyone is telling you to listen to science because it's all true, but for the love of god, don't engage in any sort of scientific inquiry yourself, who knows what heterodoxy you might arrive at.
The coffee machine at work has a bunch of advertisement stuck on it, how the coffee has been fine-tuned by experts and tested by scientists to be the optimal coffee experience. Like what the heck, am I not a better judge of whether I like the coffee than a bunch of scientists?
Impossible standard to prove.
> Which means I don't trust almost anything in psychology, social sciences, or quirky health, nutrition and lifestyle recommendations if they don't sound like something somebody from 1000 years ago could have done.
The myth of the paleo* = good is so dumb.
Of course most "paleo" nutritionists are scammers pushing cookbooks and dubious nutritional supplements.
You're right: most of the protein in the diets of our paleolithic ancestors came from insects and leftover carrion from the kills of more optimized carnivores. I've never seen these recommended in a Paleo diet.
The other thing is our understanding of nutritional science is so, so bad. It's just such a difficult area to attack with the scientific method. We've made good progress for sure but there's still so many unknowns.
Paleo is dumb because it ignores all other greater selective factors. It would be like judging wearing kevlar vests as good protection from cancer and heart disease because after you empty a revolver of hollow points into every fifty year old subject's chests the ones wearing kevlar lived the longest.
"For the majority of human existencr the diet which helped survival the most was high calorie because it meant they weren't starving."
Just like how our bodies were optimized to extract vitamin D from the abundant sunlignt, and to get benefits from physical activity.
"Paleo is dumb because it ignores all other greater selective factors"
"It would be like judging wearing kevlar vests as good protection from cancer and heart disease because after you empty a revolver of hollow points into every fifty year old subject's chests the ones wearing kevlar lived the longest."
I'd imagine it wouldn't be difficult to see which trade organizations were involved in which papers that circulated recently around these drugs.
Before COVID-19 these were touted as the most safe drugs, with a very small history of death or complications.
We all know that Pfizer and the other pharma corps are just _helping_ us out of the _kindness_ of their hearts, are super _trustworthy_ and even so virtuous as to be _heroes_!!
They learned from the scandal of big tobacco that crime doesn't pay and that it's better to be honest instead of doubling down on lobbying & propaganda.
They even sponsor news that relates to their products. And now they're coming out with a pill that has nothing in common with Ivermectin and supposedly gets much better results! Yay!!
Back on topic: is there a tool or product that can help figure out the funding sources of papers by a given topic over a timeframe? I.e. the ivermectin or hydroxyq papers published over last year-2?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
He basically weaponized psychology, group psychology to be more accurate, and still in full effect today. I mean, how else do you get young women to suddenly buck societal trends and start smoking at a time it was not "proper" to do so?
Another clever trick is when the food industry started coming out with ready-made foods to prepare, like instant cake mix. This was during a time when most people cooked from scratch, and didn't trust this magical box of powder you just add water to and bake. How nutritious could that be vs baking from scratch with whole ingredients? Well, the solution was pretty clever. "Add one fresh egg." It wasn't necessary to the cake mix, but it helped women feel like they're still using real, healthy ingredients and the product stated to really take off.
Here are some of his better known feats: https://listverse.com/2019/09/26/edward-bernays-freud-tricke...
Decent video about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOUcXK_7d_c
But the real question is how many times we don't hear about it. Many on HN are, like many executives, big on the duty of companies to maximize shareholder value. And this sort of manufactured doubt obviously increased shareholder value for a long period. So the real question becomes not "did anybody else ever do this" but "who wouldn't use a potent, cost-effective way to keep profits up?"
the strange part about that was why there was no counter-propaganda from the fat side. Surely any PR person worth their salt would pay some scientists to poke holes in studies saying that your products are bad?
>Covid-19
do tell.
Did that motivate decision making and political pressure? I have no idea - perhaps not. But the financial incentive from certain actors was there.
> the strange part about that was why there was no counter-propaganda from the fat side.
I suspect that sugar was simply more concentrated and organized.
There is a chance that will occur again.
In other words, this comment leads to direct polarized partisanship.. far removed from actual scientific practice
If topic at hand is "How Industry Weaponizes Research", the comment "fossil fuel scientific bias goes both ways" of "both sides" (as if there were only two sides to anything) is an example of "How to Weaponize comments on YNews" (!)
Remember when cholesterol in eggs was a big problem? And then remember when eggs became a superfood?
https://www.healthshots.com/healthy-eating/superfoods/brocco...
Psychology is used to make apps like Facebook as addicting as possible and hook emotions like fear and rage to boost engagement.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement_to_Cigarett...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement#/media/File:...
It is usually talking about some neutral tool (like science or speech or encryption or the Internet) and complaining that people they don’t like are using it in a way they don’t like.
The biggest epistemological advantage of science is that it is self-correcting even in the face of biased scientists. Suppression of science or only allowing science to be used or funded certain ways is self-defeating.
Did some of the issues eventually get settled on the side of truth? Sure, but with how much additional misery and how many graves? And how much time did actual scientists have to waste proving something wasn't every really in question?
But we know the game goes on. And even if science statistically gets there in the end, there's no particular reason to think it gets there for absolutely every issue in a timeframe that matters.
That depends on what your goals are, doesn't it?
If you were a tobacco exec in the 90s seeking a golden parachute, I rather suspect it was highly successful.
The scientific process is self-correcting, but it also doesn't exist in a vacuum. As they say, science progresses one funeral at a time.
Unfortunately we can't reverse environmental disasters, poisoning, cancer, and death, so we really need to be proactive on some things.
A good example might be Covid vaccines. Do they elicit an immune response? Yes! Do they prevent severe disease? Yes! Do they prevent transmission? Data suggests they do. How long does that effect last for? Seems to be 6 months, maybe 9 months. What impact does the Delta virus have? Vaccines are still effective, but less so, but not 100% sure about transmission risk or longevity of immune response.
There is “based on all known data, we strongly believe X” and there is “data proves X is true”. Those aren’t the same thing.
Mammon then Famine.
Corrupting science, whether for political or financial gain, is existentially threatening, but seems incredibly popular.
It is like the other conspiracy theory "car that runs on water that big oil and their government cronies are keeping down". It gives them a bogeyman, a miracle solution, and a simple ordered view of the world.
Think about it for half a second and how preposterously useful the water engine would be to governments if it existed. The military logistics of naval ships not having fuel tank but taking in water is just the start.
Why do you say this? anything I can read about ? From what I see in the news the government makes a plan for the future and executes it, it does not care about some billionaires or some company.
China does not need to create a convoluted scheme to pump money into some company, so it makes no sense. They could just give the population the miracle medicine/plant stuff and then write a contract for the big pharma for some vitamins that will be mandatory.
When it comes to COVID vaccines, anything that casts doubt on the need for them is verboten. Try stating that COVID, at 99% recoverability, is not dangerous enough for a mandatory vaccination, and watch your future prospects dry up.
Also, like the usual stats stuff that get misrepresented all the time, the mortality rate of COVID isn't <1%. Unless you're talking about a SPECIFIC type of COVID mortality measurement, it's higher than 1%.
There are many ways to protect the body from this viral disease. Most of them get no light of day. Zinc, diet, sun exposure, exercise. There seems to be a negative bias against discussing these, making studying them even harder. COVID-19 Vaccines seem to not have this issue. Why?
Generic drugs too seem to have an affect on the disease, but don't get the proper funding or get exposure in a way that is free from the conflict of interest that pushes alternative more profitable treatments.
There is a huge body of evidence on viruses that methods besides vaccines also work. Vaccines aren't the only answer. In fact, this is the only time in science we've said "Vaccines are the only answer, forget everything else we know about protecting the body from viruses" (zinc, sunlight, anti-virals, general healthy behavior)
Vaccines are being marketed as the only reliable ingest-able product, that works against COVID.
And all of those things you mentioned: social distancing, masking, congregating around stale air- they've all actually been compromised since vaccines came onto the market. Have you not been to a single bar since vaccines came to market? At least in Northern Virginia and LA, people have started going to places without masks, spent more time in rooms with people in higher populations, and distanced less. In fact, do you remember the time the CDC contradicted themselves to people telling them that yes they have to keep wearing masks then saying no they don't?
So, Yes, all those things have gone somewhere since vaccines became mainstream.
(Regeneron costs $2,100/dose. The Pfizer/Moderna vaccines cost around $20.)