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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.

Can this really be said with a straight face?

Suppose you're an oil company, or a trader with a large position, and "hottest year on record ten years in a row" is bad PR that will make bills you don't like more likely to get passed. Or for that matter a company selling carbon capture stuff who wants to make sure it goes the other way. How about tobacco companies?

This has been a huge problem for as long as public data has been used to make decisions affecting profits.

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> Your argument is that people had no existing profit motive to use dirty tricks to influence scientific results/data?

No, that's way too broad. I don't believe that, and I didn't write that.

Oil companies indeed had enormous incentives to obscure and confuse the scientific record of climate change. But hiring thousands of Taskrabbits to go around the world blowing hot and/or cold air on weather sensors would not have helped them: some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.

Oil companies had to do larger-scale, longer-term stuff like funding think tanks, lobbying politicians, and writing op-eds.

Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained. The incentives for big oil companies probably haven't changed much… but now any random amoral idiot or degenerate gambler has an incentive to go find unguarded weather stations or water quality monitors, etc, and mess with them.

> some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.

Isn't that the same thing that happened here? It's a news story because they got caught. There is apparently already a law against this sort of tampering and it makes sense to have that law.

> Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained.

Oil and tobacco companies are the canonical examples because they're huge and contemptible, but the incentives scale all the way down. A small industrial plant is only allowed to use river water for cooling as long as the temperature isn't too high, they now have the incentive to cause the reading to be lower. The local school doesn't have A/C and therefore cancels class whenever the outside temperature is above some threshold, what happens when the kids figure out that the temperature sensor they use is in a public place?

You can make messing with the sensor illegal to apply a disincentive to counter the incentive but that doesn't mean the incentive wasn't always there to begin with.

It's now that poorer, less powerful, were caught. I'm sure it's been caught before, but buried.

Is that supposed to be better or worse? If it gets buried you don't even know that the data has been manipulated when using it for other purposes.

Also, the oil and tobacco companies have certainly been caught manipulating scientific results on multiple occasions.

I think it's a good thing that more people are aware that it is a possibility. It was a possibility before, but people would just say "we don't have evidence this has ever occurred"

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