[HN Gopher] A Plan Made to Shield Big Tobacco from Facts Is Now ...
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A Plan Made to Shield Big Tobacco from Facts Is Now EPA Policy
Author : justin66
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-01-05 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| wheybags wrote:
| 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| Part of the EPA's mission is to protect human health. It is
| often illegal to release medical data underlying studies that
| link environmental factors to health problems.
| vkou wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >"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.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.
|
| One of the two parties is currently seriously considering
| not accepting the results of an election they lost. The
| leader of that party is busy calling up election
| officials, and threatening them into magically finding
| thousands of votes that will give him the victory.
|
| And the rank and file of the party isn't distancing
| themselves from this behavior. Instead, they are turning
| their ire at the person who leaked it.
|
| On the order of slimy political behavior that voters
| don't punish politicians for, this issue we're discussing
| won't even register. We're currently so far down the
| rabbit hole, I don't think we'll ever find our way out.
|
| > I have no idea what the solution is
|
| That's because there is no perfect solution. We don't
| live in a perfect world. We just have to find the best
| solution out of a space of sub-optimal ones. And in this
| case, public research is a much better starting point for
| policy than private research, or no research (which is
| what would happen if we applied your standard.)
| asdff wrote:
| If they upload the raw data publicly along with the source
| code any and all cherry picking will be pretty damn evident.
| vkou wrote:
| They don't, though.
|
| You have two sets of incomplete data. One from public
| research, where some of the data is missing, and one from
| private research, where nearly all of the data is missing.
|
| Which do you base policy on? Doing nothing, by the way, is
| _also_ making a policy decision.
|
| I will also point out that changing the rules post-facto,
| like we're doing here, is like asking an open source
| project to verify that every single contributor to it has
| consented that the project migrate to a new, incompatible
| license.
| azernik wrote:
| When your subjects are human beings, the rules are different -
| both for ethical reasons, and because if you violate your
| subjects' privacy you won't have any more subjects for next
| time.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| This is the kind of black-and-white dogmatic thinking that is
| the tell-tale sign of software engineer applying their software
| engineering context to a context where it doesn't fit. I have
| no doubt many people on this board (not necessarily you) share
| a similar view, yet are similarly disdainful of privacy
| protections in the US around one's use of technology (e.g.,
| cell phone tracking, DNS monitoring, cookies, ad-tech).
| jfengel wrote:
| I suspect they're all for privacy. They don't want people's
| data made public, either. Rather, they're OK with the fact
| that policy can't be made, because they're not especially
| interested in the policy implications.
|
| They likely assume that any regulation will be bad by default
| unless it's proven to them -- and won't put any effort into
| reading that proof when offered.
|
| Software engineers get used to the notion that things either
| work or they don't. Policy is a much messier process, where
| you do the best that you can with incomplete information. And
| software engineers are generally comfortable enough under the
| status quo that they will set high standards for change --
| and aren't interested in how that affects anybody not in
| their immediate circle.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210105165916/https://www.nytim...
|
| https://www.epa.gov/osa/final-rule-strengthening-transparenc...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dose%E2%80%93response_relation...
|
| Yep I don't understand.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| 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.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| 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.
| Imnimo wrote:
| 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
| esrauch wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'm incredibly curious who those activists are.
| vageli wrote:
| "Activists said they expect"; which activists? Why do they have
| that expectation? Language like this would be flagged in places
| like wikipedia.
| josefresco wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unfortunately the words of a complete and utter hack can
| be delivered with the exact same servers, fonts, and
| layouts as actual journalists.
| patcon wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| NationalPark wrote:
| You really can't take this kind of thing at face value. Do
| you think the party of "climate change is a hoax", "covid is
| a hoax", "the earth is 5000 years old", and "we should cut
| all regulations and taxes" just suddenly cares about
| scientific integrity? Or is it more likely that they found a
| new way to gut the rules that force business to pay for the
| negative externalities they create?
| xxpor wrote:
| Maybe the bias should be we should take public health
| seriously, and if it costs some corporations some money for
| no improvement, that isn't actually the worst thing in the
| world.
|
| Something like regulations to reduce lead in the air could be
| the biggest material improvement in people's lives since we
| eliminated lead from paint and gas. Bigger than any
| improvements we've made in education directly. But rules like
| these just get in the way.
| svachalek wrote:
| Surely making everyone's health data public is a fair price
| to pay to allow regulations on smoking.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Smoking regulations can be substantiated with studies that
| do not rely on anonymous public health surveys.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not OP, but scientific conclusions need to be verifiable,
| especially if they are driving policy. IMO you'd need a
| very good reason to keep any data related to such studies
| secret, and thats only if the data being kept secret
| isn't meaningful to the reproduction and verification of
| the results. Knowing who is X data point is most
| certainly relevant to independently verifying whether or
| not the data of the study is accurate, so i have a very
| hard time seeing how that should be kept secret.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Because there are no regulations on smoking?
|
| What would showing off private data do? Put a minimum age
| on smoking? Stop it from being advertised to minors? Ban
| ads in a majority of media? Put health warnings on
| packages? Put high taxes on cigarettes?
|
| Oh wait, we already have that.
|
| Short of prohibition, what new law do you want at the price
| of health data privacy? Health data is pretty much our last
| legally appointed sacred data point in the US and it's
| already weak enough as is. HIPAA is great and all, but it's
| still not enforced that great. At that since we are
| decriminalizing weed and alcohol prohibition didnt work...
| no. Everyone's health data is not a fucking fair price to
| pay for your short sighted emotional knee jerk.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Most Americans don't realize HIPAA is less than 25 years
| old. They've never thought about why it might not be in
| their best interests or why their lives might be better
| without it.
|
| The typical counterargument is that insurance providers
| would maliciously charge higher based on what they see.
| However, that's silly since they already have that data
| today.
| fat_pikachu wrote:
| Here's hoping that this will lead to better (properly
| anonymized) public health datasets.
|
| Open data has provided tremendous value in recent years, not
| just for transparency and civic engagement, but for innovation
| and progress. The fact that we can find large, detailed
| datasets for topics like sports and birdwatching but not for
| health is a travesty.
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