4 ms·

I see people arguing that there's nothing bad in this report. The shady, underhanded and dishonest context is so clear, I'm shocked to see so many such objectio

I see people arguing that there's nothing bad in this report. The shady, underhanded and dishonest context is so clear, I'm shocked to see so many such objections. The basic problem here is that two top academics are clearly selling the use of their credentials for clear commercial gain of a private company and using sophisticated means to hide the fact of such sale. That part is bad enough, even worse is the eager sales pitch and readiness to suggest financial shenanigans to hide the source of the funding that these professors are engaging in. It's very clear that these are not first-timers or unwilling participants. This is their normal MO for writing and speaking on the topic.

javajosh 11y ago
What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. "The bad guy" is often going to extremes to prevent something from going public - dumping toxic waste in a river, taking bribes, selling a vote, torturing people in secret etc. Somehow it seems like these days, if someone gets caught doing these things in real life, nothing happens. Dumping toxic waste is pro-business. Bribery is freedom of speech. Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway. Sometimes I want to grab these people and ask them, seriously, if this isn't evil, then what IS?
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Unfortunately, what people seem to pick up as "evil" from the fictions isn't the immoral actions, but instead the color-coding of villains as wearing ominous clothes (often dressed for a funeral) and accompanied by certain musical stings. I mean, for God's sakes, the Nazis wore skulls and didn't notice they were the baddies!
  - Joof 11y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
    - Joof 11y ago
      I would love a skit on the current NSA. Have an old Russian/Nazi operative on a stakeout with a NSA guy who points out that we don't have to bug phones or do stakeouts anymore. Culminates in reading the e-mail of the operative to him. "But aren't you Americans all about freedom of speech?"; "Of course! My freedom to read your speech."
  - grkvlt 11y ago
    > Nazis wore skulls and didn't notice they were the baddies You mean like the Queen's Royal Lancers [1] (17th/21st Lancers in WW2) maybe? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Royal_Lancers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Royal_Lancers
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      Yes, sure, but there's a slightly deeper meaning to the joke: fascism as an ideology has always been built around the glorification of death. If you want to spot capital-E Evil in real life, look for the people loudly proclaiming their devotion to death. Maybe they cover it up with "God is great!" sometimes, but then they pop out, "We love death as you love life!"[1]. Sometimes, rarely, they do you the favor of actually printing the Chaos Star of the occult on their book-covers[2] (and I seriously thought that was a pop-culture reference until I found the link proving its truth). Or maybe they're just cheering, "Let him die! Let him die!"[3]. [1] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfagPS6490 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfagPS6490 [2] -- http://crookedtimber.org/2015/03/10/who-is-aleksandr-dugin/ http://crookedtimber.org/2015/03/10/who-is-aleksandr-dugin/ [3] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PepQF7G-It0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PepQF7G-It0
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- shkkmo 11y ago
  > What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. > Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway. The use of torture 'by the good guys' is actually pretty ubiquitous in modern TV.
  - javajosh 11y ago
    That is very observant, something I've written about elsewhere. Not quite sure what to do about it to be honest. It makes me sick.
  - knughit 11y ago
    The TV show 24 was essentiality US military propaganda.
Steko 11y ago
If I write the paper alone, I don’t think there would be any problem stating that ‘The author received no financial compensation for this essay,’ - William Happer In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar. – Frank Clemente
x1798DE 11y ago
This is clearly not being billed as a question about non-disclosure of funding, so you can understand why people might think it's not the smoking gun evidence of misconduct it is purported to be. To me it feels like the headline and the story are that these guys have a conflict of interest because of the funding (i.e. "we paid these scientists to say climate change isn't a problem"), but in fact everything in this article is consistent with it going the other way around - they have a conflict of interest because they have strong beliefs on a scientific topic, and may be willing to do dodgy stuff in favor of that. I never said that nothing wrong happened (I honestly don't know), just that it feels like a bait-and-switch because I get the strong implication here that the point of this story is that these guys are taking bribes to induce them to say what they are saying, which is very different from "they are hiding the source of the funding which enables them to say what they are saying".
nl 11y ago
I suspect that many people don't read a lot of papers, maybe? It is absolutely, always the normal behavior to disclose all sources of funding. For example, I had the paper EpiCaster: An Integrated Web Application For Situation Assessment and Forecasting of Global Epidemics[1] open. This paper includes section 9, Acknowledgements: We thank our external collaborators and members of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab- oratory (NDSSL) for their suggestions and comments. This work has been partially supported by NSF Nets Grant CNS- 0626964, NSF HSD Grant SES-0729441, NIH MIDAS project 2U01GM070694-7, NSF PetaApps Grant OCI-0904844, DTRA RD Grant HDTRA1-0901-0017, DTRA CNIMS Grant HDTRA1- 07-C-0113, NSF NETS CNS-0831633, DHS 4112-31805, DOE DE-SC0003957, NSF REU Supplement CNS-0845700, US Naval Surface Warfare Center N00178-09-D-3017 DEL ORDER 13, NSF Netse CNS- 1011769 and NSF SDCI OCI-1032677. That's just a random paper, as an example. That is simply how academic papers are done, and anyone who isn't disclosing funding isn't following normal behavior. Maybe some people will be suspicious of this paper because it is partially funded by the US Naval Surface Warfare Center. That's their choice, and this disclosure enables them to judge it based on that. [1] http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/chenj/pub/NDSSL-TR-15-090.pdf http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/chenj/pub/NDSSL-TR-15-090.pdf

javajosh 11y ago

What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. "The bad guy" is often going to extremes to prevent something from going public - dumping toxic waste in a river, taking bribes, selling a vote, torturing people in secret etc. Somehow it seems like these days, if someone gets caught doing these things in real life, nothing happens. Dumping toxic waste is pro-business. Bribery is freedom of speech. Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway. Sometimes I want to grab these people and ask them, seriously, if this isn't evil, then what IS?

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Unfortunately, what people seem to pick up as "evil" from the fictions isn't the immoral actions, but instead the color-coding of villains as wearing ominous clothes (often dressed for a funeral) and accompanied by certain musical stings. I mean, for God's sakes, the Nazis wore skulls and didn't notice they were the baddies!
- Joof 11y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
  - Joof 11y ago
    I would love a skit on the current NSA. Have an old Russian/Nazi operative on a stakeout with a NSA guy who points out that we don't have to bug phones or do stakeouts anymore. Culminates in reading the e-mail of the operative to him. "But aren't you Americans all about freedom of speech?"; "Of course! My freedom to read your speech."
- grkvlt 11y ago
  > Nazis wore skulls and didn't notice they were the baddies You mean like the Queen's Royal Lancers [1] (17th/21st Lancers in WW2) maybe? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Royal_Lancers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Royal_Lancers
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    Yes, sure, but there's a slightly deeper meaning to the joke: fascism as an ideology has always been built around the glorification of death. If you want to spot capital-E Evil in real life, look for the people loudly proclaiming their devotion to death. Maybe they cover it up with "God is great!" sometimes, but then they pop out, "We love death as you love life!"[1]. Sometimes, rarely, they do you the favor of actually printing the Chaos Star of the occult on their book-covers[2] (and I seriously thought that was a pop-culture reference until I found the link proving its truth). Or maybe they're just cheering, "Let him die! Let him die!"[3]. [1] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfagPS6490 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfagPS6490 [2] -- http://crookedtimber.org/2015/03/10/who-is-aleksandr-dugin/ http://crookedtimber.org/2015/03/10/who-is-aleksandr-dugin/ [3] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PepQF7G-It0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PepQF7G-It0
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
shkkmo 11y ago
> What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. > Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway. The use of torture 'by the good guys' is actually pretty ubiquitous in modern TV.
- javajosh 11y ago
  That is very observant, something I've written about elsewhere. Not quite sure what to do about it to be honest. It makes me sick.
- knughit 11y ago
  The TV show 24 was essentiality US military propaganda.

Steko 11y ago

If I write the paper alone, I don’t think there would be any problem stating that ‘The author received no financial compensation for this essay,’ - William Happer In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar. – Frank Clemente

x1798DE 11y ago

This is clearly not being billed as a question about non-disclosure of funding, so you can understand why people might think it's not the smoking gun evidence of misconduct it is purported to be. To me it feels like the headline and the story are that these guys have a conflict of interest because of the funding (i.e. "we paid these scientists to say climate change isn't a problem"), but in fact everything in this article is consistent with it going the other way around - they have a conflict of interest because they have strong beliefs on a scientific topic, and may be willing to do dodgy stuff in favor of that. I never said that nothing wrong happened (I honestly don't know), just that it feels like a bait-and-switch because I get the strong implication here that the point of this story is that these guys are taking bribes to induce them to say what they are saying, which is very different from "they are hiding the source of the funding which enables them to say what they are saying".

nl 11y ago

I suspect that many people don't read a lot of papers, maybe? It is absolutely, always the normal behavior to disclose all sources of funding. For example, I had the paper EpiCaster: An Integrated Web Application For Situation Assessment and Forecasting of Global Epidemics[1] open. This paper includes section 9, Acknowledgements: We thank our external collaborators and members of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab- oratory (NDSSL) for their suggestions and comments. This work has been partially supported by NSF Nets Grant CNS- 0626964, NSF HSD Grant SES-0729441, NIH MIDAS project 2U01GM070694-7, NSF PetaApps Grant OCI-0904844, DTRA RD Grant HDTRA1-0901-0017, DTRA CNIMS Grant HDTRA1- 07-C-0113, NSF NETS CNS-0831633, DHS 4112-31805, DOE DE-SC0003957, NSF REU Supplement CNS-0845700, US Naval Surface Warfare Center N00178-09-D-3017 DEL ORDER 13, NSF Netse CNS- 1011769 and NSF SDCI OCI-1032677. That's just a random paper, as an example. That is simply how academic papers are done, and anyone who isn't disclosing funding isn't following normal behavior. Maybe some people will be suspicious of this paper because it is partially funded by the US Naval Surface Warfare Center. That's their choice, and this disclosure enables them to judge it based on that. [1] http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/chenj/pub/NDSSL-TR-15-090.pdf http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/chenj/pub/NDSSL-TR-15-090.pdf