[bestouff]

Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.

[counters]

Biased about what?

There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!

[jandrewrogers]

Companies spend a lot of money to remove and repair the idiosyncratic bias that already exists in this data.

[groundzeros2015]

Private companies don’t care about having accurate data?

Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?

[throwaway_7274]

They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.

[groundzeros2015]

And governments don’t face bad incentives that would cause them to hide information?

[munk-a]

Let's have the government collect the data and private companies can engage in that as well if they wish - both parties can call the other out if there's a discrepancy.

IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.

1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.

[groundzeros2015]

I would characterize it as the things the government would lie about are different than the things a company would lie about.

[throwaway_7274]

They do. Often for different kinds of things. It’s not “government good, private bad” or the other way around. Both are facile views.

[groundzeros2015]

Agreed. Different organizations with different incentives. Neither of them have the privileged or an unbiased view.

[bumby]

Depends if the accuracy is counter to profit. Not to say governments don’t have their own biased incentives, but they tend to be of a different kind.

[bestouff]

Private companies care way more about making money.

[groundzeros2015]

Making money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.

[bumby]

You can make even more money if you make sure you have accurate data while your competitors do not.

[autoexec]

> Making money requires accurate information about the world.

A company may have accurate information that their product causes cancer, but they aren't going to tell you that. They'll outright lie and say it doesn't, hire scientists to create fake research to "prove" that it's safe, and harass, threaten, and discredit anyone who tries to tell the public the truth.

[munk-a]

This is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.

[autoexec]

Private companies care ONLY about making money.