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Comment by mathgladiator | Hacker News Reader

What I want to know is this. How do people go to work, find out they need to _work_ to discredit someone, then try to go on about it. Coming from the tech world, I'm not even sure how this exactly works, and I wonder if I have rose tinted glasses for most of the "real world". For instance, are there meetings about who and how to discredit people?

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This is very common. After graduating, I spent the last six years doing consulting for various Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies, working in some 20 countries with routine interaction with C-level execs and board members.

These activities usually fall under the banner of 'change management and corporate communications', for which an entire army of specialists are brought in to 'manage' perceptions and ensure 'alignment' both inside & outside the organization.

Specifically within the pharmaceutical industry, it's not at all unusual for clinical trial data to be misrepresented.

Even worse, in second and third world countries with lax regulations, drug testing is conducted on a massive scale - often sickening and sometimes killing the most vulnerable. Just Google 'third world drug testing'.

So I'm often a little surprised at the anti-regulatory tone on this board. I agree that some regulations are detrimental to innovation (e.g. the resistance to Uber). But the real world is far less rosy and idealistic than our beloved startups.

I couldn't in good conscience be associated with this type of unethical behavior. So I decided to leave that world behind.

Ever since, I've been diligently diving into various programming languages, design patters, and frameworks. Best decision ever. I can't wait to get back into the software development world!

Remember that people also go to work & find out who they need to kill this week, a lot of people.

I don't think that fundamentally unsavory jobs have a particularly hard time recruiting. Corporate lawyers playing zero sum games, abusing the law (their own chosen profession) and doing other mean nasty ugly looking things have people lining up for the job while more ethical lawyering jobs have shortages

I suspect it goes something like this: if we don't do it we will lose money and possibly our jobs. It's us or them, and for most people that is then not a difficult choice.

> I wonder if I have rose tinted glasses for most of the "real world".

This depends on how you are defining the 'real world'. If you think of society as an ecosystem it should not surprise you that prey and predation occurs, as occurs in natural systems. In a natural system, if something is both possible and successful it is very likely to occur.

As for jobs that the whole purpose is to discredit people, have not paid attention U.S. politics? Mudslinging is a very popular method of securing political victory. Many of our intelligence agencies are built on collecting just this kind of information.

What if you believed the work in question unfairly demonized your product? What would you do then?

Note that the EPA reviewed all the data in question and still determined that the risk did not outweigh the benefit. The article implies that industry owns the EPA, which I find a little surprising due to the power they can (and do) wield.

Anyone else shocked at the number of studies the EPA reviewed and found didn't fit their definition of quality work? Wow, kind makes you wonder!

It makes me wonder if, as the article stated, its possible that the standards they are looking for are only really possible by very expensive studies funded by the industries they are supposed to study. Then again, given all the other nasty business conducted by the pesticide company in this article, regulatory capture is probably not something they would attempt...

Welcome to the grand world of revolving doors and regulatory capture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture#United_State...

"What if you believed the work in question unfairly demonized your product? What would you do then?"

Yep, Don't assume the 'other' side is just being corrupt or greedy. They could have some true believers that think you are the crackpot and being dishonest or have your own greedy / ambition motive. Look at political discussions and how few false first stories are corrected if wrong.

It gets worse if one or both sides believe "the end justifies the means".

I doubt meetings start with "who do we discredit this week?". After all, a company might be unlucky and hired someone with a conscience (or more profane: the slides end up in court through discovery at some point).

Make it "who are the main detractors and what is their agenda?" and you're fighting for a noble cause.

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