5 ms·

A Plan Made to Shield Big Tobacco from Facts Is Now EPA Policy

111 points by justin66 6y ago

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
> A spokesman for President-elect Joseph R. Biden declined last week to comment on the expected rule, but activists said they expected him to quickly work to suspend and then repeal it.
- Technically 6y ago
  I'm incredibly curious who those activists are.
- vageli 6y ago
  "Activists said they expect"; which activists? Why do they have that expectation? Language like this would be flagged in places like wikipedia.
  - josefresco 6y ago
    > places like wikipedia Did you mean NY Times? I too also hate when this sort of language is used. Typically it's "Twitter thinks" or "Facebook reacts" when the correct terminology should be "These 3 users on Twitter" or "This specific person on Facebook".
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      I've lost count of how many times I've seen news people claim that a video has "gone viral" only to find out that it has something like 80,000 views. 80k views is nothing to sniff at, but that's hardly "viral". Not really the same as what you're talking about, but I was reminded because it's another example of lazy use of language by journalists.
      - josefresco 6y ago
        The very nature of "gone viral" is based on the concept that the content was created and then spread by a minority of users. Context matters. If your town population is 5K and a video of it's town administrator accepting a bribe gets 80K views that's viral, relative to the townspeople. I think we're in agreement here; stop lazy journalism.
    - Notorious_BLT 6y ago
      I joke about this a lot, but if anything is a sign of the state of journalism, its "Twitter is outraged" articles, which consist of a "journalist" finding 2-3 tweets that agree with their stance and have moderate to high engagement, writing up a few paragraphs, and embedding the tweets.
      - spacemanmatt 6y ago
        Unfortunately the words of a complete and utter hack can be delivered with the exact same servers, fonts, and layouts as actual journalists.
patcon 6y ago
"More transparency" and "only making policy based on public, not proprietary data" sounded great in theory (and aligned with how some scientific journals are leaning), so I was confused at first. But the crux of it was that > The new rule, public health experts and medical organizations said, essentially blocks the use of population studies in which subjects offer medical histories, lifestyle information and other personal data only on the condition of privacy. Such studies have served as the scientific underpinnings of some of the most important clean air and water regulations of the past half century.
- hcurtiss 6y ago
  I don't know. I'm pretty good with this change. There is abundant evidence of activism in certain scientific fields in the last ten years (particularly on diet). Verifiable data seems like an appropriate hurdle to me for expensive and disruptive regulation.
  - svachalek 6y ago
    Surely making everyone's health data public is a fair price to pay to allow regulations on smoking.
    - hcurtiss 6y ago
      Smoking regulations can be substantiated with studies that do not rely on anonymous public health surveys.
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      okay real talk is this (a) a serious suggestion that health data privacy should be eliminated to buy us a regulation that we already have, or (b) sarcasm? because I'm leaning (b) on principle from my own analysis of the tradeoff but there aren't powerful sarcasm flags in this post that I see, nor is there much in the way of arguments to convince me
      - djbebs 6y ago
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20210105165916/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/climate/trump-epa-science.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210105165916/https://www.nytim... https://www.epa.gov/osa/final-rule-strengthening-transparency-pivotal-science-underlying-significant-regulatory-actions https://www.epa.gov/osa/final-rule-strengthening-transparenc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dose%E2%80%93response_relationship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dose%E2%80%93response_relation... Yep I don't understand.
wheybags 6y ago
I have a tendency to believe that any research, in any field, veing used for any purpose, should be discounted if it doesn't present its source data. And in computer science, the source code. The fact that this doesn't happen 100% of the time already is baffling to me, it feels like science is broken.
- vkou 6y ago
  So, we discount the research, and just go by what private industry says? Because that's the alternative, as industry will massage and cherry pick the data until it fits whatever narrative it wants. It has a lot of money at stake.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >massage and cherry pick the data until it fits whatever narrative it wants. It has a lot of money at stake. People already do this when there's basically nothing at stake though.
    - vkou 6y ago
      Does public research do it even remotely to the same extent as what gets us advertisements like "Four out of five dentists recommend Marlboro cigarettes"? Policy has to be based on something. Public research is being attacked because it's not perfect. Okay. If you're going to do that, you should apply the same expectations to private research, and also require that firms prove that their products are safe, to the same rigorous standards that you expect out of public researchers.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        >"Four out of five dentists recommend Marlboro cigarettes"? I don't see how that's any different than when congressmen get interviewed by the talking heads and say "the research is clear, there's been study X by Y and P by Q that show that what we need to do is enact <insert some asinine extremist legislation that that congressmen supports>". They're both lying in a plausibly deniable manner in order to market something to the public. Anyone who bothers to verify either claim will find it's all crap. The problem isn't the research. It's that we blindly trust "the research" and people know this so the research gets manipulated and cherry picked and whatnot. Two hundred years ago these sorts of people and entities all invoked gods name in order to peddle crap. I have no idea what the solution is but I think whatever it is will involve the public being more disapproving of parties that behave in a slimy manner like this.
huitzitziltzin 6y ago
Two separate issues here - 1. Make the underlying model public (e.g., you ran such and such regression, here’s what you included and here’s a table of coefficients). Inarguably a good idea. Totally unobjectionable. You should correctly be suspicious if the model (and the R, Stata, SAS or whatever code to produce it) is not available. 2. Make the underlying data public. Completely different! I have done research with (e.g.) detailed birth certificate level data. Such data are confidential by state and federal laws generally. Other researchers work with detailed income histories from the IRS. As another example, I have worked with electronic health records, which include names, addresses, health conditions, etc. Almost no one thinks this stuff should be public. It is fair IMO to require researchers to describe what data they use and how someone else might get it (even if that includes the line “find a collaborator at the IRS”). But it is unreasonable to require researchers to make data itself public, when they may not have the right to do so. What’s worse is that the reason this regulation is being proposed is to prevent research informed by private, confidential health data (eg birth certs) from being used to make public policy, especially in areas around pollution and environmental regulation.
- esrauch 6y ago
  I think this separation falls down badly in some cases: after someone claims a method worked but it's a dubious model, you can't possibly reproduce their results then there's no way to know that their model actually even worked once when they did it or if they just made an entirely stupid mistake (like using the complete data set for training). Concretely there's applied ML papers on confidential military data, where I'm fairly sure the results are just bogus or cherry-picked or done with incorrect procedure, but with the data being unobtainable (even to those with clearance the data isn't materialized in some DoD database for reproducing) it makes the published results entirely unreproducible and unchallengeable.
- Imnimo 6y ago
  Point 1 might be less clear cut in some settings. Obviously, if you're just doing a simple regression, it's no big deal, but more powerful models can memorize and expose parts of their training data. See for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08232 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08232
cosmiccatnap 6y ago
We shouldn't be surprised that when you are willing to put people in charge that have a background working for companies on a capacity who's specific goal was to get around EPA regulations, and who have stated publically that they would shit down the EPA if they could...that they spend their entire political career defrauding the EPA and the american tax payer. The question is how do we prevent them from getting cushy CEO jobs for this after, and how to we prevent them from holding a position they wish to destroy in the first place.

111 points by justin66 6y ago

> A spokesman for President-elect Joseph R. Biden declined last week to comment on the expected rule, but activists said they expected him to quickly work to suspend and then repeal it.

Technically 6y ago
I'm incredibly curious who those activists are.
vageli 6y ago
"Activists said they expect"; which activists? Why do they have that expectation? Language like this would be flagged in places like wikipedia.
- josefresco 6y ago
  > places like wikipedia Did you mean NY Times? I too also hate when this sort of language is used. Typically it's "Twitter thinks" or "Facebook reacts" when the correct terminology should be "These 3 users on Twitter" or "This specific person on Facebook".
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    I've lost count of how many times I've seen news people claim that a video has "gone viral" only to find out that it has something like 80,000 views. 80k views is nothing to sniff at, but that's hardly "viral". Not really the same as what you're talking about, but I was reminded because it's another example of lazy use of language by journalists.
    - josefresco 6y ago
      The very nature of "gone viral" is based on the concept that the content was created and then spread by a minority of users. Context matters. If your town population is 5K and a video of it's town administrator accepting a bribe gets 80K views that's viral, relative to the townspeople. I think we're in agreement here; stop lazy journalism.
  - Notorious_BLT 6y ago
    I joke about this a lot, but if anything is a sign of the state of journalism, its "Twitter is outraged" articles, which consist of a "journalist" finding 2-3 tweets that agree with their stance and have moderate to high engagement, writing up a few paragraphs, and embedding the tweets.
    - spacemanmatt 6y ago
      Unfortunately the words of a complete and utter hack can be delivered with the exact same servers, fonts, and layouts as actual journalists.

patcon 6y ago

"More transparency" and "only making policy based on public, not proprietary data" sounded great in theory (and aligned with how some scientific journals are leaning), so I was confused at first. But the crux of it was that > The new rule, public health experts and medical organizations said, essentially blocks the use of population studies in which subjects offer medical histories, lifestyle information and other personal data only on the condition of privacy. Such studies have served as the scientific underpinnings of some of the most important clean air and water regulations of the past half century.

hcurtiss 6y ago
I don't know. I'm pretty good with this change. There is abundant evidence of activism in certain scientific fields in the last ten years (particularly on diet). Verifiable data seems like an appropriate hurdle to me for expensive and disruptive regulation.
- svachalek 6y ago
  Surely making everyone's health data public is a fair price to pay to allow regulations on smoking.
  - hcurtiss 6y ago
    Smoking regulations can be substantiated with studies that do not rely on anonymous public health surveys.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    okay real talk is this (a) a serious suggestion that health data privacy should be eliminated to buy us a regulation that we already have, or (b) sarcasm? because I'm leaning (b) on principle from my own analysis of the tradeoff but there aren't powerful sarcasm flags in this post that I see, nor is there much in the way of arguments to convince me
    - djbebs 6y ago

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210105165916/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/climate/trump-epa-science.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210105165916/https://www.nytim... https://www.epa.gov/osa/final-rule-strengthening-transparency-pivotal-science-underlying-significant-regulatory-actions https://www.epa.gov/osa/final-rule-strengthening-transparenc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dose%E2%80%93response_relationship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dose%E2%80%93response_relation... Yep I don't understand.

wheybags 6y ago

I have a tendency to believe that any research, in any field, veing used for any purpose, should be discounted if it doesn't present its source data. And in computer science, the source code. The fact that this doesn't happen 100% of the time already is baffling to me, it feels like science is broken.

vkou 6y ago
So, we discount the research, and just go by what private industry says? Because that's the alternative, as industry will massage and cherry pick the data until it fits whatever narrative it wants. It has a lot of money at stake.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >massage and cherry pick the data until it fits whatever narrative it wants. It has a lot of money at stake. People already do this when there's basically nothing at stake though.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Does public research do it even remotely to the same extent as what gets us advertisements like "Four out of five dentists recommend Marlboro cigarettes"? Policy has to be based on something. Public research is being attacked because it's not perfect. Okay. If you're going to do that, you should apply the same expectations to private research, and also require that firms prove that their products are safe, to the same rigorous standards that you expect out of public researchers.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >"Four out of five dentists recommend Marlboro cigarettes"? I don't see how that's any different than when congressmen get interviewed by the talking heads and say "the research is clear, there's been study X by Y and P by Q that show that what we need to do is enact <insert some asinine extremist legislation that that congressmen supports>". They're both lying in a plausibly deniable manner in order to market something to the public. Anyone who bothers to verify either claim will find it's all crap. The problem isn't the research. It's that we blindly trust "the research" and people know this so the research gets manipulated and cherry picked and whatnot. Two hundred years ago these sorts of people and entities all invoked gods name in order to peddle crap. I have no idea what the solution is but I think whatever it is will involve the public being more disapproving of parties that behave in a slimy manner like this.

huitzitziltzin 6y ago

Two separate issues here - 1. Make the underlying model public (e.g., you ran such and such regression, here’s what you included and here’s a table of coefficients). Inarguably a good idea. Totally unobjectionable. You should correctly be suspicious if the model (and the R, Stata, SAS or whatever code to produce it) is not available. 2. Make the underlying data public. Completely different! I have done research with (e.g.) detailed birth certificate level data. Such data are confidential by state and federal laws generally. Other researchers work with detailed income histories from the IRS. As another example, I have worked with electronic health records, which include names, addresses, health conditions, etc. Almost no one thinks this stuff should be public. It is fair IMO to require researchers to describe what data they use and how someone else might get it (even if that includes the line “find a collaborator at the IRS”). But it is unreasonable to require researchers to make data itself public, when they may not have the right to do so. What’s worse is that the reason this regulation is being proposed is to prevent research informed by private, confidential health data (eg birth certs) from being used to make public policy, especially in areas around pollution and environmental regulation.

esrauch 6y ago
I think this separation falls down badly in some cases: after someone claims a method worked but it's a dubious model, you can't possibly reproduce their results then there's no way to know that their model actually even worked once when they did it or if they just made an entirely stupid mistake (like using the complete data set for training). Concretely there's applied ML papers on confidential military data, where I'm fairly sure the results are just bogus or cherry-picked or done with incorrect procedure, but with the data being unobtainable (even to those with clearance the data isn't materialized in some DoD database for reproducing) it makes the published results entirely unreproducible and unchallengeable.
Imnimo 6y ago
Point 1 might be less clear cut in some settings. Obviously, if you're just doing a simple regression, it's no big deal, but more powerful models can memorize and expose parts of their training data. See for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08232 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08232

cosmiccatnap 6y ago

We shouldn't be surprised that when you are willing to put people in charge that have a background working for companies on a capacity who's specific goal was to get around EPA regulations, and who have stated publically that they would shit down the EPA if they could...that they spend their entire political career defrauding the EPA and the american tax payer. The question is how do we prevent them from getting cushy CEO jobs for this after, and how to we prevent them from holding a position they wish to destroy in the first place.