The problem of agency, in scientific research especially, but also in any field where the results of the questions asked have direct effects on businesses, is a hard problem. It will always be the case that those most interested in funding a given field of research will be biased towards a specific class of results. It becomes that much more difficult for lines of enquiry that touch on liability for causing economic harm to others.
If any of those reading this are in the business of writing news articles, then, please:
If you want to tell me about a scientist's report being something fake he cooked up (for fame or because someone paid him to say it or whatever), then first tell me what, scientifically, is or might be wrong with the report, and then tell me about his background and financial incentives and stuff.
I believe it's supposed to be good news-article-writing style to put the most important facts and overview first, so that the reader can stop at any part in the article and come away with a good overall picture of whatever the article talks about. The thesis of the article seems to be that there's something wrong with this scientist's study... yet this author seems to have thought it was fine for a reader to walk away having read the ad hominem attacks against the scientist, but not the actual description of what might be wrong with his study. I was rather disconcerted to see this in a major news outlet like CNN; I thought that only happened in Ayn Rand novels.
The gist of this article was not that the original report was "something fake" the scientist "cooked up". It was that the scientist received funding from an interested party that he failed to disclose.
While it is true that in the realm of pure logical discourse this fact is irrelevant to the argumentative structure of the original paper, in the real world it is a significant fact that legitimately questions the credibility of the scientist.
Except of course when the scientist is paid by a government agency and concludes that the government needs more power - then the funding or employment situation is irrelevant.
You make a very good point. However your point is not politically correct therefore it is being buries. Have an upvote.
I find the fact that people who make valid points that don't happen to be in lock step with party ideology are buried on this site very tragic and it has significantly reduced my interest in participating in this site.
Particularly ironic is that the ideological downvoting always seems to come from the left/socialist wing, yet this is ostensibly a capitalist/startup oriented site.
He's not being downvoted for being un-PC, he's being downvoted for being reflexively paranoid, in a style that resists falsification and contributes nothing to the discussion.
The credibility of the author is relevant to the author's argument/results/conclusions to the extent that the argument depends on points whose plausibility requires faith in the author's honesty and ability.
For example, suppose my thesis is, "Running the Miller-Rabin test with a=2 is sufficient to determine primality for all numbers up to 2047." If my argument is, "I have verified this myself", then my argument depends entirely on the reader's trust in me. If my argument is, "Here is a C program that tests all numbers up to 2047; its output shows no exceptions", then my argument depends on the assumptions that a) this C program works as intended and b) when run, this program produces the desired output.
In the second case, (a) can be verified by someone who understands the Miller-Rabin test and can understand C code, and (b) can be verified by anyone with a (trusted) C compiler. These things are not particularly hard to do for an expert (or amateur) in the field. So, even if you don't know anything about the Miller-Rabin test or about C, you can find other people who do, and they will be able to tell you whether my argument is correct; my own credibility is useless for evaluating my argument unless you are too lazy to find yourself a trustworthy mathematician-programmer. And journalists are certainly not lazy in this respect--they interview experts all the time, and do so in this article.
The credibility of the scientist is irrelevant until you find a part in his argument that depends on his credibility. Like a part where he carries out an experiment that requires careful controlling to be accurate, and you have reason to think he is sloppy (inherently or deliberately). Or where he collects a bunch of data and you have reason to think it might be inaccurate (again, due to clumsiness or malice). Here, it seems to be (and I quote from the story--two pages in, I might mention):
"Dr. Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the health group at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that while the Bromenshenk/Army study is interesting, it fails to ask the underlying question "Why are colonies dying? Is it because they're getting weak? People who have HIV don't die of HIV. They die of other diseases they get because their immune systems are knocked off, making them more susceptible." In other words, pesticides could weaken the bees -- and then the virus/fungus combination finishes them off. That notion, however, is not explored in the new study."
There are some mutterings about pesticides maybe killing bees earlier, but it's not clear--wasn't to me, anyway--what this has to do with alleged problems in the author's study. But this is the part where we (finally) see what part of the study depends on his credibility. It is the sort of implied conclusion that the fungus/virus combination is the end of the story, that this fungus and virus just proliferated somehow and the solution is to get rid of them. The flaw, or rather the incomplete part of the study, is that pesticides might somehow make it easier for the virus/fungus to infect the bees, and this possibility isn't given the attention it should get; thus, we see how the author's strong connections with a company that makes pesticides might lead him to keep his mouth shut about it. (Which, I might opine, is not much of a flaw--it says that the author merely didn't go far enough.)
It is not true that, "in the real world", facts that would call a scientist's credibility into question are necessarily significant in evaluating his study. It is only true if there are parts of the study that depend critically on his credibility; and once you've found these parts, you can isolate them and check them yourself (or go ask experts to check them), and either prove the study wrong or validate it.
If you say this is a minor distinction, I say, no, quite the contrary. I think it's important to realize exactly what can and what can't be invalidated by attacks on someone's credibility: it puts a limit on the potential power of character a...
> The credibility of the author is relevant to the author's argument/results/conclusions to the extent that the argument depends on points whose plausibility requires faith in the author's honesty and ability.
Unless you personally have invested the time and effort needed to evaluate his research, you're stuck listening to the people who have. And unless they're all saying the same thing, you have to look at credentials, reputation, and motivation to decide who to believe. While these factors don't affect the quality of his thesis, they do affect it's believability to the rest of us.
Hmm.. I do have to amend my statement. Evidently, Bayer was caught with their pants down in Europe and Japan after their non-certified-edible GM rice was found in our food supply for export.
I feel that your criticism is off base. The author of the story was right to focus only on the facts: specifically, the scientist's funding sources and the pattern of behavior that occurred with regards to funding and testimony.
Wisely, the author does not overreach the facts and try to call shenanigans on the science per se. Nor should he, unless he knows of a scientific experiment that has been done demonstrating what you are claiming.
Yes, the implication is that the scientist is not to be trusted and that, by connection, his work should not be. But that is intentionally left to the reader to conclude. It allows for the possibility that the scientist does questionable science but that his conclusions might be proven correct by others, even. This is very good investigative scientific journalism.
That pattern of behavior is treated unfairly, though. He argued for one theory, did a study, and then published a paper with a very different direction. That's how it's supposed to work. You change your mind as the facts come in. The article treats this as a betrayal.
That is how the pattern is supposed to work (opinion informed by data), I agree. However, credibility can be called into question by the appearance of impropriety. Perhaps one could say that the appearance of impropriety increases the prior likelihood of actual impropriety, but it's not black and white.
This article is serving as a counterbalance to a NYT article that failed to disclose this author's relationship with industry. That is usually a prominent disclosure; I've had to be very clear about my funding in every paper I've submitted, and if it's of high interest to those in the field, one can imagine that the public has an interest in this knowledge as well.
I really felt that this was an article written to draw attention to the scientist's funding, and I don't think it was done badly. When doctors fail to disclose funding in situations like this, they rightly get slammed. This strikes me as no different.
Like I said, it is quite possible that this scientist's conclusions are correct, but it is always important to have independent validation, where independent != funded by the company that benefits from your stated results.
Another important point is that it sounds like the scientist's own company would also benefit extensively from the bee problem being disease rather than pesticides. As you say, this may not invalidate his results but it does mean they probably need further scrutiny.
Yes, the implication is that the scientist is not to be trusted and that, by connection, his work should not be. But that is intentionally left to the reader to conclude....This is very good investigative scientific journalism.
Insinuation being a subset of implication, I have no problem with your preference for a minimally different word choice, but confess that I am surprised that you would go to the effort to actually post that :-)
From a scientific perspective, failing to disclose that you're being funded by the company you're report exonerates is wrong. Research has shown that funding sources are strongly correlated the results of scientific papers in controversial areas, so this is arguably the single most important fact in the article.
More specifically the article did specifically identify a major flaw in the report: it didn't look at the chemical aspects as well, so couldn't draw conclusions about the contributions of different causes.
It seemed rather apparent to me that something was missing from that other article - like more insight into the underlying causes. Its reaffirming to see that Dr. Jennifer Sass asks the same questions I was asking (which, incidentally I was downvoted for and 'corrected' about here on HN).
I kind of agree, actually, I didn't need to throw that in. My point was not to whine about being marked down, but rather to comment that I'm surprised that a community of people as sharp as this one didn't agree that there seemed to be something major missing from the earlier article.
Finding the root cause is certainly interesting, but finding intermediary steps on the road to finding a root cause is also important. The press is notorious for being unable to represent scientific findings in a proper light. I don't know how many times I've read about 'possible cures for cancer' HIV and a whole series of other diseases simply because the press tends to hype things in order to get more eyeballs.
"minor link in bee mystery found" makes for less user engagement than "Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found".
The effect of the pairing of the two pathogens being more sever than either one on their own is also not novel (usually if you suffer from two diseases at the same time you feel a bit worse than if you had only one), but the magnitude of the effect is.
So possibly that's where they key to all this lies.
Even if the effect is real though, I'm not quite sure what can be done other than monitoring the bee populations for any strain of bee that is resistant to this combination.
If it turns out that Bayer funded this research in order to squash the idea that their chemicals are the root cause here then there will be(e) a lot of explaining to do.
Scientific research and 'big business' go hand in hand, Bayer, Monsanto and many other companies have used their money and lobbying muscle in the past to manipulate the scientific community and the press to their advantage, so it would not come as a total shock if they've done it again. However, I think it is a little early to shoot this research down, that should only come after a competing lab has tried to verify their findings and they turn out to be un-reproducible.
Not disclosing funding would be a problem if Bayer funds were used for this particular research, but if it wasn't then I don't have a problem with that, and even if the truth will come out eventually.
Just as some of us are annoyed by the scientist for not talking about the funding, we also have to remember that newspapers have funding too. Advertisers and eyeballs.
The linkbait-y headlines are all about helping the newspapers make money.
I've read reports that the global bee population is not actually decreacing. The poplution seem to be decreasing in the USA and a few other areas in Great Britaitn and Holand, but overall there's no evidence of the world population being signifficantly lowered.
Guess what. If they are able to fix the bee genocide with some sort of pharmaceutical... that means that it was the virus/bacteria/fungus that caused the problem! This New York Times article isn't bringing the bees back.
I don't think Bayer thought it would be great to make people think this would work, for PR (?) and then to go ahead and NOT be able to fix it. We're not talking about 9/11 or something that you can sort of say "we're stopping another one of those from happening every day."
Instead, we have ONGOING deaths that we don't know the cause of. So if this particular study, and any extrapolated treatment ACTUALLY WORKS. Then yes, it wasn't pesticides. Maybe Bayer is wrong, but the article is pretty clear this is preliminary.
b) Science papers aren't opinion articles. Nowhere in the study did he say that the virus and the fungus are exclusively the cause of the epidemic. If you got that impression, that was the media editorializing the study. If he falsified or omitted data, then he's guilty. But all he did was show that these two pathogens are present in collapsed colonies. You can't criticize the guy for something that another writer invented.
A
Even if he didn't use the funding for the study, he should have at least disclosed it. His research is going to now be perceived (right or wrong) as a lot shadier now that this CNN article came out than it would have if he just made his disclosure in the first place.
B
Well, I don't know if I agree with you there. There's a fine line between opinion and theory in scientific papers, especially when you're trying to prove (or disprove) causation. You don't find it interesting that, say, the tobacco industry manages to find scientists to refute links between use of their products and cancer? Or what about the division between the "global warming" debate. There's a reason for peer review in scientific publications, and even the peer review process can occasionally break down.
This touches on an very important topic: the corruption of scientists (often "scientists") by funding. The corruption that lead to the "climate consensus" is now costing the world a LOT, and the green-industrial complex is not likely to rest on its laurels.
This article makes me think of Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis), who wrote this book called
"Dancing in a Mind Field" years ago, and it brought up some interesting points when talking about "scientific research" and the reporting behind it.
The one takeaway from the book.. "follow the money". Fact checking, of course, is much harder than it sounds, which is probably why a lot of news organizations don't do as much as they should when reporting stuff like the bee colony collapses, etc.
Mullis has some interesting (almost conspiracy theory-esque) ideas about AIDS research, etc. One of the more memorable anecdotes in this book - he found it amusingly coincidental that there was a huge movement to ban Freon for environmental reasons right before Dupont's patents were about to expire.
And his particular domain is exquisitely narrow ... as further evidenced by the breadth and depth of his ignorance. Sorry to rant, but there's a guy that gets on my nerves.
But his points, at least as he wrote them in the particular book I mentioned aren't invalid or interesting because he's a jerk (his chapter on wanderlust had my head spinning).
"Follow the money" is a guideline that makes sense. I even thought his reasons for -not- dismissing astrology outright were somewhat interesting, although I see in his wikipedia entry that he now 'believes' in astrology.
45 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadIf you want to tell me about a scientist's report being something fake he cooked up (for fame or because someone paid him to say it or whatever), then first tell me what, scientifically, is or might be wrong with the report, and then tell me about his background and financial incentives and stuff.
I believe it's supposed to be good news-article-writing style to put the most important facts and overview first, so that the reader can stop at any part in the article and come away with a good overall picture of whatever the article talks about. The thesis of the article seems to be that there's something wrong with this scientist's study... yet this author seems to have thought it was fine for a reader to walk away having read the ad hominem attacks against the scientist, but not the actual description of what might be wrong with his study. I was rather disconcerted to see this in a major news outlet like CNN; I thought that only happened in Ayn Rand novels.
It's much easier this way.
While it is true that in the realm of pure logical discourse this fact is irrelevant to the argumentative structure of the original paper, in the real world it is a significant fact that legitimately questions the credibility of the scientist.
I find the fact that people who make valid points that don't happen to be in lock step with party ideology are buried on this site very tragic and it has significantly reduced my interest in participating in this site.
Particularly ironic is that the ideological downvoting always seems to come from the left/socialist wing, yet this is ostensibly a capitalist/startup oriented site.
For example, suppose my thesis is, "Running the Miller-Rabin test with a=2 is sufficient to determine primality for all numbers up to 2047." If my argument is, "I have verified this myself", then my argument depends entirely on the reader's trust in me. If my argument is, "Here is a C program that tests all numbers up to 2047; its output shows no exceptions", then my argument depends on the assumptions that a) this C program works as intended and b) when run, this program produces the desired output.
In the second case, (a) can be verified by someone who understands the Miller-Rabin test and can understand C code, and (b) can be verified by anyone with a (trusted) C compiler. These things are not particularly hard to do for an expert (or amateur) in the field. So, even if you don't know anything about the Miller-Rabin test or about C, you can find other people who do, and they will be able to tell you whether my argument is correct; my own credibility is useless for evaluating my argument unless you are too lazy to find yourself a trustworthy mathematician-programmer. And journalists are certainly not lazy in this respect--they interview experts all the time, and do so in this article.
The credibility of the scientist is irrelevant until you find a part in his argument that depends on his credibility. Like a part where he carries out an experiment that requires careful controlling to be accurate, and you have reason to think he is sloppy (inherently or deliberately). Or where he collects a bunch of data and you have reason to think it might be inaccurate (again, due to clumsiness or malice). Here, it seems to be (and I quote from the story--two pages in, I might mention):
"Dr. Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the health group at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that while the Bromenshenk/Army study is interesting, it fails to ask the underlying question "Why are colonies dying? Is it because they're getting weak? People who have HIV don't die of HIV. They die of other diseases they get because their immune systems are knocked off, making them more susceptible." In other words, pesticides could weaken the bees -- and then the virus/fungus combination finishes them off. That notion, however, is not explored in the new study."
There are some mutterings about pesticides maybe killing bees earlier, but it's not clear--wasn't to me, anyway--what this has to do with alleged problems in the author's study. But this is the part where we (finally) see what part of the study depends on his credibility. It is the sort of implied conclusion that the fungus/virus combination is the end of the story, that this fungus and virus just proliferated somehow and the solution is to get rid of them. The flaw, or rather the incomplete part of the study, is that pesticides might somehow make it easier for the virus/fungus to infect the bees, and this possibility isn't given the attention it should get; thus, we see how the author's strong connections with a company that makes pesticides might lead him to keep his mouth shut about it. (Which, I might opine, is not much of a flaw--it says that the author merely didn't go far enough.)
It is not true that, "in the real world", facts that would call a scientist's credibility into question are necessarily significant in evaluating his study. It is only true if there are parts of the study that depend critically on his credibility; and once you've found these parts, you can isolate them and check them yourself (or go ask experts to check them), and either prove the study wrong or validate it.
If you say this is a minor distinction, I say, no, quite the contrary. I think it's important to realize exactly what can and what can't be invalidated by attacks on someone's credibility: it puts a limit on the potential power of character a...
Unless you personally have invested the time and effort needed to evaluate his research, you're stuck listening to the people who have. And unless they're all saying the same thing, you have to look at credentials, reputation, and motivation to decide who to believe. While these factors don't affect the quality of his thesis, they do affect it's believability to the rest of us.
In the real world.
The way I read the article, the most important fact was that he was paid by Bayer.
Seems more like an oversight than "nefarious pan-government cum dystopian corporate plot".
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_1605.cfm
So the jury could still be out: Is Bayer corrupting science to lead away from the idea of GM food is causing bee deaths? Ugly, to say the least.
Wisely, the author does not overreach the facts and try to call shenanigans on the science per se. Nor should he, unless he knows of a scientific experiment that has been done demonstrating what you are claiming.
Yes, the implication is that the scientist is not to be trusted and that, by connection, his work should not be. But that is intentionally left to the reader to conclude. It allows for the possibility that the scientist does questionable science but that his conclusions might be proven correct by others, even. This is very good investigative scientific journalism.
This article is serving as a counterbalance to a NYT article that failed to disclose this author's relationship with industry. That is usually a prominent disclosure; I've had to be very clear about my funding in every paper I've submitted, and if it's of high interest to those in the field, one can imagine that the public has an interest in this knowledge as well.
I really felt that this was an article written to draw attention to the scientist's funding, and I don't think it was done badly. When doctors fail to disclose funding in situations like this, they rightly get slammed. This strikes me as no different.
Like I said, it is quite possible that this scientist's conclusions are correct, but it is always important to have independent validation, where independent != funded by the company that benefits from your stated results.
Really? It just sounds to me like insinuation.
More specifically the article did specifically identify a major flaw in the report: it didn't look at the chemical aspects as well, so couldn't draw conclusions about the contributions of different causes.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767170
Finding the root cause is certainly interesting, but finding intermediary steps on the road to finding a root cause is also important. The press is notorious for being unable to represent scientific findings in a proper light. I don't know how many times I've read about 'possible cures for cancer' HIV and a whole series of other diseases simply because the press tends to hype things in order to get more eyeballs.
"minor link in bee mystery found" makes for less user engagement than "Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found".
The effect of the pairing of the two pathogens being more sever than either one on their own is also not novel (usually if you suffer from two diseases at the same time you feel a bit worse than if you had only one), but the magnitude of the effect is.
So possibly that's where they key to all this lies.
Even if the effect is real though, I'm not quite sure what can be done other than monitoring the bee populations for any strain of bee that is resistant to this combination.
If it turns out that Bayer funded this research in order to squash the idea that their chemicals are the root cause here then there will be(e) a lot of explaining to do.
Scientific research and 'big business' go hand in hand, Bayer, Monsanto and many other companies have used their money and lobbying muscle in the past to manipulate the scientific community and the press to their advantage, so it would not come as a total shock if they've done it again. However, I think it is a little early to shoot this research down, that should only come after a competing lab has tried to verify their findings and they turn out to be un-reproducible.
Not disclosing funding would be a problem if Bayer funds were used for this particular research, but if it wasn't then I don't have a problem with that, and even if the truth will come out eventually.
The linkbait-y headlines are all about helping the newspapers make money.
This is the only source I could find with a quick search, and it's in spanish [PDF]http://www.fcen.uba.ar/prensa/cable/2010/pdf/Cable_752.pdf
I don't think Bayer thought it would be great to make people think this would work, for PR (?) and then to go ahead and NOT be able to fix it. We're not talking about 9/11 or something that you can sort of say "we're stopping another one of those from happening every day."
Instead, we have ONGOING deaths that we don't know the cause of. So if this particular study, and any extrapolated treatment ACTUALLY WORKS. Then yes, it wasn't pesticides. Maybe Bayer is wrong, but the article is pretty clear this is preliminary.
a) He didn't use the funding for this study.
b) Science papers aren't opinion articles. Nowhere in the study did he say that the virus and the fungus are exclusively the cause of the epidemic. If you got that impression, that was the media editorializing the study. If he falsified or omitted data, then he's guilty. But all he did was show that these two pathogens are present in collapsed colonies. You can't criticize the guy for something that another writer invented.
B Well, I don't know if I agree with you there. There's a fine line between opinion and theory in scientific papers, especially when you're trying to prove (or disprove) causation. You don't find it interesting that, say, the tobacco industry manages to find scientists to refute links between use of their products and cancer? Or what about the division between the "global warming" debate. There's a reason for peer review in scientific publications, and even the peer review process can occasionally break down.
The one takeaway from the book.. "follow the money". Fact checking, of course, is much harder than it sounds, which is probably why a lot of news organizations don't do as much as they should when reporting stuff like the bee colony collapses, etc.
Mullis has some interesting (almost conspiracy theory-esque) ideas about AIDS research, etc. One of the more memorable anecdotes in this book - he found it amusingly coincidental that there was a huge movement to ban Freon for environmental reasons right before Dupont's patents were about to expire.
"Follow the money" is a guideline that makes sense. I even thought his reasons for -not- dismissing astrology outright were somewhat interesting, although I see in his wikipedia entry that he now 'believes' in astrology.