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Comment by yuliyp | Hacker News Reader

I gave up reading the article about halfway when they hadn't mentioned at all how the program committee of the conference is assembled. That corporations sponsor academic conferences is natural: there are a lot of reasons it's useful: recruiting, networking, cooperating with other researchers, etc. And they're the part of those scientific communities that has the spare money to be able to provide sponsorships. That the article spent so long trying to convince me that this was sinister is bizarre.

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> That corporations sponsor academic conferences is natural

But of course, not all "natural" things are ideal.

Pervasive corporate influence over scientific communication and funding puts a really big thumb on the scale of which programs get pursued and which findings get acknowledged and explored.

It doesn't make sense to forbid corporate participation in research altogether (that would be bad too), but it's prudent to look at real-world examples in real research domains to see if important work contrary to moneyed interests is being stifled or misrepresented by way of these money+power dynamics.

Why would eliminating corporate funding in academic research be bad?

The way it stands now is that it’s a nice tax write of the the company and a great way to play the heads I win tails you lose game.

> The way it stands now is that it’s a nice tax write of the the company and a great way to play the heads I win tails you lose game.

What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?

Presumably he means you can use company funds to donate to a pro-pesticide charity/NGO, and then use that donation to claim a tax credit (around 50%, subject to some limits). It's not really a "heads I win tails you lose" situation though. If you donate $100k, and claim the tax credits, you're still out $50k. You might get back more than $50k worth of monetary benefits from whatever the NGO/charity does, but that's not really guaranteed. It's like buying some junk on wish.com with a 50% coupon and saying that it's a "heads I win tails you lose" because if it turns out to be not junk, then you win, but if it's shit you still saved 50%. A far more straightforward and honest way of describing it would just be to say that they get a discount on their charity spend.

That's also money you're spending out of your "profit" instead of netting it off as an expense, so it's really a fairly minor discount on pre-allocating money over a multi-year horizon for purposes that can be structured as a charity.

Corporations can fund research in ways that allow them to suppress results that threaten their profits. If science is conducted in these ways, corporations can fund science (for which they receive tax benefits) and if the results are positive, it gets published and the corporation wins because the research supports their business model (tails, I win). If the research results does not support their business model, they can decline to publish it (tails, you lose).

There are ways to do science that avoid this kind of corruption.

Name three academic institutions that would sign a contract that prevented them from publishing adverse results. You are at least fifty years out of date on this argument.

A) They don't have to have that in writing, it's very implicity understood that you don't bite the hand that feeds. B) Even if they do find adverse results, depending on what they are (e.g. actively harmful versus negative results) you may have a hard time publishing them since journals don't care much for negative results.

Not all science is performed by way of academic research. Industry performs research too, and the best way to ground both biased industrial research and impractical/naive academic research is to have the two communities engaged as commingled peers, where both have standing in funding and process and are each obliged to provide justification and transparency to the other.

The phrase "Eliminate corporations from academic research" does a lot of heavy lifting here.

If a company wants to bring a pesticide to market. We would like them to bear the brunt of safety research costs before they launch. You might say that product safety is different from pure academic research.

We're just arguing semantics and incentives at that point. Like giving them a tax break for that research. Sure that sucks. But how else shall we make it happen.

> impractical/naive academic research

I think this is a common confusion. You need impractical/naive research because that's how exploration gets done. If you heavily bias the search towards areas of the search space that you've already seen a lot then you've basically killed science and its ability to deliver useful results.

> Why would eliminating corporate funding in academic research be bad?

The honest answer is because there isn't enough funding through government and philanthropy.

You'll find a really odd opinion, that many people think engineering endeavors are significantly more important than research ones. When instead the truth is that both are two sides of the same coin. After all, research funds the next generation of engineering.

I think there's an unfortunate effect of this because there is quite a bit of science that is beholden to corporate... let's say "motivations"(?) rather than more free intellectual pursuit. Then the money that is more free is much more competitive and frankly people are metric hacking to get there (publish or perish paradigm is weird when you have to frequently publish novel works). The system was fine but the environment changes and eventually all metrics are hacked.

For personal values, I think it is quite important to fund research. From the very basic low level to even higher engineering research.[0] I'd actually be in favor of 5-10xing the federal science budget. I'd argue this should be primarily funded through federal grants, because people will take that research and go make things which will then be sold (world wide) and we'll tax through that. It's like venture capital if it was less risky but had a longer time frame for ROI.

The category of "General Science, Space, and Technology" accounts for 20.5 bn dollars[1]. The problem is, people understand this to be a big number and hear about these huge costs (often of projects that last decades!), but this is actually 0.4% of the 2024 budget! 64% of that (13.2bn) is going into space flight, research, and supporting activities. The other 7.3bn is going to the rest of science! To put this into perspective, we spend 8.4bn dollars on salaries and expenses for Social Security. The Navy gets 16bn for research, Army 11.5, Air Force 8.2, and another 14 on "Defense Wide" (so a total of ~50bn).

edit: To be clear, I'm not against corporate funding of science or even corporations working with academics for research. I think it can often work out great. But I think there needs to be some balance or academia gets captured by industry. I think we can think of some where this may have happened (or is in danger of), including domains closely related to the topics HN cares about the most.

[0] If you're unfamiliar, the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is a often referenced and useful (albeit vague) map to point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer

[side note] A fun thing I do is talk about the ultra wealthy's wealth in terms of "CERNs" instead of dollars. Because numbers in the billions are just unimaginable (I have a physics degree and work with numbers this large -- or the inverse -- and if you tell me you understand this more than an abstract concept, I'll call you a liar). But we can imagine a CERN (which is funded by several countries btw and not a significant part of any of those budgets. Despite being the largest if not most expensive physics experiment ever). Which is a (roughly) 10 billion dollar super project that took (roughly) 10 years to build and costs (roughly) 1 billion dollars a year to operate. This actually makes for a good comparison for people like billionaires because their money is so massive that it is often growing far faster than they can actually conceivably spend it. Maybe the best example of this is Mackenzie Scott who in 2019 got $35.6bn in Amazon stock when divorcing Bezos, has given away $14 billion (5.8 in 2020 alone!) AND Forbes has her at 34.9 billion in net worth (Amazon has done 30% better than VOO since 2019 for context. So, not counting her givings, it's the difference of about 5bn)

I would say the right word is “emergent” not “natural”

Like a cell becoming cancerous.

I also found the article to be far too verbose and the parts I read mostly tried to imply some malfeasance, but there was hardly any specific accusations.

Industry sponsorship is entirely normal for scientific conferences, they would not really be possible without it. This also isn't an issue usually, the sponsors get some advertisment on the conference and some space to represent themselves. If sponsors actually would affect the talk selection that certainly would be a very serious problem, but I didn't see any real evidence of that in the article.

They spell out that:

"This face of Corteva Agriscience, ... that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the organization ... "

and:

"However, during hundreds of sessions on these subjects, a significant topic went missing: scholarly research on one of Corteva’s products – neonicotinoids, a factor in one of the most controversial, high-profile areas of research in entomology."

The article discusses quite a few angles about neonics. Close to the conclusion it quotes a researcher from the Uni of Minnesota:

"I don’t think the scientific meetings are run by them or overrun by them," she said. ... "You donate money, you get a perk. . . . It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t."

So, an issue that even I (a civilian) have heard of fails to be mentioned at a massive conference that should be discussing it (int al). That conference has a major sponsor who also manufacturer's said "issue". Also it seems to be accepted that if you pay, you get perks.

That's an insinuation, not an accusation of anything specific at all. There are lots of reasons that in that particular year neonicotinoids were under-represented at the conference. The article basically presents one possible hand-wavy explanation as if it must be the explanation, and then offers no evidence of a link at all. Yes those companies sponsor the organizers of the conference, and yes the topic in question was under-represented relative to the article's expectations. No there is not necessarily a causal link between those statements.

A lot of arguments are hand wavy these days but neonics are nasty in my opinion.

I live in a UK county that is quite rural and there is a lot of farming here. It was also a testing ground for blasting badgers into the middle of next week 'cause bovine TB. Yay, go: Somerset (we also bring you the Glastonbury music festy and Chedder cheese and possibly "England" if you squint hard enough - that's a D Trump grade assertion!)

We can debate cause and effect but I suspect if I suggested you sniff a neonic, you might politely refuse on health grounds. They are not nice compounds and there is damn good evidence that neonics damage insects and may cause damage further up the food chain.

This conference should discuss all interested issues, regardless of sponsors. It didn't and you and I both know why not. There is no if or but.

> corporations sponsor academic conferences is natural

There is a vocal minority that treats "corporation" as a dirty word. This sort of writing is fodder for them. It doesn't actually have to make a point, just point out that corporations exist. It's helps campaigns get out the vote and electeds' staffers filter out stupid feedback.

Yes, along with capitalism, free markets, anti-union - once you have enough positive confirmation bias momentum on words already agreed upon as bad, then all you need is a little ad hominem implication nudge and you captured a large number of readers.

> along with capitalism, free markets, anti-union

On the other side you have socialism, DEI and cisgender. You really don't have to make a point to get that section riled up, just mention the term. (One could literally start a speech to the respective crowds by repeating a single word, e.g. corporations or socialism, taking a dramatic pause, and get a strong response.)

And again, it's safe to toss out policy feedback that obsesses over these terms. (Both the far left and right also have a weird obsession with capitalising random words. I think it seems evocative of Enlightenment-era English?)

Absolutely. It goes both ways. I just realized I may have implied otherwise. I was sticking to the negative words that go with corporation.

The article extensively details how insecticide companies, and neonic producers in particular, have a huge role in the organization leadership, funding, and its conferences. It quotes people who describe how industry infiltrates professional and academic organizations and influence.

At that "halfway" mark, the author describes employees of these companies gish-galloping conference presenters.

Then the author describes a couple of scientists in the ESA describing how neonic research isn't selected because it doesn't "add anything new." except the author then shows that neonic research and citations are both growing - the complete opposite of what several ESA people said.

These insecticide companies are getting to keep their cake (aggressively challenging neonic research as poorly supported) and eat it too (suppress representation of neonic research at their conferences because "it doesn't add anything new" and "is settled science.")

> the author describes a couple of scientists in the ESA describing how neonic research isn't selected because it doesn't "add anything new." except the author then shows that neonic research and citations are both growing

I suppose this needs to be expanded on. It could be that neonic research is growing, but that the papers being submitted aren't adding anything novel.

OP's point stands. Burying the lede after, essentially, a series of paragraphs that filters the readership to a particular political bent is bad writing.

That’s because USRTK is an organic industry funded PR group. They get paid to attack conventional agriculture. They are quick to point out corporate sponsors yet they themselves are a corporate sponsor.

This kind of “it must be sinister because … look at all the things that weren’t there!” Is highly damaging to the pursuit of science. It’s like gas lighting … so disappointing . The absence of anything is NOT proof that was purposely omitted

useful for careers, maybe

> That corporations sponsor academic conferences is natural: there are a lot of reasons it's useful: recruiting, networking, cooperating with other researchers, etc.

And for manipulating the scientific consensus, for rewarding scholars that agree with them, etc.

But who actually cares? I don't think anyone was saying that sponsoring scientific conferences wasn't useful for corporations. It's a straw man. The question is whether it's good for science and public health, specifically in the case of neonicotinoids.

> And they're the part of those scientific communities that has the spare money to be able to provide sponsorships.

The fewer challenges to what is currently profitable to them, the more spare money they have.

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