Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mola 2218 days ago
You have an interest in the outcome of the research, why should we trust you to conduct or fund it properly? Your track record is terrible. The fact you are throwing around dubious research as facts is crazy.

I'm sorry, but really, there's no reason to believe a word a you say.

You get paid from Facebook, Facebook lied again and again, how on earth do you expect people to take you seriously?

Your job and title is to give FB the optics of caring about integrity, and was invented as part of FB PR in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre.

The amount of cynicism is just mind boggling.

1 comments

>why should we trust you to conduct or fund it properly?

You are welcome to conduct research or fund it. You can even help current research by criticizing their research in its substance, or engage yourself politically (at least by voting) so we can have more and better research about the topic.

I do, but that's irrelevant to the fact the corporate funded research is used to muddy the waters and make reality even less accessible than it is.

It's not the lack of research that's a problem, it's the weaponization of research.

Outside of actual weapons research, research can't be "weaponised" and academia is rife with incredibly strong political biases. Political bias in academia is so severe that there is actually an entire foundation devoted to trying to combat it (the Heterodox Academy).

Your posts sound like you believe corporations shouldn't ever do research and worse, that academics don't have any interest in the outcomes of their own work. But that's nonsense, of course they do. They want to publish papers, they want their research findings to be novel and widely cited, they want to build a reputation. They have all kinds of self-interested incentives that act against producing accurate research findings; hence the replication crisis!

So, what’s the solution?

How do you think Facebook should deal with this? If Facebook-funded research is suspect and nobody else is able or willing to fund it (why should someone else fund soemthing for Facebooks potential benefit, when Facebook are rich, and if someone else is funding research for Facebooks detriment, then I would say its equally suspect), how should such research be funded then?

How can you show results of the research in a way that you wouldn’t consider as “weaponized”?

I’m not a fan of Facebook and am quite suspicious of them, but I’m also not sure what they can do in this particular situation that we would find satisfactory,