[fsociety999]

Is it really that insane of an accusation? This is how almost everything in the world works.

This isn’t only about greed either. People want their research published for reasons other than greed. For example, they want to move up in their career or achieve recognition.

After looking at a lot of medical studies related to COVID during the last couple years, I have seen first hand how biased and inaccurate many of them are. Some of these studies are even mentioned in major news outlet despite their obvious flaws when you actually begin to scrutinize them. Think big pharma providing research grants for studies that conclude their products are effective.

The OP never said that people falsify data as a result of receiving grants from interested parties. They often don’t have to. They can simply design the experiment in a way that doesn’t account for specific variables or behaviors then use the resulting data to reach a specific conclusion.

I remember seeing an article related to AI research on HN a little while ago that somewhat explained this problem. The grant money all goes to people researching deep neural networks which creates a reinforcing feedback loop. Since all the money goes to one branch of research, it creates very few opportunities to research competing ideas. I believe it was this one:

https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-14467/