can statisticians be bought?

[Pied Piper]

we easily trust the results of studies conducted by universities or scientists/ but what are the chances that there people can be bought by a company or government so the results are swayed in their favor?

 

[Squarechoke]

No, you can't buy them, only hire them. Slavery is illegal.

 

[Pied Piper]

No, you can only hire them. Slavery is illegal.

cheeky bugger

 

[DickSarp]

Big Tobacco has murdered 250 million people. BT knew their product was addictive, caused cancer, caused heart disease, and caused arterial sclerosis, and emphysema. Yet they had slews of doctors and phds denying all of that and it worked for decades. These fuckers knew. They targeted children to replace the smokers they killed. Yet there were the experts denying everything. Paid by Big tobacco to deny everything. Why they even made safer light cigarettes.

 

[Pied Piper]

Big Tobacco has murdered 250 million people. BT knew their product was addictive, caused cancer, caused heart disease, and caused arterial sclerosis, and emphysema. Yet they had slews of doctors and phds denying all of that and it worked for decades. These fuckers knew. They targeted children to replace the smokers they killed. Yet there were the experts denying everything. Paid by Big tobacco to deny everything. Why they even made safer light cigarettes.

so why are we still blindly trusting statistics and scientists, when its uncertain if they can be credible sources

 

[Fluffernutter]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Mark Twain

 

[IDL]

Wouldn't be unprecedented. Do people really trust Chinese or Russian statistics? There can be a very large motive to fudge numbers. Similar to cooking the books in the financial world.

So from both a state and corporate perspective this is very tempting. To what degree it can it be done without too much blow back is difficult to determine though.

Often it is better to just cherry pick statistics and use them to draw a distorted picture, rather than fudge them outright.

 

[Swing]

so why are we still blindly trusting statistics and scientists, when its uncertain if they can be credible sources

I get the sense that it's more common nowadays to argue/inquire over methodology for exactly this reason.

 

[Pied Piper]

Wouldn't be unprecedented. Do people really trust Chinese or Russian statistics? There can be a very large motive to fudge numbers. Similar to cooking the books in the financial world.

So from both a state and corporate perspective this is very tempting. To what degree it can it be done without too much blow back is difficult to determine though.

Often it is better to just cherry pick statistics and use them to draw a distorted picture, rather than fudge them outright.

havent done any fact checking on this one, but heard on the Joe rogan podcast from Dorian Yates that the sugar industry paid off universities and scientists to produce studies that said Fats were the real enemy of weight loss and health, and not sugars

 

[IDL]

havent done any fact checking on this one, but heard on the Joe rogan podcast from Dorian Yates that the sugar industry paid off universities and scientists to produce studies that said Fats were the real enemy of weight loss and health, and not sugars

I'm unfamiliar with the claim but that sort of thing wouldn't be surprising. I imagine if that is true though it would be more along the lines of funding studies to 'find everything you can that could be a negative for fats' and/or 'find alternative theories to claims that sugar is detrimental' and that sort of thing.

Also I am not sure about how that relationship works with university studies, if all results are automatically public, but often times the results of studies can be kept under wraps so that only 'useful' results can be published by the financier, thus skewing the picture.

This wouldn't necessarily mean the people performing the studies are in there fudging them, but there would be a bias towards finding a desired result (to please the sponsor) which could taint the process.

 

[44nutman]

Big Tobacco has murdered 250 million people. BT knew their product was addictive, caused cancer, caused heart disease, and caused arterial sclerosis, and emphysema. Yet they had slews of doctors and phds denying all of that and it worked for decades. These fuckers knew. They targeted children to replace the smokers they killed. Yet there were the experts denying everything. Paid by Big tobacco to deny everything. Why they even made safer light cigarettes.

The bottom left even say those figures were certified.

 

[bobgeese]

we easily trust the results of studies conducted by universities or scientists/ but what are the chances that there people can be bought by a company or government so the results are swayed in their favor?

"We"???? You trust them, not me.


You should stop trusting them.

 

[Lubaolong]

 

[DickSarp]

so why are we still blindly trusting statistics and scientists, when its uncertain if they can be credible sources

People cannot be experts in everything. We depend on reputation to make decisions.

There's a reason the GM food is suspected as bad irrespective of the findings of science.

Fucking Monsanto's reputation:

uses child labor on cottonseed plantations in India that supply Monsanto and supply seed companies licensed by Monsanto. All these seed companies pay significant amounts of royalty to Monsanto. In North Gujarat, a center of cottonseed production, children under 18 comprise of 52% of the total labor force of Monsanto suppliers, and nearly a third of those children are younger than 14. In a recent survey, children were identified on every single one of 38 Monsanto suppliers reviewed recently.

knowingly and intentionally poisoned Argentinian tobacco farmers with Monsanto pesticides resulting in 'devastating birth defects' for the purpose of increased economic profit. Monsanto guaranteed the safety of the pesticides which caused epilepsy, cerebral palsy, psychomotor retardation, spina bifida, mental retardation, metabolic conditions, Downs syndrome, heart defects, hand deformities, and blindess in the children.

was caught lying by France's highest court. It ruled that Monsanto had not told the truth about the safety of its best-selling weed-killer, Roundup. The court confirmed an earlier judgment that Monsanto had falsely advertised its herbicide as "biodegradable" and claimed it "left the soil clean."

has a long pattern of fraud concerning dioxin contamination. From an Environmental Protection Agency letter, "Monsanto also covered-up the dioxin contamination of a wide range of its products, e.g., Lysol. Monsanto either failed to report contamination, substituted false information purporting to show no contamination or submitted samples to the government for analysis which had been specially prepared so that dioxin contamination did not exist."

Monsanto, just as trustworthy as Big Cancer.

Not everyone is able or predisposed to understand peer reviewed work from real scientists, i.e., credible sources....and let's not forget, Big Business wants profits first...they will lie, cheat, obfuscate and confuse to that end, i.e., not credible sources.

So the lazy or unintelligent or both work on reputations...sort of like looking at a presidential candidate and thinking, "I'll vote for him bc I could have a beer with him." Bollocks but that's what we have.

 

[Pied Piper]

"We"???? You trust them, not me.


You should stop trusting them.

Stop. You know what i mean

 

[lookslikeseen]

The bottom left even say those figures were certified.

The full quote probably read "Luckies are less irritating than swallowing a piece of white hot charcoal" and they technically wouldn't be lying.

 

[bobgeese]

Stop. You know what i mean

Honestly, who trusts polls anymore?

Who trusts "studies" done by these universities which hire unironic communists, and teach courses on beyonce?



I get your point, but you even asking the question, basically answers it. No.

 

[Pied Piper]

Honestly, who trusts polls anymore?

Who trusts "studies" done by these universities which hire unironic communists, and teach courses on beyonce?



I get your point, but you even asking the question, basically answers it. No.

Who the fuck said anything about polls? you angry little man

 

[Renard]

You can look at the actual study you know, sometimes you can even find in-depth analysis of the study by other people. You don't have to rely on some useless one-liner in a news article.

 

[bobgeese]

Who the fuck said anything about polls? you angry little man

You're question was "can statisticians be bought", let me educate you.

Duties of Statisticians
Statisticians typically do the following:

• Decide what data are needed to answer specific questions or problems
• Determine methods for finding or collecting data
• Design surveys, experiments, or opinion polls to collect data
• Collect data or train others to do so
• Analyze and interpret data
• Report conclusions from their analyses

Ok, now that we have that cleared up.


Of fucking course. Just look at some of these ridiculous studies produced today. You'd have to be full potato to believe them.