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> 2. paying others to not just discredit Hayes' work, but to make him look "as foolish as possible"

> 3. putting together a team of over 100 people, including 25 professors, to act as "spokespeople on Hayes"

> 5. getting paid scientists to write op-eds accusing Hayes of being a "junk scientist"

> 8. sending sock puppets to Hayes' talks whose job was to only ask him the same embarrassing questions (“everywhere Tyrone went there was this guy asking questions that made a mockery of him. We called him the Axe Man.”)

These are the truly terrifying ones. The weight of people -- supposedly credible scientists -- that they were able to bring to bear to speak against him calls into question effectively every controversial scientific finding. If that much 'scientific' expertise can be bought, then you never know if that failure to reproduce certain results was bought and paid for or not! Following the funding sources isn't always possible. It completely corrupts the whole scientific process and destroys its objectivity.

If you want to see a similar example, look at what's happening to the team that discovered irregularities in rats generated by Glysophate. They're being discredited in a very similar way, only much more thoroughly. How do we know that all of that paper's detractors haven't been bought in a similar way?

I once came across a very scientific-looking paper, with lots of tables and graphs and technical prose, arguing that aluminum containers are less energy-intensive to produce than glass because the amount of energy required to produce the container from the virgin material is smaller. Yes, I imagine that once you have a sheet of pure aluminum, it takes less energy to form it into cans than it does to melt glass. But of course this completely overlooks the massively greater amount of energy it takes to produce virgin aluminum from raw bauxite! Much more than it takes to produce glass from sand.

The paper was a total piece of shit, and yet it looked completely legitimate.

> The weight of people -- supposedly credible scientists -- that they were able to bring to bear to speak against him calls into question effectively every controversial scientific finding.

Yep.

That aluminum paper was right.

Firstly, aluminum is originally made on-site at hydroelectric plants in inconvenient places. While it is energy intensive, nobody else is competing for that electricity. Cost = price of dam ÷ decades of aluminum production.

Secondly, aluminum recycles really well. Dumb machines can separate and purify it to high levels. The majority of aluminum has been recycled at least twice, amortizing the energy cost over a much larger amount of products.

Thirdly, aluminum is ductile (does not shatter) so containers can be made paper thin, and researchers are constantly devising ways to make it thinner. With recycling and thinness, the original production energy can be amortized over 10-100× more containers than an equal strength of glass.

Your first point is false -- in some countries bauxite is processed with power from coal-fired plants. Your other points seem valid.

That's madness or desperation. Sensible people ship bauxite as far as necessary to find cheap energy.

You make a good case, but I would like to see the numbers. What would it cost, for example, to run power lines to these "inconvenient places"? Under present-day circumstances, might it not be cost-effective?

Anyway, I still find it disingenuous that the paper never mentioned any of these issues (I think I looked carefully, but this was years ago so who knows). I think that's essential context that had to have been omitted deliberately.

The glyphosate team is a bad example. They deserved every bit of the criticism they received [2]. In fact, I'd go so far as to Monsanto's criticism was highly understated and generally an outstanding example of scientific discourse. I suspect that they (the team that found negative effects) didn't get the results they wanted so they came up with an implicit null hypotheses so shitty that they practically guaranteed p<.05: they first did PCA on a 48-dimension dataset and then did significance tests along the principal components. I'm not a statistician, but that methodology is about as dubious as it gets. You should read it and decide for yourself before using it as an example.

It's a pity that this kind of behavior is par for the course in the category of "controversial environmental findings," because there are plenty of legitimate questions to ask and legitimate issues to raise.

I have no relation to Monsanto, except that I eat their products. We talked about this paper [1] in journal club and were unimpressed (except by their criticism of Monsanto's methodology, which was, ironically, spot on). I wasn't aware of Monsanto's formal response [2] at the time, but from a brief glance it appears to hit the nail on the head.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793308/

[2] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Documents/SpirouxdeVendimo...

Well, and this is the very problem with these tactics and the very reason why they are so thoroughly evil.

I do not have the ability read a scientific paper and judge its merits. I'm a software engineer. I can usually get the gist of what the experiment did, what they found, etc, but not judge the merits.

The fact that this amount of scientific critique can be bought, for someone like me, calls into question any scientific discussion anywhere. Because I don't know who to trust to tell me whether a paper or experiment is good or not.

My natural inclination would be to be suspicious of Monsanto and side with the glysophate paper's author. After it was so thoroughly discredited, I believed the critiques of the paper. However, reading about the methods that were used against Tyrone Hayes, I'm now thoroughly questioning that paper's being discredited. Because the manner in which that paper is being attacked looks so similar to the manner in which Tyrone Hayes was being attacked.

Do you see what I'm getting at? It ruins the trustworthiness of scientific discourse for anyone not a scientist. And that's an enormous problem.

What source of information in life isn't like this? You have to trust the news, the history books, everything else. You make a fair point, but you can't simply just say the two studies can both be questioned because of the manner they are attacked.

You don't judge the the paper based on how it's being discredited. You try your best to judge the paper on it's own merits. If you lack the knowledge/information to do so, then you obviously have to live with the fact that your opinion on the matter may not necessarily reflect what is true. It's a tradeoff many of us make considering we can't be experts in everything. If it's something you truly believe in and want a better opinion on...then you have to spend time on doing research into it.

Everyone verifying everyone is O(n) work per person or O(n^2) total work. I think it is possible to do better than that. Web of trusts for instance.

It doesn't have to be everyone verifying everyone - just that a reproducible result tends to be more trustworthy. This is why reproducing results from other studies are also valuable scientific endeavours.

But you know, just verifying that it is reproducible takes time. Ideally you would have a system that enable you to trust everything you read with minimal work. Like if I claim the world is round you would know from my awesome reputation / fancy title / little green WoT indicator, that you can take that at face value.

In this case the poster tried to use fancy title, but found that it didn't work satisfactorily.

> The weight of people -- supposedly credible scientists -- that they were able to bring to bear to speak against him calls into question effectively every controversial scientific finding.

Since you claim not to be a statistician, pardon me if I also ignore your unsubstantiated opinion that the null hypothesis was "so shitty that they practically guaranteed p<.05".

Hey, you don't need to be a statistician to understand the "data mining" fallacy. If you look at 100 different null hypotheses, and you set p<.05 as your threshold for rejecting, then you're going to find ~ 5 ones you can reject at p<.05. Duh. Monkeys typing Shakespeare and all that.

The only way to combat this is through whistle-blower rewards. This kind of behaviour is so damaging to the society that it's worth government monies for this - and meanwhile, you can recoup costs by fining the companies. It will at least minimize the damage, and incentivize companies away from this kind of behaviour. Some companies have billions of dollars of profits to protect, and business-wise, spending as much of that as they need to maintain the sale of their product or service is "smart" business - though if a chemical causes harm to the environment and/or people, then it needs to not be pumped into our environment.

9. Syngenta hired a communications consultancy, the White House Writers Group, which has represented more than sixty Fortune 500 companies. In a memo describing its strategy, it wrote that, "regarding science, it is important to keep in mind that the major players in Washington do not understand science."

which is why it's crazy that they get to decide what funding science research gets!

Cost of doing all of the above (travel, paying people) would run what? Hundreds of thousands? A Million a year?

What about the very people who ran the operation? They were probably retired law enforcement or some govt intelligence type. I can't think of normal office worker (CPA, MBA types) being capable of the methods described.

They must've been paid pretty highly in part because the higher ups wanted to buy silence from the operatives...

All the methods are NOT assumptions but from internal notes of the company. Pretty amazing. Shouldn't this be investigated by the govt attorneys who go after racketeers? They sold a product that was damaging and did pretty much everything (except physical injury) to try to continue selling it.

Who are these people, and why are they not being named?

Syngenta has 14B in revenue every year; a few million seems like chump change for a company to use underhanded unethical tactics to protect their flagship product.

Searching Duck Duck Go on the contrary, gives credible results as Wiki page and his own anti-atrazine website

This is the reason why I feed DDG all my data, even if I'm going to use their !g function to do a Google search anyway.

A monopoly on search is a monopoly on the truth.

I'm curious when you say you feed DDG all your data. What does that include?

Also, instead of allowing competitors access to your data, what would you lose by denying everyone access to it?

I mean that I run my searches through DDG, I dont think there's a way to even allow them to have anything else as they strictly don't track.

There's no other way to have a search engine other than by having an IP and a search query so I think that's about the best I can do.

The industry has already taken care of building (b), there's little risk of that at this point.

The scary thing is just how commonplace, and how well-thumbed the playbook is.

Look up the stories behind the disinformation and smear wars waged on behalf of tobacco, leaded paint, MLK, labor organizers, environmental activists, global warming (especially), and others, and you'll find the same story again and again. It's very useful to read these stories, because the tricks simply don't change.

In a recent posting on documentaries, "The Corporation" was listed, and I took the opportunity to watch it again. Yes it's long and repetitive, but it's good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6zQO7JytzQ

A friend of mine lost his father as a child in an industrial accident which turned out to be the manufacturer's fault. That process involved years of litigation, much of it lead by his mother and a young attorney (the other families were less active) against a major corporate titan. They attempted to smear her character and play all sorts of other dirty tricks, but did eventually lose. The whole affair did form the basis of an excellent education in corporate cynicism, however.

> A friend of mine lost his father as a child in an industrial accident ...

A few minutes spent editing could have prevented this -- surely your friend's father wasn't killed as a child in an industrial accident. Unless that child was sexually far ahead of his peer group.

English wasn't my first language this morning.

I am not a lawyer, not even close; but isn't this systematic destruction of a person's image illegal? Libel (2,3,5)? Stalking (8)? Etc?

Making someone look foolish is not libel.

Yes, but what about:

3. putting together a team of over 100 people, including 25 professors, to act as "spokespeople on Hayes"

5. getting paid scientists to write op-eds accusing Hayes of being a "junk scientist"

Defamation of character is tortuous: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Defamation+of+...

Conspiracy to defame would also be tortuous, and in the context of this case, possibly criminal.

> Defamation of character is tortuous [sic]

No, it's tortious.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tortuous : "full of twists, turns, or bends; twisting, winding, or crooked: a tortuous path."

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tortious : " having the nature of or involving a tort; wrongful."

Thanks, yes.

Setting people up to make fools of themselves is not defamation though. Nor is factual spin.

Setting people up to make fools of themselves

In a conspiracy, for an ulterior motive, on a large scale, you wanna argue that in front of a jury?

I see very little of that as unethical. What is objectionable about researching one's opponent and try to discern his weaknesses? What is objectionable about mocking someone who is a risk to one? What is wrong with paying someone to write an article? That is wrong with trying to trick one's opponent into tripping?

I am slightly troubled by their use of Google keyword searches. I'll note that the Left didn't have those concerns with their 'smirking chimp' campaign.

Frankly, from the article Hayes appears to be either his own worst or second-worst enemy. One can either try to win a chess game or upend the board, but one can't choose to upend the board and then try to maintain one's dignity.

Edit: I forgot one important point. The items you mentioned overlook one very key issue: is atrazine actually net harmful? That's the only real question. If it is, then its makers have a duty to cease production; if it is not then they have a duty to continue. If it is net-positive, then it is _good_ for them to discredit someone who opposes it, since by definition his course of action will be net negative.

The article refers to a growing body of research supporting Hayes, yes.

Let me try to explain to your why it's unethical to behave this way.

You don't attack the messenger, you attack the message, and you do it with better science. No, it's not OK to bring the fight to the gutter if an honest man is making an honest attempt to follow the science.

An ethical response to a challenge from the scientific community on the efficacy or safety of your product is never a win-at-all-costs response. When a scientist is researching your product, unless you can show the research itself is a fraud, the only acceptable response is to accept or further the research.

An ideal response is not only to pour funding into furthering the research, it's to work alongside the other team collaboratively in doing so.

The ethics don't change depending on whether atrazine is actually net harmful. The only way to determine if atrazine is net harmful is through research exactly like this. We need this kind of research to happen, or net harmful chemicals will remain in use. Remember, Tyrone Haze starting his research on atrazine because Syngenta asked him to. From that point forward he was performing a public service.

Hope this helps you understand why it's NOT acceptable for companies to behave like this.

when the real possibility that your company's product is harmful, or detrimental to the environment, you could use your resources to continue researching it, at the cost of losing your profitability, or use your resources to vilify the researcher and stop the research from going, and continue to gain profit selling the product.

A human would feel guilt. A corporation would feel nothing, except for the sound of money.

> No, it's not OK to bring the fight to the gutter if an honest man is making an honest attempt to follow the science.

You're assuming that he's an honest man. He could be a dishonest man. He could be crazy. He could be persecuted, and still have a persecution complex.