[throwawaygh]

That's the confusing thing. Appealing to rich twitter users/journalists/the public doesn't strike me as a particularly good strategy for raising research funds!

Random rich people rarely fund individual researchers. More common for them to fund an institute (perhaps even by starting a new one). The institute then awards grants based on recommendations from a panel of experts. This was true before Epstein scandals, and now I cannot imagine a decent university signing off on random one-off funding streams from rich people.

All gov funding goes through panels of experts.

Listening to random rich people or journalists or the public just isn't how those panels of experts work. Over-hyping work by eg tweeting at rich/famous people or getting a bunch of news articles published is in fact a good way to turn off exactly the people who decide which scientists get money.

Maybe a particularly clueless/hapless PR person at the relevant university (or at Nature) is creating a mess for the authors?

[perl4ever]

>Random rich people rarely fund individual researchers.

Yes and no. There are private foundations that, if someone donates a reasonably large amount, say at least the amount of their typical grant, they will match the donor with a particular researcher, and the researcher will have lunch, give a tour, and send them a letter later about about the conclusions (more research is needed).

That doesn't mean the donor gets input into which proposals are accepted; that is indeed done by a panel of experts as far as I know. It's more of a thing to keep them engaged and relating to where the money goes when there are emotional reasons for supporting e.g. medical research.

[throwawaygh]

Even less than that now. The ability of specific donors to direct funds to specific academic groups for specific research is WAY more constrained now than it was pre-Epstein. Institutions want that that extra layer of indirection.

[PartiallyTyped]

While I agree with you, the nature paper that I linked above was published by the folks at google of all places. I think a valid hypothesis is that work done during internships (or even residencies) may not be on-par with what NeurIPS/ICLR/etc require but they give publicity and thus the PR teams push for that kind of papers.

However, it still does note explain why this kind of sloppy work done and published by publicly funded research labs, except perhaps as a form of advertisement.

[throwawaygh]

Well, yeah, corporate research is what it is. A lot of the value add is marketing.