7 ms·

Researchers Who Exposed VW Gain Little Reward from Success

chaps 6y ago
This is sadly the case with most public good research. Just look at the amount of money that's available for things like police transparency research, or advertisement-less journalism. Even if you do great work in these sorts of fields, there's usually very little to personally gain from it.
- homero 6y ago
  And this is how one day he might be forced to take a job where he becomes one of engineers at VW who hid the pollution so he can pay the bills.
- op03 6y ago
  There is a big gap between Observations and Solutions. Just like the resources, knowledge and skills required to detect Cancer is very different from what is required to treat it, which is very different from what is required to cure it. The healthy way to go about it involves understanding the gaps(usually from someone/group with experience) and then picking an issue. "Optimize for a simplistic world Or satisfice for a realistic one"
  - chaps 6y ago
    I cannot for the life of me figure out what the point is that you're trying to make.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Ever since GPT-3 was released, HN has been like this.
      - chaps 6y ago
        Heh, I think you might be right.
      - voodootrucker 6y ago
        lol, proof amanfrommars was AI 10 years ahead of it's time. https://forums.theregister.com/post/search/?q=amanfrommars https://forums.theregister.com/post/search/?q=amanfrommars
    - totalZero 6y ago
      I think it's a variant of P!=NP. Solution is not reducible to verification. Employees who can tell that a problem exists, aren't necessarily as profitable as employees who can resolve that problem. Or in some cases, they may be more profitable. Either way, it is not an identical task. A person who can identify fraud is very useful in an accounting firm. Not so much in an engineering firm. Just my attempt at interpreting the downvoted comment.
- eru 6y ago
  If you want to get paid for exposing scandals, work for a short-seller. See eg https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/ https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/
  - anshumankmr 6y ago
    True. Even Dr. Michael J Burry who predicted the 2008 crisis intended to short against the banks.
ekanes 6y ago
Or maybe they can sleep well at night the rest of their lives, knowing they changed the world?
- kokx 6y ago
  We unfortunately "reward" our heroes with things like that. Empty gestures. Just a pat on the back. On the other hand we reward the people who actively cheat and exploit the world with large sums of money.
  - onecommentman 6y ago
    Sleeping well at night, “a satisfied mind”...they may be less visible, but they are the opposite of empty. Ask any old person whether they would prefer a pile of gold or a good night sleep, a fat bank account with vultures circling overhead or a comfortable feeling that they did good. The latter can’t buy the former (although the former often happens anyways...life is funny). The former can never buy the latter and most oldsters I know grow to think the latter is the only thing that ever really mattered.
    - boringg 6y ago
      Maybe - also I think that the premise that you can't have both is false. Its a false narrative that runs in our economy you either get wealthy or you do something good - its ridiculous and really detrimental to our society.
    - mafuy 6y ago
      That's not how it works. Young people want to acquire resources to be able to successfully grow old (i.e. survive). Once they are old (i.e. had gotten the resources to become old), they don't need to get these resources anymore - because they have them already! Thus, they are free to want something else (like "sleeping well"). It's called survivorship bias, and it means that these very romantic ideas cannot be trusted without compensating for the bias. Those with too little resources died before you could ask them.
tantalor 6y ago
> we never thought it would blow the lid off Volkswagen If they didn't set out with that goal, then there's little point in rewarding them, because it would not necessarily incentivize similar outcomes in the future.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Doesn't matter what these specific people were motivated by. Rewards will incentivize some people.
Proven 6y ago
There was little to no damage from VW's cheating. Don't confuse the silly state-imposed fines with "value" of the researchers' findings.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  > There was little to no damage from VW's cheating. I think your post is downvoted because it stakes a contrarian position, but doesn't provide supporting arguments / evidence.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  I believe less pollution is valuable.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Aside, of course, from the excess deaths and lowered quality of life caused by increased pollution. MIT researches estimated 1200 early deaths caused by VW's cheating: https://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deaths-europe-0303 https://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-dea...
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    Why was it OK a few years earlier when the emissions regulations were more permissive? Were the people killed by those emissions not worthy for some reason? Why were the new emissions targets the "right" ones? Why not make them half again and save even more lives? The answer is that they are numbers pulled out of the ass of some CARB or EPA bureaucrat. In reality it's impossible to say that "1200 early deaths" were caused by VW emissions. It's statistical smoke and mirrors and doesn't even show up as a blip in the normal variation of total mortality of any given year. How many early deaths were caused by California's refusal to allow or perform proper forest manangement, resulting in this year's devastating wildfires and the pollution they caused? Sorry for the whataboutism. Deaths are deaths.
    - yaacov 6y ago
MattGaiser 6y ago
What is the cost of forcing researchers to spend all this time piecing together little bits of money? Perhaps a bit off topic, but it seems like the poor guy has to spend a lot of time not doing research.
- nickff 6y ago
  Almost every organization which produces a valuable products spends a great deal of resources convincing others to pay for continued production. This applies to researchers, software development companies, and integrated circuit manufacturers.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Fair enough. It just never occurred to me that research labs might be just like running a company, except with no potential profitable upside.
    - jessriedel 6y ago
      There is substantial potential upside for researchers, it's just not monetary.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Most researchers I know spend more time not doing research. Competing for project funding is extremely time consuming. I personally left research mostly for this reason, I was asked to spend more and more time not doing actual research but finding funding and I suck at it and I don't like it.
jariel 6y ago
It's be interesting if they were offered a cut of the damages. That would create a pretty crazy incentive structure.
- jonathanyc 6y ago
  That’s actually how SEC whistleblower awards work. I think it makes sense. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-266 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-266
  - jariel 6y ago
    It makes sense if humans are rational and have good judgement. I don't believe they do in general, and without having a bigger understanding of a lot of things, a lot of individuals are prone to magical, conspiratorial thinking, lacking in rigour. For VW, you have very smart people, very self aware (i.e. able to read their own data), probably smart enough to snoop out what the law is, backed by an institution with integrity. It's a classical case Whistleblowing type findings of the good kind. 'Random Employee Bob' may have access to a treasure trove of data they think is 'evidence' when in reality it's nothing of the sort. Case and point: Manning with the cable leaks. Manning did not know what was on the cables, and turns out, there was nothing damming in them. The other leak at the time - the video showing the deaths of freelance journalists probably isn't 'evidence' either. It's a shocking video, but the military misidentifying armed, unknown, unregistered individuals in a war-zone, moving towards friendly forces ... is a tragedy but probably not a crime. Though that leak is more contentious. There are a lot of confused people in the world, who misconstrue their ideology for the more commonly agreed upon versions of what is right and wrong, and vast numbers of individuals in the press who are as much suited to narrative as they are to truth. If you hop onto OAN right now, you'll see a delightfully despicable and shocking number of individual 'whistleblowers' who have 'evidence' that the election was 'stolen' by nefarious parties, and millions of people reading it believing that it's true. Their incentive is clicks, Rudy Giuliani's is his pardon, or $20K/day. Which is why I implied 'crazy' incentives ...
    - chaps 6y ago
pmarreck 6y ago
The set of things that are valuable to mankind and the set of things that are profitable to mankind only partially overlap, and we should optimize for the former
jey 6y ago
(2016)
redis_mlc 6y ago
The importance of the VW case can be summarized as publicizing the following: 1) European countries experienced a mass delusion that diesel was cleaner than gasoline engines. This was based on measuring one emission gas, not all gases plus particulates. Sales are shifting from diesel to gas and electric now. Note the reduction of diesel sales by 13.5% from 2017 to 2019: https://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/share-of-diesel-in-new-passenger-cars https://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/share-of-diesel-... 2) All vehicle mfgs. game their emissions and product counts based on govt. mandates. VW got caught, but if you read the press, there are periodic articles on this topic. The main thing to know is that US domestic makers only make cars to offset the fact their profitable trucks emit more than the limits.
dehrmann 6y ago
I think this is a case of the headline and article being written by different people. > The center he runs received $70,000 in 2013 from an environmental group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, to conduct the study that eventually exposed how Volkswagen had rigged vehicles to deceive regulators. The original purpose of the research was to show that carmakers were capable of meeting more rigorous limits on emissions of harmful nitrogen oxides. The work was more complicated than expected, though, and Mr. Carder had to make up a $20,000 or $30,000 shortfall from other sources. > Over time, the researchers noticed that emissions from the vehicles — a Volkswagen Jetta and a Passat — were much higher than they should have been. But they attributed the discrepancies to technical defects or design flaws in the cars rather than deliberate wrongdoing. > Mr. Besch presented the team’s findings at an industry conference in San Diego in early 2014, still not realizing they had uncovered a scandal. The data piqued the interest of officials in the audience from the California Air Resources Board. CARB, as the agency is known, worked with the West Virginia group before and had let the team use state labs to calibrate equipment for the Volkswagen tests. It sounds like they were just doing their jobs, they found it by accident, and the insight actually came from CARB. This history behind this is interesting, it's good they found it, and Dr. Thiruvengadam seems to be advancing in academia, so I think what recognition they got seems fair.
- toomim 6y ago
  Sigh... remember when the NYTimes was credible? Those were the days.
  - eru 6y ago
    Those days might have just been a case of Gell-Mann Amnesia?
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  > I think this is a case of the headline and article being written by different people. But you don't prove this. Let's see these rewards. No, a grant of $70k in 2013 isn't it.
- imtringued 6y ago
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Reading this article made me think that there should be some kind of monetary prize each year (similar to Nobel prize) for whistleblowers and all those people who are trying to expose corporate or governments corruption around the world. Currently these people are risking their lives, having huge number of issues... just to get a tap on the shoulder, that does not encourage other people to come out, that could also serve as a protective cushion.
- anshumankmr 6y ago
  Hell, give them a Nobel Prize.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  That's ... a really good idea ...

This is sadly the case with most public good research. Just look at the amount of money that's available for things like police transparency research, or advertisement-less journalism. Even if you do great work in these sorts of fields, there's usually very little to personally gain from it.

homero 6y ago
And this is how one day he might be forced to take a job where he becomes one of engineers at VW who hid the pollution so he can pay the bills.
op03 6y ago
There is a big gap between Observations and Solutions. Just like the resources, knowledge and skills required to detect Cancer is very different from what is required to treat it, which is very different from what is required to cure it. The healthy way to go about it involves understanding the gaps(usually from someone/group with experience) and then picking an issue. "Optimize for a simplistic world Or satisfice for a realistic one"
- chaps 6y ago
  I cannot for the life of me figure out what the point is that you're trying to make.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Ever since GPT-3 was released, HN has been like this.
    - chaps 6y ago
      Heh, I think you might be right.
    - voodootrucker 6y ago
      lol, proof amanfrommars was AI 10 years ahead of it's time. https://forums.theregister.com/post/search/?q=amanfrommars https://forums.theregister.com/post/search/?q=amanfrommars
  - totalZero 6y ago
    I think it's a variant of P!=NP. Solution is not reducible to verification. Employees who can tell that a problem exists, aren't necessarily as profitable as employees who can resolve that problem. Or in some cases, they may be more profitable. Either way, it is not an identical task. A person who can identify fraud is very useful in an accounting firm. Not so much in an engineering firm. Just my attempt at interpreting the downvoted comment.
eru 6y ago
If you want to get paid for exposing scandals, work for a short-seller. See eg https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/ https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/
- anshumankmr 6y ago
  True. Even Dr. Michael J Burry who predicted the 2008 crisis intended to short against the banks.

ekanes 6y ago

Or maybe they can sleep well at night the rest of their lives, knowing they changed the world?

kokx 6y ago
We unfortunately "reward" our heroes with things like that. Empty gestures. Just a pat on the back. On the other hand we reward the people who actively cheat and exploit the world with large sums of money.
- onecommentman 6y ago
  Sleeping well at night, “a satisfied mind”...they may be less visible, but they are the opposite of empty. Ask any old person whether they would prefer a pile of gold or a good night sleep, a fat bank account with vultures circling overhead or a comfortable feeling that they did good. The latter can’t buy the former (although the former often happens anyways...life is funny). The former can never buy the latter and most oldsters I know grow to think the latter is the only thing that ever really mattered.
  - boringg 6y ago
    Maybe - also I think that the premise that you can't have both is false. Its a false narrative that runs in our economy you either get wealthy or you do something good - its ridiculous and really detrimental to our society.
  - mafuy 6y ago
    That's not how it works. Young people want to acquire resources to be able to successfully grow old (i.e. survive). Once they are old (i.e. had gotten the resources to become old), they don't need to get these resources anymore - because they have them already! Thus, they are free to want something else (like "sleeping well"). It's called survivorship bias, and it means that these very romantic ideas cannot be trusted without compensating for the bias. Those with too little resources died before you could ask them.

tantalor 6y ago

> we never thought it would blow the lid off Volkswagen If they didn't set out with that goal, then there's little point in rewarding them, because it would not necessarily incentivize similar outcomes in the future.

BurningFrog 6y ago
Doesn't matter what these specific people were motivated by. Rewards will incentivize some people.

Proven 6y ago

There was little to no damage from VW's cheating. Don't confuse the silly state-imposed fines with "value" of the researchers' findings.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> There was little to no damage from VW's cheating. I think your post is downvoted because it stakes a contrarian position, but doesn't provide supporting arguments / evidence.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I believe less pollution is valuable.
wpietri 6y ago
Aside, of course, from the excess deaths and lowered quality of life caused by increased pollution. MIT researches estimated 1200 early deaths caused by VW's cheating: https://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deaths-europe-0303 https://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-dea...
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  Why was it OK a few years earlier when the emissions regulations were more permissive? Were the people killed by those emissions not worthy for some reason? Why were the new emissions targets the "right" ones? Why not make them half again and save even more lives? The answer is that they are numbers pulled out of the ass of some CARB or EPA bureaucrat. In reality it's impossible to say that "1200 early deaths" were caused by VW emissions. It's statistical smoke and mirrors and doesn't even show up as a blip in the normal variation of total mortality of any given year. How many early deaths were caused by California's refusal to allow or perform proper forest manangement, resulting in this year's devastating wildfires and the pollution they caused? Sorry for the whataboutism. Deaths are deaths.
  - yaacov 6y ago

MattGaiser 6y ago

What is the cost of forcing researchers to spend all this time piecing together little bits of money? Perhaps a bit off topic, but it seems like the poor guy has to spend a lot of time not doing research.

nickff 6y ago
Almost every organization which produces a valuable products spends a great deal of resources convincing others to pay for continued production. This applies to researchers, software development companies, and integrated circuit manufacturers.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Fair enough. It just never occurred to me that research labs might be just like running a company, except with no potential profitable upside.
  - jessriedel 6y ago
    There is substantial potential upside for researchers, it's just not monetary.
speedgoose 6y ago
Most researchers I know spend more time not doing research. Competing for project funding is extremely time consuming. I personally left research mostly for this reason, I was asked to spend more and more time not doing actual research but finding funding and I suck at it and I don't like it.

jariel 6y ago

It's be interesting if they were offered a cut of the damages. That would create a pretty crazy incentive structure.

jonathanyc 6y ago
That’s actually how SEC whistleblower awards work. I think it makes sense. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-266 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-266
- jariel 6y ago
  It makes sense if humans are rational and have good judgement. I don't believe they do in general, and without having a bigger understanding of a lot of things, a lot of individuals are prone to magical, conspiratorial thinking, lacking in rigour. For VW, you have very smart people, very self aware (i.e. able to read their own data), probably smart enough to snoop out what the law is, backed by an institution with integrity. It's a classical case Whistleblowing type findings of the good kind. 'Random Employee Bob' may have access to a treasure trove of data they think is 'evidence' when in reality it's nothing of the sort. Case and point: Manning with the cable leaks. Manning did not know what was on the cables, and turns out, there was nothing damming in them. The other leak at the time - the video showing the deaths of freelance journalists probably isn't 'evidence' either. It's a shocking video, but the military misidentifying armed, unknown, unregistered individuals in a war-zone, moving towards friendly forces ... is a tragedy but probably not a crime. Though that leak is more contentious. There are a lot of confused people in the world, who misconstrue their ideology for the more commonly agreed upon versions of what is right and wrong, and vast numbers of individuals in the press who are as much suited to narrative as they are to truth. If you hop onto OAN right now, you'll see a delightfully despicable and shocking number of individual 'whistleblowers' who have 'evidence' that the election was 'stolen' by nefarious parties, and millions of people reading it believing that it's true. Their incentive is clicks, Rudy Giuliani's is his pardon, or $20K/day. Which is why I implied 'crazy' incentives ...
  - chaps 6y ago

pmarreck 6y ago

The set of things that are valuable to mankind and the set of things that are profitable to mankind only partially overlap, and we should optimize for the former

jey 6y ago

(2016)

redis_mlc 6y ago

The importance of the VW case can be summarized as publicizing the following: 1) European countries experienced a mass delusion that diesel was cleaner than gasoline engines. This was based on measuring one emission gas, not all gases plus particulates. Sales are shifting from diesel to gas and electric now. Note the reduction of diesel sales by 13.5% from 2017 to 2019: https://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/share-of-diesel-in-new-passenger-cars https://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/share-of-diesel-... 2) All vehicle mfgs. game their emissions and product counts based on govt. mandates. VW got caught, but if you read the press, there are periodic articles on this topic. The main thing to know is that US domestic makers only make cars to offset the fact their profitable trucks emit more than the limits.

dehrmann 6y ago

I think this is a case of the headline and article being written by different people. > The center he runs received $70,000 in 2013 from an environmental group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, to conduct the study that eventually exposed how Volkswagen had rigged vehicles to deceive regulators. The original purpose of the research was to show that carmakers were capable of meeting more rigorous limits on emissions of harmful nitrogen oxides. The work was more complicated than expected, though, and Mr. Carder had to make up a $20,000 or $30,000 shortfall from other sources. > Over time, the researchers noticed that emissions from the vehicles — a Volkswagen Jetta and a Passat — were much higher than they should have been. But they attributed the discrepancies to technical defects or design flaws in the cars rather than deliberate wrongdoing. > Mr. Besch presented the team’s findings at an industry conference in San Diego in early 2014, still not realizing they had uncovered a scandal. The data piqued the interest of officials in the audience from the California Air Resources Board. CARB, as the agency is known, worked with the West Virginia group before and had let the team use state labs to calibrate equipment for the Volkswagen tests. It sounds like they were just doing their jobs, they found it by accident, and the insight actually came from CARB. This history behind this is interesting, it's good they found it, and Dr. Thiruvengadam seems to be advancing in academia, so I think what recognition they got seems fair.

toomim 6y ago
Sigh... remember when the NYTimes was credible? Those were the days.
- eru 6y ago
  Those days might have just been a case of Gell-Mann Amnesia?
TomSwirly 6y ago
> I think this is a case of the headline and article being written by different people. But you don't prove this. Let's see these rewards. No, a grant of $70k in 2013 isn't it.
imtringued 6y ago

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

Reading this article made me think that there should be some kind of monetary prize each year (similar to Nobel prize) for whistleblowers and all those people who are trying to expose corporate or governments corruption around the world. Currently these people are risking their lives, having huge number of issues... just to get a tap on the shoulder, that does not encourage other people to come out, that could also serve as a protective cushion.

anshumankmr 6y ago
Hell, give them a Nobel Prize.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
That's ... a really good idea ...