This must be Google's response https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/responding-camp...
Oh, wow.
Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
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Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#62This is nothing new. Happens with sugar lobby, happened with big tobacco and happens on climate change etc... These are questions whose context depends on how you frame the debate. Those who frame it get to decide the playground. Helps too if you have the regulators in the same framework as well. By framing one can argue that google is a monopoly vs it's a small player in global advertising etc... Vs Facebook etc.. s…
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Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not an A or B question. A company isn't a charity handing out awards to random people. If they give someone money to support research without specific goals, playing nice is implied. Unprofessional conduct (blowing money on donuts) is reasonably expected to not attract more funds. But when does undesirable conduct come into play? Would they fund a guy who discovered that YouTube improves high school academic perf…
How could a company avoid that perception from the part of professors, though?
If the goal was to advance basic research, hire people Bell Labs style and public research in the name of the company or setup a foundation where the funding decisions are made through a process not controlled by management.
My local library is prohibited from accepting many kinds of gifts as a government entity. So the library board setup a "Friends of the Library" non-profit with its own board that can accept and distribute cash or other gifts, subject to reporting requirements. You need a similar concept where you give up control.
They key thing here is that perception is more important than reality. You need to work to build and maintain trust.
Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#64This is nothing new. Happens with sugar lobby, happened with big tobacco and happens on climate change etc... These are questions whose context depends on how you frame the debate. Those who frame it get to decide the playground. Helps too if you have the regulators in the same framework as well. By framing one can argue that google is a monopoly vs it's a small player in global advertising etc... Vs Facebook etc.. s…
dont be evil. i remember that. i remember when the internet was a promise....a promise to level the playing field. to give ordinary people something they never had. access. a new space. a new frontier. where we would build a better world, better than the one we came from. without worries about corrupt power hierarchies, without endless greed, without pointless cruelty. we were there to make something. to build. to create. to make this new world beautiful, a better version of ourselves. how far we have fallen. how much we have forgotten, forgotten where we came from or why we trekked here. they reached us after all, never more than a deal away, their sickness contagious, we all caught it, we are all guilty of it now. no more new world. just new greed. new corruption. new power hierarchies.
internet is dead. long live internet.
Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#65> The money didn’t influence his work, Mr. Heald said, and Google issued no conditions: “They said, ‘If you take this $20,000 and open up a doughnut shop with it—we’ll never give you any more money—but that’s fine.’” At a glance, this seems like the funds are no-strings-attached. But when you think for a minute, you realize it's the exact opposite. Google is saying that if they don't like what you do with the money,…
Google's response:
https://www.blog.google/topics/public-policy/responding-camp...
Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#66Wait, a profit-driven company is spending money supporting research into areas related to the company's interests? Why is this even news? Is there a single for-profit company that funds research contrary to the company's interests?
Because some groups have a vested interest (no pun intended) in building and protecting the notion that professors, scientists, and researchers* are angels without financial conflicts, personal biases, or even emotions. If people realize that they're all humans with flaws just like the rest of us, people might stop and think instead of blindly accepting their conclusions as Truth. * Except for the professors, scienti…
It is definitely hard to reconcile the "science is science" notion I hear on a lot of political topics here on HN (particularly on the left) with the general acceptance in this thread that it's okay that much of that much of academia is funded by biased sources.
Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#67Paywall...
Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#68I know that the story is nonsense -- I am part of a research group that's gotten such grants before. This is basically a story aiming to confuse those who don't understand how research works. Google is funding work that aligns with what they do, but the grants they give are no-strings-attached and are tiny. (Government grants are much bigger.)
Sure, Google only funds things that are related to what they care about, but of course that's the case. And these days the NSF is partnering with Intel, VMware, and others to give out grants on things that align with those companies.
The WSJ has been sniffing around for this for a long time, and actually was trying to get professors' private email claiming that their email should be in the public domain. (I don't know if they succeeded.) I actually see this as part of the larger trend of trying to discredit research.
Edited to add: the story focuses on policy and law research, which is easier to attack, and I don't have any interest in defending that. But I'm willing to bet that the amount of grant money Google gives out for that work is probably tiny compared to funding they give for CS research. And it's the latter I'm familiar with.
Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#69To be fair, similar tactics are standard practice in many non-tech fields: pharmaceuticals, law, and agronomy to name a few. What's perhaps different here is that researchers may not be accustomed to disclosing financial support that is only weakly connected to the research in question.
It's difficult to understand the purpose of your comment except as a Google apology, which I'm sure they can do fine without, seeing that they're a huge corporation paying a lot of money to have the friendly ear of government representatives.
Yes, there's a lot of things going wrong in the world. Today we discuss Google, tomorrow Microsoft, etc. There's enough for everybody.
Re: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign
#70Wait, a profit-driven company is spending money supporting research into areas related to the company's interests? Why is this even news? Is there a single for-profit company that funds research contrary to the company's interests?
This kind of dismissal is at best unhelpful and at worst even suspicious. Why does it bother you that people discuss this topic? Science influences policy and influences our behaviour and well-being, of course we want to know when it's biased.
The fact that it's not "new" is irrelevant. A lot of bad things are happening and sometimes we forget about a particular bad thing. Some of us genuinely don't know.