Wow. If there was one article you had to read to understand how large corporations systematically and unethically try to vilify their critics to shift focus from their own dangerous behaviours, this is it!
Just a few of the things Syngenta turned out to be doing:
1. paying for detailed sychological profiles of critics, including weaknesses (“grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life,” "investigate wife")
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"
4. buying Google keywords for his name and variants to astroturf people searching for him. Searching Google for "Tyrone Hayes" brings up "Tyrone Hayes Not Credible"
5. getting paid scientists to write op-eds accusing Hayes of being a "junk scientist"
6. leaning on universities (Nicholas School of the Environment, at Duke) so they wouldn't hire Hayes
7. trying to get Hayes to bait himself (“set trap to entice him to sue,”)
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.”)
There's so much more in the article that this could become either
(a) a primer for scientists and critics to understand how corporations target them, or
(b) a ready reckoner for corporations on what tactics to use to smear opponents.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing that I have been saying for years is that google is a dichotomy. Google claims that their intention is to organize and show the most objectively relevant content as possible and yet all their income is from advertising which is a completely different objective. It's offering up relevance to the highest bidder. This can work in certain circumstances (if I'm willing pay more for a search term than anyone else I likely have relevant content) but it is far from the promise of objectivity.
To wit:
The P.R. team suggested that the company “purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search word on the internet, so that any time someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material.” The proposal was later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian hayes,” “atrazine frogs,” and “frog feminization.” (Searching online for “Tyrone Hayes” now brings up an advertisement that says, “Tyrone Hayes Not Credible.”)
Is everyone really cool with the premier organizer of information being so easily bribed(through a fucking API) to essentially lie to it's users.
Google has stopped being about "organizing the world's information" a long time ago. Now its more about how can I make everything look like Plus even if it breaks the application and how can Plus be a Facebook clone, and how can I drag everyone to Plus.
A distinguishing characteristic of erstwhile Google used to be: get them out of your system with what they need, as fast as you can, and be so seamless that people want to come back. This was a welcome change compared to Microsoft's: make leaving so annoying that nobody dares to. Even that has changed.
This seems to be well correlated with Page taking over Schmidt's duties.
To google's credit it keeps the organic search and the paid search separate and everyone knows the paid results are 'bribed(through a fucking API)' as you put it. To me when that came it that was great - I think the biggest competitor at the time Google came in was Yahoo which I think allowed straight bribery in the main results and most other information came through main stream media, in my case in the UK things like the Guardian and the BBC which were ok but had an official kind of politically correct line and not much coverage of anything else. I'm not quite sure how Google could do better while still making money. Perhaps if they allowed people to rate the paid ads as good or rubbish etc.?
> To google's credit it keeps the organic search and the paid search separate
There is just this oh so very faint difference in background color (rgb(255, 247, 237) instead of rgb(255, 255, 255) which is a joke of a distinction, and depending on viewing angle they both look white on this monitor) and a first line that is very easily overlooked.
Most people here know where the actual results begin, but I bet you that a lot of people do not; my mother sure never realized it until I pointed it out to her. As Erich Schmidt said: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.", and it shows. So technically organic and paid search are separate, but practically that separation is so thin it's next to worthless. They A/B test everything, so they surely know that some or even a lot of people confuse ads and actual search results.
Search companies were already advised in 2002 by the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection about the potential for consumers to be deceived, in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, "unless search engines clearly and prominently distinguished advertising from natural search results," Mary K. Engle, associate director at FTC's division of advertising practices, said in the letter.
Companies followed those recommendations in 2002, the FTC said, but since then "we have observed a decline in compliance with the letter's guidance," the group said.
"Top ads," or advertising that is located immediately above the natural results, may be partly to blame, the FTC suggests. The group cites a recent survey by the search strategies company SEOBook that found that nearly half of searchers did not recognize top ads as distinct from natural search results.
> I'm not quite sure how Google could do better while still making money.
Of course, making a clear separation (#ccc for the background, an actual border, the possibilities are endless) would cost them some money, but it's not like they have to be this creepy to make any money at all.
I searched for "google separation of ads and search results" to see how they did it in the past (I'm pretty sure it wasn't always that thin a separation), the first result is https://www.google.com/honestresults.html and returns 404. Hah!
Many people don't know the ads are ads, even though their on a different background colour and that box is labled "ads".
They could also allow me to tell them that an ad has zero interest to me. I don't block ads, but it's frustrating when I get a blitz of car insurance ads. I don't own a car; I am never going to buy car insurance. It would be great to be able to turn those ads off.
I imagine some alcoholics or gambling addicts would like to turn off alcohol and gambling ads too.
That "different background color" becomes invisible on cheap TN laptop screens at a slight deviation from vertical. I wouldn't be surprised if Google A/B tested background colors until they happened upon one that effectively disappears for a lot of users.
Well one easy thing they could do would be avoid using sponsored links when the subject matter could be heuristically identified as relating to public health and safely. How much revenue do these words really generate?
I've been pondering the ethics of AdWords for a while... I can maybe understand how tech people perceive ads as this "black box thing" that they can just tune out of their vision, and therefore assume that ads aren't a problem. But I do think there may be something inherently problematic about it.
If we drop this "invincibility-to-advertising" assumption and look at the facts: the largest information search engine in the world displays a portion of results whose presence and salience on the page is determined, in part, by how much someone was willing to pay. That seems a little weird to me.
Worse, all their art and technology goes into knowing what the most relevant results are and yet they promote the sponsored result instead. It's one thing to point me to a potentially inferior washing machine but even when the search is about a potentially dangerous chemical in wide use throughout the US they point users to information they know to be less relevant. And they do it for money. How is this not clearly acting against the public good? This isn't "weird" - this is plain dishonesty and immoral by pretty much any standard. Just because it's a web application doing it shouldn't change anything.
For now, we're in the technological twilight where it's somewhat foreseeable someone could challenge Google but when they increasingly control both the client and the server -the ability to ad block will go away and the 'sponsored' links will be more difficult to ignore (their business essentially depends on it). The technology (patents/software/hardware/expertise) required to parse the increasingly unwieldy stream of information that describes this world will be held by a single entity - one whose revenue is the open betrayal it's user's interests.
Whats fucked up is it's probably more expensive to mislead me about the washing machine. I feel like there should at least be a fee of some sort. They could use geolocation to see if the user is in an affected area and apply a surcharge of charge, say 40%, for the privilege of manipulating evidence of dangerous chemicals in a user's environment.
Ultimately this is you complaining that people are not thoughtful enough consumers of information.
I'm fine with regulating commercial speech to make sure that it is true (and maybe even that it is not misleading, harder to say, a lot more ambiguity there), but let's also focus on fixing the real problem.
> Is everyone really cool with the premier organizer of information being so easily bribed(through a fucking API) to essentially lie to it's users.
I'm not, and it's part of why I'm willing to put up with the occasional lack of relevance ordering in DuckDuckGo/Bing's results.
A search engine that narrows the range of its results through the slit of advertising is not only useless for research, it's actually counterproductive to anything but bias reinforcement.
Traditionally, newspapers had that same conflict, where political groups of all stripes can buy some of the most visible space to advance their causes, regardless of truthiness. In fact, you could even buy an ad in the NYT to slam the NYT itself: http://m.deadline.com/2013/05/scott-rudin-slams-nyt-reporter...
Think of it this way: this kind of ad purchasing allows for the editorial side, or in Google's case, the search results, to remain independent of outside influence
The original word for that is "verisimilitude." I may be alone in this, but I consider "truthiness" to be something that you want to be true even though it's obviously not true.
From where I'm sitting, Mayor Rob Ford being the victim of a "lefty elitist conspiracy" has zero verisimilitude but plenty of truthiness amongst his supporters.
Crockford gives us a definition of truthy in Javascript as anything other than one of the six values such as 0 and NaN which evaluate to false. This maybe closer to your parent's intended meaning.
I would really like to get Matt Cutts view on this story and what Google is doing to limit unethical uses of AdWords like this and punish the companies who do use it unethically.
If a human bit the head off a live baby seal, we'd probably call that evil. But when a polar bear does it, it's just the nature of the polar bear. It operates on instinct.
Most corporations only care about their bottom line. Even if the individuals within them are moral, the structure tends to cancel that out.
They are built to seek profit. If they obey the law, it is only because obeying the law maximizes profit. If they are moral, it is only because morality maximizes profit. On the other hand, if breaking the law maximizes profit (e.g. because enforcement is lax or penalties are low) then that's what they'll do. Likewise, if immoral acts make the most money, that's what they'll do.
What Hollywood gets wrong is that corporations aren't intentionally evil. There's no CEO sitting in his office laughing maniacally about how his new project is going to kill widows and orphans. Hollywood always wants a villain, but in this case there isn't one. Villainy falls out of the corporate structure and lots of employees just doing their jobs to keep bread on the table.
This is far from an isolated example, of course. Discrediting or destroying whistleblowers is what just about any corporation will do and has done, as long as they think the positives outweigh the negatives on next quarter's earnings statement.
>Most corporations only care about their bottom line. Even if the individuals within them are moral, the structure tends to cancel that out.
It's ridiculous (and disastrous) that we grant this idea of corporate personhood, bestowing to companies the rights of people, but not the responsibility. It is a dangerous mindset which cooly accepts that corporations are amoral vs. immoral.
At the end of the day, there are people who are making these decisions and people who are benefitting from them. If the decisions are immoral, then the corporation is immoral. If the corporation is engaged in immoral behavior, then the people are immoral.
>What Hollywood gets wrong is that corporations aren't intentionally evil. There's no CEO sitting in his office laughing maniacally about how his new project is going to kill widows and orphans.
I don't think I've ever seen a Hollywood movie wherein the CEO of a corporation laughed maniacally about doing something evil for its own sake. Instead, corporations and their leadership are always characterized as being driven by greed.
>Hollywood always wants a villain, but in this case there isn't one.
Sure, there is a villain. Those people who do evil things for the sake of greed, whether in Hollywood or IRL, are still villains and are rightly portrayed as such.
To imply that evil deeds are not villainous if a person is driven by greed vs. sadism/insanity plays into the culture of corporate absolution and tacitly endorses the behavior.
GP is saying, I believe, that the corporation's greed doesn't necessarily grow out of the greed of an individual, but rather out of an organization of individuals all trying to do their jobs. Each is responsible for making a small contribution to 'protecting the bottom line,' but as an organized system it makes the organization greedy.
This is why we need strong regulations. I never liked them before, but now I've come to understand that they are required to allow the honest people to behave honestly.
I've made a similar point here before: the same situation is occurring in the US' national intelligence groups right now. There is no 'evil' person trying to 'take away our rights.' There are just people who are responsible for protecting us who have been granted the authority to read our emails.
What are they going to do? Not look? Suppose it was you? And tragedy happened and you later learned that had you looked you would have saved 2000 lives? You would have a hard time getting over it. So you look- trying to uphold the principles you believe in as you do so, but you look.
However, as an organized system, with good people trying to do the right thing in each of their own small part, it's evil. That's why we need laws to prevent it.
We need the laws to prevent evil results of good intentions.
>the corporation's greed doesn't necessarily grow out of the greed of an individual, but rather out of an organization of individuals all trying to do their jobs
I don't believe that's all your GP was saying. But, I disagree nonetheless. My primary point is that there are actual people who benefit from the corporation's actions. So, we need to stop this nonsensical notion that corporations are "amoral". And, we need to stop slipping in and out of corporate personhood when granting rights vs. assigning responsibility. Actually, the whole idea of corporate personhood just needs to die.
>Each is responsible for making a small contribution to 'protecting the bottom line,' but as an organized system it makes the organization greedy.
Sure, in any organization there are people who just toe the line and, in many cases, don't even know that their efforts may contribute to something immoral. But, that's irelevant here. The point is that there are certainly people within the company who are making these decisions and who are well-aware of their immorality and consequences. They do this for personal gain (perhaps among other reasons).
So, putting this off on the corporation or organization is ill-considered. There is a tendency to let these individual decisions just sort of dissolve into the morass of the organization. It's especially bad because then we say, "Oh the corporation is amoral. It was just doing what it was supposed to do".
I believe your analogy with U.S. intelligence overlays roughly but differs significantly enough that it's a different discussion. The short though, is that I don't believe that we can just conclude that it was all good intentions with coincidentally evil results.
These options aren't mutually exclusive. Yes, there are bad operators out there. But there are also cases, I believe, like I outlined.
The danger of ignoring it is that if we blame really bad outcomes (like the banking crisis) on a malicious plot by a bad player, it's too easy to dismiss as a one-off event when the problem may be systemic.
"that we grant this idea of corporate personhood, bestowing to companies the rights of people, but not the responsibility."
Technically, what the law says is that a person doesn't give up his or her rights when forming a corporation. Corporations are formed to give a liability shield of a limited extent. The extent of the shield is much, much less than a government official gets[1].
1) ask anyone who has dealt with a criminally corrupt prosecutor
> They are built to seek profit. If they obey the law, it is only because obeying the law maximizes profit. If they are moral, it is only because morality maximizes profit. On the other hand, if breaking the law maximizes profit (e.g. because enforcement is lax or penalties are low) then that's what they'll do. Likewise, if immoral acts make the most money, that's what they'll do.
This has been demonstrated to not be true. Decision makers at corporations are not rational actors, they may choose to pursuit business plans and take courses of action that actually harm profit. We have seen in the banking and housing collapse that there are those that knowingly seek their own personal profit at the expense of others, including the very businesses they work for.
> What Hollywood gets wrong is that corporations aren't intentionally evil. There's no CEO sitting in his office laughing maniacally about how his new project is going to kill widows and orphans. Hollywood always wants a villain, but in this case there isn't one. Villainy falls out of the corporate structure and lots of employees just doing their jobs to keep bread on the table.
This is has also been demonstrated to be false. While certainly the very nature of corporations creates negative externalities, we have had plenty of examples of high level executives that pursue a course of profit that knowingly endangers and harms others and may ultimately even be ruinous to the business itself.
> Corporations aren't really immoral, just amoral.
Ok since corporation is considered a person, why can't a person just claim to be amoral? A corporation is a person and thus a person should be a corporation. No?
> Corporations aren't really immoral, just amoral.
In this instance, it's just splitting hairs. The net effect is still the same: they're doing damage to a person and probably the environment for the sake of money, and are aware of this but it doesn't stop them.
To corporations, if it's not about making money, then the motivation is unclear. Part of the reason why you hear the BS about climate scientists being money-driven (you know, all those fat 6- and 7-figure salaries, and the multi-billion dollar grants?) is because of this narrow perception. The structural underpinnings of businesses like this make it nearly impossible for any other motivation than "how much profit can we make" to be a factor in planning.
Googling "Tyrone Hayes" now shows an ad titled, Atrazine and Hayes - Academics Question Tyrone Hayes' Work.
The ad links to the "official sounding" http://academicsreview.org/. That domain is privately registered by proxy and there is no information on the site itself regarding ownership.
There are, however, clearly industry-supportive, but unattributed articles on a variety of topics, in addition to Mr. Hayes. Not sure if those were added for "credibility" or actually used in separate campaigns.
This stuff is straight out ouf Hollywood, and it's the reason conspiracy theories thrive. Sometimes, and perhaps more often than we think, there really are people out to mislead us for their own gain.
For what it's worth, I see no ads in the search right now, and a Wikipedia blurb saying
"Tyrone B. Hayes is an American biologist at University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research demonstrating that the herbicide atrazine is a potent endocrine disruptor that demasculinizes and feminizes frogs."
A slight aside: "People also search for" contains Steven Milloy. His name autocompletes to "steven milloy is an idiot".
Yeah, looks like the "Tyrone Hayes Not Credible" ad from the article is back in circulation for me. Maybe HNers exhausted the budget for the other one.
This ad links to http://agsense.org/atrazine-alarmists/tyrone-hayes/ where the tagline is "Where farmers explain the real benefits of atrazine for healthy crops and healthy land". Awesome. Makes me want to drink an ice cold glass of it.
Their page on Mr. Hayes leads off with an ad hominem attack:
Thanks.
The founders of this site [1] are not anonymous, however, but a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a lecturer at the University of Melbourne.
Definitely a strange site containing quite crude ad hominem attacks on researchers [2].
The founders seem to be very outspoken about the benefits of genetically modified organisms, too, as Google searches indicate.
Thanks. Not sure how I missed that. Perhaps because my instinct is to check the footer for "about" links. I would still be curious about the registration. May reveal more interesting information...or not.
I would also be curious about the founders and their "independent" non-profit--In particular, the source of their funding and support. From GMO to pesticides, they seem to absolutely love what the ag industry is doing. If I get a little more time to look into it, I will post back here.
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?
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!
"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".
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...
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.
What I found most disturbing is how EPA works. They accept only research that passes a bar that was lobbied by the industry and that only industry can pay.
Even if they accepted negative research about a product then they do a risk assessment to see how many deformed babies are affordable given the dollars the industry would lose.
The privatisation of science (pesticides, medicine, etc) will always lead to these types of conflict of interest.
If the objective is to find The Truth, then a profit motive can be very damaging. It is why pharmacology in its current form is very badly flawed, among other endeavors.
And I'd say this is just typical of the quality you'd find in an average New Yorker feature. Also, they have a reputation for having the most rigorous fact checking process in journalism.
How could you know without extensive investigation on your own that it wasn't sponsored by some other biased group?) No, really, when you have believed any similar article, it seems unreasonable to expect truth of any journalism and science (which has now become a form of journalism since the only visible effect is articles being published).
Even if it was sponsored by some biased group it provides a lot of information as to what was going on and then you can judge who you believe. Bit like the adversarial court system where both sides put their case. Without the New Yorker article there would not have been someone putting Hayes case as well. Syngenta can now reply and say why it's all rubbish if they are so inclined.
> Syngenta can now reply and say why it's all rubbish if they are so inclined.
I would love to see Syngenta's response. The facts were supposedly from INTERNAL memos of Syngenta. Will Syngenta sue New Yorker for lying and defamation?
I hate to be that guy. But this reminds me hysteria around DDT, now it is estimated that DDT ban is responsible for 20M deaths due to malaria.
But how strong is link between that chemical and negative effects? This guy works on this for 15 years, other confirm his result. But there is no lawsuit or anything which requires strong evidence.
Also the lethal dosage is 3 grams/kg for rats, that is far from poisoning. In EU it was banned not because of toxicity, but because it degrades slowly in ground waters.
> I hate to be that guy. But this reminds me hysteria around DDT, now it is estimated that DDT ban is responsible for 20M deaths due to malaria.
You're inadvertently offering a GREAT example of the behaviour described in the article. DDT was known to be losing its effectiveness as early as the 1950s because heavy use was rapidly selecting for resistance in the mosquito population. The claim that the DDT ban lead to a large number of human deaths was created and marketed as part of an attack on Rachel Carson and the concept of public health programs in general:
Note that the DDT stories rely heavily on the same Steven Milloy mentioned in this article. One of the less immediately obvious sources of money was actually the tobacco companies, who are trying to discredit public health organizations whose anti-smoking campaigns are cutting into profits.
Banning DDT did, however, open the door for research and development of other pest control techniques. Since chemical controls lead to resistance in the affected populations, biological techniques were investigated, such as breeding captive populations and releasing sterile individuals (usually males that cause less damage in the wild). This has already been used on screwworm and fruit fly, and as soon as the checks clear, will probably also be used on zoonoses carrier mosquitoes. For similar reasons, phage research may be able to mitigate antibiotics resistance.
Given that maintaining a population of sterile males can cause wild populations to crash, anything proven to exhibit mutagenic or teratogenic effects on any animal--especially when the result is lowered fertility--is of greater long-term concern than chemicals that simply kill you.
With my foil hat on, I might come to the conclusion that a chemical that reduces the fertility of the human serfs while turning a profit is a win-win for the lizard-people running the planet. Of course they would turn the resources of the vast global conspiracy to protecting it.
Without my foil hat on, this is just company execs being enormous, rabid, jerkwad ass-mimes, which is pretty normal these days. I'm more upset that they are willing to pump millions of dollars into the destruction of scientific integrity and credibility than the possibility that they are systematically poisoning millions of people through agricultural runoff. And that is pretty bad all by itself.
It is unlikely that the negative consequences of banning DDT are nearly as much as that. Malaria nets and pyrethoids are each more effective than DDT, to which mosquitos quickly become resistant - making continued use of DDT wholly negative.
Regarding the figures you state, I am copying and pasting the relevant section of Wikipedia:
Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said in 2007, "The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children." In his novel State of Fear, author Michael Crichton wrote "Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler." These arguments have been dismissed as "outrageous" by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios. May Berenbaum, University of Illinois entomologist, says, "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible." Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a "myth" promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM).
That's a moot point. Science isn't about banning dangerous chemicals. It is about providing politicians the facts they need to make an educated decision regarding whether a chemical should be banned or not.
This is simply another another example of a long tradition of standing behind scientists when their findings agree with you, only to shun, ignore and discredit them when their findings are inconvenient. Tobacco, DDT, asbestos, deep sea diving, global warming.
Science rarely cares about what to do. It's only about finding out what is true. If politicians read Haynes's research and concludes that this is an acceptable tradeoff, there's no problem. If they are unaware of Haynes's research and make a decision on incorrect assumptions, that is a problem.
Multinationals will be able to sue countries for their business obstructing laws concerning environmental legislation etc., thereby conveniently bypassing democratic process.
Multinationals will be able to sue countries for their business obstructing laws concerning environmental legislation etc., thereby conveniently bypassing democratic process.
That's a ridiculously stupid idea. We are now all going to be vulnerable to the most gullible among us.
Not well known in the US, but I've read some history on the Norwegian petroleum industry.
There was a big political tug-of-war here in the 1980s when it became evident that current procedures for deep sea diving caused delibitating long-term injuries to the nervous system of the divers. This was very inconvenient for the oil companies and national authorities, because building a deep-sea pipeline was necessary if the nation was to have control over its petroleum exports.
There was a very intense campaign (however not necessarily a conspiracy; thousands of people had economic incentives to ignore these findings) of discrediting the scientist who made the findings. The research was initially the result of the single Ph.D. at the Department of Medicine at the University of Bergen. Lawsuits concerning reparations to divers who kept working after these findings were made, are in fact still ongoing. But the science was quite clear at the time, and it has become clearer still afterwards.
I wouldn't be surprised if similar controversies happened over this in the US. But it hasn't become a public debate to the same degree.
You're claiming that 20m people in the US have died from malaria since DDT was banned? Because the scientists who got DDT banned in the US never pushed for it to be banned for fighting malaria in countries with malaria problems, and it in fact was never banned for this purpose. You're just spreading the same bullshit corporate propaganda this article is about.
That's a very important thing to say. In any such case a risks/returns analysis must be made.
I think it's too simple to just blame the ban on DDT for 20 million malaria deaths, the reasons for dying of malaria are plenty, some within the control of the western world.
But within the context of the article, directly banning azantine could have some negative effects as well, it's not clear why those farmers who use it don't use the Monsanto product instead.
That also raises an interesting question. If Monsanto really does have a directly competing product, why didn't Monsanto come to the aid of Hayes? Not that I'm super liberal or something, but that would be proper capitalism wouldn't it?
From a species-health perspective, doses between the teratogeneic/mutagenic level and the lethal level are more dangerous than dose that simply kill everyone. Dead individuals do not prevent healthy, fertile, and possibly resistant individuals from replacing them, whereas sterile individuals will displace future breeders until they die.
If you want to eradicate a population, you stop the breeding and not the breathing.
The PR damage control team is pulling extra hours, I just got an atrazine advert reading another unrelated New Yorker article. And certainly nothing would indicate I would be interested in any agricultural product...
Isn't that just very basic web-tracking and ad targeting? Somewhere an ad-server is keeping track of keywords your browser is associated with and now atrazine is in your list.
While reading this, I wondered if there is a startup focused on crowdfunding research. A quick Google search brought up Microryza.com, an online crowdfunding platform for researchers.
This type of funding might end up being really useful for scientists in the future, in light of corporate shenanigans and diminishing government funding.
I tend to lean the other way, I hate the trend for shorter articles.
Usually, there isn't enough room in a short article, unless it is about something really simple and minor, to actually look at something properly, so you just end up with a woolly impression of the subject, that has often been rendered totally inaccurate by the requirements of brevity.
The takeaway of the article seems to be: when fighting limited-liability companies, being irrational is a good tactic. It is sad if guerilla warfare is the only option left when fighting corporate actions one disagrees with.
What prevents some enterprising high school student from purchasing some Atrazine off Amazon.com, catching a few hundred tadpoles from their local pond, and doing their own study?
Just a few of the things Syngenta turned out to be doing:
1. paying for detailed sychological profiles of critics, including weaknesses (“grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life,” "investigate wife")
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"
4. buying Google keywords for his name and variants to astroturf people searching for him. Searching Google for "Tyrone Hayes" brings up "Tyrone Hayes Not Credible"
5. getting paid scientists to write op-eds accusing Hayes of being a "junk scientist"
6. leaning on universities (Nicholas School of the Environment, at Duke) so they wouldn't hire Hayes
7. trying to get Hayes to bait himself (“set trap to entice him to sue,”)
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.”)
There's so much more in the article that this could become either
(a) a primer for scientists and critics to understand how corporations target them, or
(b) a ready reckoner for corporations on what tactics to use to smear opponents.