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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I've defended Monsanto repeatedly on HN (there are some extraordinarily popular beliefs about Monsanto that turn out, from what I can tell, to be just completely false, and they used to wind up here a bunch). I'm not carrying any water for them. I'm pro-GMO just in principle, but neutral-to-skeptical about any company of Monsanto's size. I'm sure the company itself is perfectly amoral. I'm just calling actual issues like I see them.

Naturally, plenty of people on HN think I'm a paid shill (what makes this funnier is the company I founded and worked at for most of my time on HN was named "Matasano", which was so frequently confused for "Monsanto" that we put a sign on our window about it in our Mountain View office).

My point is just: your intuition for whether comments are paid shillage are likely to mislead you.

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I’m a biochemist and while I’m not interested in sticking my neck out to defend any company, a lot of the criticism directed at Monsanto is unfair, uninformed and/or unintelligent.

This is particularly true of criticism levied against glyphosate (one of the least-bad herbicides I know of) and GMOs (which people are usually just super confused about).

Disclaimer: zero conflict of interest, I make all my money building software in the non-bio world.

Neat, I have a kid graduating with a biochem undergrad degree right now. Reassure him about his job prospects! :P

There's no money in life science except at the very top. All the (dear) nutjobs that want to "follow the money" should look into software engineering haha.

If you run "ad campaigns" like Monsanto I don't think you can really call it unfair at this point. Why demand fairness here?

If you are a biochemist you may have been either a victim or a participant in their campaigns. You should be angry at them if they damage scientific integrity apart from that because it will reflect on anyone working in that field.

Here is the multi billion dollar company trying to influence reporting but this comment from a random redditor is wrong and a bit unfair? I don't get the incentive to even mention that.

Even if Monsanto is trying to influence reporting, that doesn't mean that the criticism against GMO is automatically correct. That doesn't even make sense

The previous commenters are talking about the criticism of GMO in which GMO organisms are suddenly killing babies because there's corn making fish proteins. The criticisms literally don't make sense from a biochemical mechanism standpoint, and the previous commenters are pointing this out.

That means that the previous commenters are standing up for scientific integrity while you come along saying "big company bad, therefore everything big company says is lie"

A genetically modified mold is used to create citric acid for a hundred years now and it used in almost all types of food. Maybe better if people don't know but even there are still problems with intellectual property.

Still, not the point. The topic of the article is corporate propaganda and you hand wave criticism away by making fun of "big company bad" remarks. To feel better than some of the most stupid criticism? That doesn't elevate you that much higher.

Yes, big company is bad. It did influence reporting and research for its own interest. That is very, very bad. Much worse than a criticism not hitting the mark by miles.

> I don't get the incentive to even mention that.

"The best way to damage a cause is to advocate for it badly."

If you allow bad anti-GMO/Monsanto arguments to proliferate, the good ones will have a harder time reaching the light.

Often an intuition as to whether a particular comment is a paid shill is inaccurate, but one cannot deny that there are clear trends that indicate that paid shilling is occurring in general for a particular topic or organization. There are swarms of posts and comments with the same talking points that you find on the company's website, small subreddits in support of them that have no real reason to exist other than as aggregators of talking points, and an exaggerated responses to seemingly non-controversial statements that go against the company.

It's not some lizard man conspiracy that bot nets and sock puppet accounts exist. In fact they are a pretty standard MO on the internet.

+1 same stuff happens in nuclear power. I spent 15 years getting trained in the field and every time I say something factual on the internet people scream shill. It's nuts.

>I'm pro-GMO just in principle

One doesn't have to be a shill though - they can genuinely believe and spread what they read from shills and their "expert" "independent" arguments.

Wouldn't innocently reading and accepting as genuine science Monsanto's astroturfing and Monsanto-ghost-written "scientific" papers, "independent" experts defense, etc. play quite a role in making many people pro-GMO "in principle"?

Parent coment talks about pesticide use and you pivot to "GMO"... Interesting. Why the deceptive debate tactic?

You've also stumbled over yourself to avoid any criticism of Monsanto for perfectly valid reasons, so that factors into whether people consider you to be a shill or not. You have set the precedent for how to defend imperialist monopolies, that's for sure. If you're not being paid, you probably should be ..

If Monsanto's competitors aren't paying you, they should be. /s

Monsanto doesn't have any competitors. It just buys them.

Wrong, Monsanto was bought by Bayer.

You say Bayer, I say Monsanto, the distinction is entirely irrelevant since they both have a history of aggressively buying/smothering any perceived competitors that threaten their "own all the foodz" business model.

Precision and exactitude are almost always relevant, and even more so when directing criticism.

It is precise to call Monsanto and Bayer the biggest threats to food security the human species has ever faced.

Certainly could say something about how concentrating power in a few corporations is not a good thing but that is a result of capitalism under a lax anti-trust environment and all companies play under the same incentive. Not in terms of the technology though.

Bayer/Monsanto certainly have set the standard for corrupt control over the worlds food resources, though, and they're definitely playing evil games in Ukraine, for example ..

And Greenpeace and similar ilk wanted to block golden rice which could potentially saves many lives and prevent blindness in areas where vitamin A deficiency is common. They care about nothing but to demonize a technology for the purposes of their misguided ideology https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/26/gm-golde... . As far as I know Monsanto/Bayer do not own any IP around it.

I don't agree with this.

FWIW, Monsanto isn't as much of a household name in my country (I don't think), so I'd heard of Matasano before I heard of Monsanto. And i'll probably be mixing the two up for the rest of my life :)

What's yet even more funny is the website in your user info is suckpuppet.org. Heavy irony I guess? I hope?

I've owned that domain since before the word took on its current message board meaning. I just liked puppets made from socks.

The term has been in use since 80's Usenet - has it been that long? Wow. Fair enough that you just like sock puppets. Though I hope you do you see the humour in someone who defends big corporations like Monsanto on forums having an email ending in sockpuppet. It's so on the nose its almost painful. Anyways, enjoy your day.

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