High on their own supply
3 Likes
[quote=âjtf, post:36, topic:50980â]
People play up the conflict of interest angle way too much, in my opinion.
[/quote]Industry and corporate media plays it down too much, in my opinion. Of course, thatâs not just my opinion, but also the repeated findings of the world-renowned media experts at fair.org.
Now, you may disagree with fair.org, but unless you work within the media watchdog industry, youâre just coming at it from a âbubble of enforced amateurismâ, correct?
everyone qualified has in some way been involved with industry
Thereâs a large difference between being âin some way involvedâ with industry and direct conflicts of interest. My links pointed out examples of conflicts of interest and thatâs what I mentioned in my post and revised graph.
Also, for you to say that being involved in industry is the only way for someone or some group to be qualified on an issue is rather bizarre. With that kind of logic, any cancer researcher or group who hadnât worked within the cigarette industry was never qualified to study the links between cigarettes and cancer. That flies in the face of reality.
Real incidents of bias are much rarer than most people seem to believe.
Do you have any valid evidence to back up that rather amorphous supposition?
Never mind that a consultancy might work both for and against the industryPlease name some that match your specific criteria. Again, you're using rather amorphous terminology there, so I'd prefer you to offer some specific examples as I've offered in my previous post (with links).
The only person that can claim to be neutral in an industry-linked field like nuclear engineering or agronomy lives in a bubble of enforced amateurism!
Thereâs several problems with your supposition there. Thereâs sometimes a âbubbleâ of enforced bias within industry studies. They will skew the methodologies of the studies in order to work in their own profitable favor. This is very well documented.
For you to once again claim that every scientist, researcher or expert that doesnât work directly within the industries they research to be an amateur is, again, bizarre and untrue.
For example, why would a financial analyst and researcher have to work directly for a nuclear engineering firm in order to determine cost analysis for implementation of say, new nuclear power plants in France versus the utilization of wind energy or tidal energy and more? What would give your nuclear engineering employee more insight into wind energy or tidal energy than a third party expert who is also examining the same feasibility studies, etc. for those other competing industries?
With your logic, only people that have worked (I assume for many years) in wind energy and nuclear and tidal (thatâs still very nascent) and every other source of energy theyâre comparing must have also have worked directly at a company within every industry that develops and sells each and every technology in order to analyze all of them at once.
Good luck finding those people, because they donât exist especially once you factor in nascent industries/technologies mixed into those large combos.
To turn this on its head for a moment, remember that this is the same canard trotted out by the climate change denialistsEr, what? You've got it completely backwards.
Youâre merely helping me to make my point. What you just offered is one of the best examples of how some industry-sponsored studies that have opaque methodologies, etc. are heavily skewed in order to favor industry profits over valid science. Many studies that supported climate change denial over the years were funded by the fossil fuel industry.
This is very well documented:
On the other hand, the majority of studies that support anthropogenic climate change and/or global warming have no such conflicts of interest, are transparent and peer reviewed. These are the very type of studies that I support. You should have gathered this from my chart, etc. within my post you replied to.
Of course, there are many real incidents of bias or irreconcilable conflicts of interest, many of which we already know about, mostly on the denialist side of that debate.Understatement of the decade.
Judging from your graph and your reference to cigarettes, you've tarred all scientists that you disagree with using the same brush.Then your judgement is very flawed, I'm sorry to say.
By the way, the scientific establishment is overwhelmingly liberalEr, I really don't think you grasped my point very well at the end of my post. I wasn't referring to the scientific establishment, I was referring to the political persuasions of the general populace.
The only academic fields that are majority conservative, to my knowledge, are business, economics, political science and lawThat's interesting. Do you have sources of evidence to back up that supposition or are you relying on your own anecdotal evidence?
The studies I can find show the opposite where most academic fields are taught by more lefties no matter what their discipline. For example, this shows that two-thirds of economists are liberals/Democrats:
If that trend has reversed itself since that study was taken, Iâd like you to direct me towards a newer study of equal caliber.
more:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147.6141&rep=rep1&type=pdf
1 Like
iâd like a couple overt examples of this, please. Leadership level, like climate denial and evolution denial are seen in the leadership on the right.
1 Like
Can you imagine 2% of scientists finding enough fault with the question to answer no? I can.
My calc II professor once memorably remarked, âIâm working with a chemist and right now and⌠well⌠You think mathematicians are scary, wait till you meet some chemists.â
1 Like
I resemble that remark.
When you see the way it all works, itâs hard to grasp it as accidental. I found that studying biogeochemical evolution restored my sense of wonder and has kept me off of the conspiracy sciences.
1 Like
HEY! 
1 Like
Re: math and chemâŚ
My chemistry classes (especially a Chem Eng class) were more mathematically pedantic than my math classes â coming from a loosey goosey physics background, I was doomed.
You know, the set of memes and behaviors we identify as âUSA right wingâ typically includes higher distrust of leadership and worship of individualism than the opposite âleft wingâ set, although of course neither side is homogenous.
So youâd expect to see that the right wing masses would be more divergent from their leadership⌠and indeed, American Catholics routinely use birth control, to give just one example
In my opinion, based on no data whatsoever, I think liberals demand more consistency from their leadership, because they seem to think it is possible for their leaders to be trusted. Right wingers expect their leadership to be corrupt liars, because they believe all politicians are corrupt liars. The left wing keeps foolishly believing this time their leader will be different.âŚ
Industry and corporate media plays it down too much, in my opinion. Of course, thatâs not just my opinion, but also the repeated findings of the world-renowned media experts at fair.org.
Youâre begging the question. Fair.org assumes that funding = bias, no matter how many times removed, which is precisely the attitude Iâm criticizing. And really? Youâre going to trot out a rebuttal that relies on Howarth, whose only claim to fame is being author of a discredited paper thatâs inconsistent with drilling physics and has been thoroughly trashed by at least 10 different organizations, half of which have no affiliation with the oil and gas industry (e.g., NREL, Cathles et al)? Howarth isnât credible, he exaggerates the findings of those other papers, and even so his statements donât change the paperâs conclusions about fracked natural gas being cleaner than coal.
Also, for you to say that being involved in industry is the only way for someone or some group to be qualified on an issue is rather bizarre.
On certain issues - note that I did mention nuclear engineering. I would have included more detail, but we can say that nuclear engineering, geophysics, petroleum engineering, and to a much lesser extent agronomy are areas in which acquiring expertise means working with industry. Incidentally, this is where your examples have come out.
Do you have any valid evidence to back up that rather amorphous supposition?
No, itâs an inductive conclusion. If you ignore the bullshit that fringe researchers spew from the safety of non-mainstream think tanks or clear industry or activist shills, itâs easy to allege but very hard to prove bias. I apologize for not unpacking that assumption earlier, but at this point itâs just automatic to ignore everything from, say, Seralini or any think tank that uses code words like âmarketsâ in its title.
Never mind that a consultancy might work both for and against the industry
Please name some that match your specific criteria. Again, youâre using rather amorphous terminology there, so Iâd prefer you to offer some specific examples as Iâve offered in my previous post (with links).
Certainly. Iâm employed at one of them, in which capacity weâve been retained as subject matter experts testifying for the states in lawsuits against refineries (the ones Iâm familiar with are MTBE related), debunking industry insurance claims, and other matters, as well as being employed by many refining companies as well. ARCADIS is also a good example in environmental consulting as theyâve been employed both by the industry and by regulators to ensure compliance - and in the past, theyâve laid down the law on their former clients. While my employer is a smaller example, ARCADIS is by no means a bit player.
Thereâs several problems with your supposition there. Thereâs sometimes a âbubbleâ of enforced bias within industry studies
But Iâm not talking about industry studies, and neither are you. Industry-conducted studies are different from what you talked about, which is industry-sponsored studies.
With your logic, only people that have worked (I assume for many years) in wind energy and nuclear and tidal (thatâs still very nascent) and every other source of energy theyâre comparing must have also have worked directly at a company within every industry that develops and sells each and every technology in order to analyze all of them at once.
Nope. For one thing, your analogy of a single person is often not what is invoked when industry bias is alleged; a lot is corporate entities with long histories of receiving funding, like fair.org has claimed.
Secondly, by picking financial analysis and cost engineering as a subject youâve (deliberately or otherwise) chosen a subject matter for which the relevant expertise is general energy technology and cost engineering, not nuclear engineering. A cost engineer doesnât know the science, they know construction, or for the case of your broad study, basically just finance. I do a lot of that stuff for a living, mainly in bio-renewables, and I will freely admit that while it requires some engineering knowledge, I do not and never will consider myself a subject matter expert in these technologies. Subject matter expertise required in nuclear engineering analysis would be necessary for, say, a fault tree analysis to determine risks of various accidents and to determine regulatory safety requirements. Incidentally, the NRC is frequently criticized for having lots of former industry employees, an example of precisely the kind of unwarranted allegations I was talking about before.
On the other hand, the majority of studies that support anthropogenic climate change and/or global warming have no such conflicts of interest, are transparent and peer reviewed
Climate change is one area where Iâm pretty sure that industry ties can be safely reviewed as suspect, because climate science has no relation whatsoever to industry. Iâm sure that we can both agree that the farther away from applied science that we get, the less relevant industry becomes. To jump from GMOs, pesticides, and nuclear power to climate science removes any presumption that industry experience is useful, let alone required. Once again, industry association is too often trotted out as an argument in certain industries like the ones that I named, but climate science is not one of them.
Regarding your citation of economistsâ political views, please read the paper - it talks about AEA members, not academics; less than 50% were employed as academics and 20% of total respondents did not hold Ph. D degrees. A full copy can be found at http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf
A better paper is http://www.cwu.edu/~manwellerm/academic%20bias.pdf; go to Table 2. It seems I was wrong; though business is the most conservative field and economics is close, in political science I was hilariously off. Law isnât on there, though.
2 Likes
american catholics vote democratic en mass. could you come up with an example that supports your point?
Woops, good call! Sorry, Iâm from Delaware⌠our local arch-conservatives are Catholic and yes, they do vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Nonetheless many of them also condone the murder of abortion doctors, believe that homosexuals should be burned at the stake, do not believe in global warming, vocally hate âenvironmentalismâ etc. etc. and so forth so they really arenât a good model for the nation as a whole. I guess I shot down my own theory right from the get-go by dragging in such a huge anomaly.
1 Like
The data might be accurate, but the implication is deceiving. Take GMOâs- if you, as a scientist, report that we can find no conclusive data proving GMOâs are unhealthy, that still doesnât mean you should eat GMOâs. Scientific opinion on pretty much everything changes over time, and for something that hasnât been around all that long, that is going into your body, a healthy skepticism is warranted- or, at least, the push for labeling, which is usually what the battle is about. That doesnât make you âanti-science,â it just makes you ânot blindly putting your faith in anything rubber-stamped as being scientific.â
Also, what scientists are we talking about? With the nuclear power plant question, if youâre talking about environmental scientists who are studying climate change, not that many of them are pushing for nuclear power as a logical solution- yet an astrophysicist might be all about nuclear power, even though heâs not an expert and is clearly biased by his field of study. Iâll take my opinion on nuclear power over his any day.
The fact that even among scientists there is very little consensus in most of these questions also undermines the point of this post. Itâs not just the public that doesnât believe them, itâs a shitload of scientists, too.
1 Like
I have to admit that I have an increasingly difficult time wrapping my head around that assertion.
(edit: Iâm not a scientist)
No worries. I just like people to bring the factiest facts to the table, no matter their position. Thanks for sayin.
2 Likes
Your point on labeling GMOs as yet is inconsistent. GMOs are essentially as highly regulated as pharmaceutical drugs in the US, and are precisely crafted organisms with very specific modifications that are highly studied post market.
Plain old traditional hybrids (such as all plants commercially farmed) are created by scattershot with many mutations and genetic changes and only have to prove theyâre not overly poisonous. If anything itâs the hybrids that need to be labeled with their genetic histories.
1 Like
Scientists canât believe in god. Which appears to be unbelievable. It is rational that most people cannot believe scientists. It is probable that they will not.
EDIT: I mean, look at this nonsense for instance:
Rubbish. Honestly.
1 Like
Thatâs not true. Itâs not even close to true. You canât sell unlabeled pharmaceutical drugs in the USA and the FDA regulations governing their development, documentation, advertising and use are among the most extensive and crippling in the world, and certainly vastly more comprehensive than those governing agriculture and GMO products. My best friend has been involved in pharmaceutical regulatory oversight for over 20 years now, and most of my own work is governed by HIPAA, HiTECH, SOX, and GLB legislation, but my spouse can do anything she pleases with GMOs in her lab (because itâs a private non-profit) with effectively zero oversight.
Edit: your point about the lack of regulation of hybrids is very good, though. Didnât Burbank sell garden nightshade hybrids under the name âwonderberryâ? I bet a few people had fatal reactions to that!
Edit 2: second time in this thread Iâve made self-defeating remarks. Apparently Burbank was lying, the wonderberry was common African black nightshade, and not a hybrid at all. So if anybody died from it, it was probably due to solanaceae allergies, and theyâd have died from eating a tomatillo.
From what Iâve read about Burbank, he wasnât lying- he did make a hybrid that wasnât poisonous, but was essentially the same as black nightshade, so people gave him shit for it- the inevitable backlash after garnering so much praise.
[quote=âjtf, post:50, topic:50980â]
Fair.org assumes that funding = bias, no matter how many times removed ⌠Howarth, whose only claim to fame is being author of a discredited paper âŚ
[/quote]I see your point and agree about Howarthâs methodologies being debatable. Iâll also certainly concede Howarth is controversial and has been disputed by others, etc.
However, youâre making a hyperbolic interpretation of fair.org based upon one person they mentioned without paying attention to the main point of their critique of the NYT article.
Fair.org wasnât pointing out that Howarth was correct, nor was he the crux of their piece by any stretch. They were pointing out the absence of opposing views within that NYT article and they were correct on that, in my opinion. The NYT article they critiqued did, indeed, have industry (Shell) reaffirming industry (Shell) instead of properly offering opposing views on the matter.
And, this is where that kind of one-sided, âpublic relations-styleâ reporting has gotten us since that study and glowing NYT article was published:
A review of more than 200 earlier studies confirms that U.S. emissions of methane are considerably higher than official estimates.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/methane-leaky-gas-021314.html
OuchâŚ
It later turned out that the study the NYT was glowing over and claiming was missing all the âred flagsâ was actually deeply flawed due to poor methodologies that favored industry. Those flaws just so happened to have worked in the industryâs favor in the meantime by drastically underestimating the emissions from shale gas via leaks during the fracking process.
⌠and fair.org did try to warn usâŚ
Once again, we see undue public and environmental harm because there was a lack of due diligence upon the part of an industry-sponsored study that also was given a pass by much of the corporate media.
The point is that fair.org isnât merely equating funding with bias. They are pointing out flaws in how the corporate media all too often offers one-sided views that donât properly challenge studies that are heavily inundated with conflicts of interest. Itâs often not in the publicâs best interest for the media to do this and it sure as hell isnât good for critical thinking that sparks challenges to industry-sponsored studies and more transparent, independent, peer-reviewed science.
Now, whether or not you side with Howarth or the industry-sponsored study the NYT championed (even though that study is now debunked) is beside the point. My point was (and still is) thereâs not enough scrutiny brought forward with potential conflicts of interest (or even obvious conflicts of interest) within the corporate media and fair.org shows that consistently if you look over their body of work.
You may think conflicts of interest are mostly irrelevant (or overstated), but history is rife with examples of where it is often terribly relevant and harmful for humanity.
we can say that nuclear engineering, geophysics, petroleum engineering, and to a much lesser extent agronomy are areas in which acquiring expertise means working with industryRight, but you're moving the goal posts a little bit. Let's get back on track. I'm referring to things mentioned in the chart. For example, "Building more nuclear power plants".
The point is that in order to make policy decisions of that nature, someone does not have to work in every industry involved in order to commission studies and/or analyze studies to determine if nuclear is a better option than every other choice in the situation for energy (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, energy storage implications, etc.).
One would certainly look at industry-sponsored studies, but they need to be weighted against more transparent, independent studies as well. Just because the policymakers havenât worked directly for the nuclear industry, that doesnât automatically disqualify them from deciding if building new nuclear power plants in France, for example, is a better idea than say, offshore wind.
This is very similar to the example I already gave you before where with your errant logic, any cancer researcher or group who hadnât worked within the cigarette industry wasnât qualified to study the links between cigarettes and cancer. And, again, thatâs flawed logic and flies in the face of reality, in my opinion.
ARCADIS is also a good example in environmental consulting as they've been employed both by the industry and by regulators to ensure complianceYeah, I'm not sure that was a great example on your part.
ARCADIS was involved with that slimy Chris Christie no-bid, questionable contract with AshBritt to clean up New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy.
ARCADIS were brought in by that NJ gang to monitor AshBritt, but this was just after ARCADIS was employed by AshBritt in a stellar conflict of interest.
Kind of a âfox guarding the hen houseâ sort of situation with some convenient âmiscalculationsâ. Nearly two-thirds of the eventual overcharges for the clean up were due to ARCADISâ lack of proper oversight of AshBritt and they âcouldnât explain the discrepancyâ once they were caught. No one could prove it was intentional, fortunately for ARCADIS.
However, itâs kind of funny how these kind of errors end up favoring the foxes and not the hens time and time again.
But I'm not talking about industry studies, and neither are you. Industry-conducted studies are different from what you talked about, which is industry-sponsored studies.I've been referring to both industry-sponsored studies and internal industry studies as well. I find that both of them are sometimes problematic without more transparent, independent studies to back them up. I apologize if I wasn't more clear on that.
your analogy of a single person is often not what is invoked when industry bias is allegedThat's why it was an analogy instead of a case example. ;)
Subject matter expertise required in nuclear engineering analysis would be necessary for, say, a fault tree analysis to determine risks of various accidents and to determine regulatory safety requirementsNot sure where you're going with this. The point is that one shouldn't garner only industry studies (or industry-sponsored studies) when it comes to things like building new nuclear power plants (again, that was actually in the chart). Nothing you're saying here takes away from that.
Climate change is one area where I'm pretty sure that industry ties can be safely reviewed as suspectAgain, understatement of the decade.
Regarding your citation of economists' political views, please read the paper - it talks about AEA members, not academics; less than 50% were employed as academics and 20% of total respondents did not hold Ph. D degrees.I did read the paper, that's why I said they were economists, not academics, before I linked to it. But, I should have been more clear and I apologize.
I couldnât readily find a paper on academic economists, so thatâs why I used that paper instead that has these results that show economists vote Democratic:Republican in a ratio of 2.5:1. Most were also supporters of safety regulations, gun control, redistribution, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws, etc.
All the things that make a lot of Fox News watchers vomit, of course.
A better paper is http://www.cwu.edu/~manwellerm/academic%20bias.pdf; go to Table 2. It seems I was wrong; though business is the most conservative field and economics is close, in political science I was hilariously off. Law isn't on there, though.Yeah, I think that was my third link in my previous post.
Hereâs the meat I read in the study I linked to:
" ⌠Even among what appears to have once been the traditional enclaves of more conservative faculty, liberals outnumber conservatives, by a significant margin â for example, by 51% to 19% among engineering faculty and 49% to 39% among business faculty.
Similarly, although 62% of humanities faculty and 55% of social scientists are Democrats, that leaves nearly a three to one margin (43% to 15%) of Democrats versus Republicans among other faculty. Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 4 to 1 among biologists and nearly 10 to 1 among physicists. ⌠"
So, yeah, unless people want to embrace false equivalence, conservatives just arenât too hip on science, etc. compared to progressives overall even when it comes to other fields that people may mistake for being the bastions of conservatives for some reason.
Law isn't on there, though.I love how thorough you are with that stuff. Seriously, I enjoyed discussing this with you and thanks for being polite too!
1 Like
