Re:California AG Rob Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert fo...
by WalterBright on Saturday March 22, 2025 @07:06PM
(#43449399)
Government funded research also has perverse incentives:
1. publish or perish, leading to lots of low quality papers
2. funding doesn't continue if one doesn't get results, leading to selection of "safe" research rather than risky research, and results that cannot be replicated
3. no funding for politically unpopular topics
and, of course, the reasons why people publish overtly fraudulent research papers.
If your company does treatment X that competes with treatment Y, they'll look to expenand the edge cases that suggest X over Y as much as possible. If a company wants people to feel like they're getting something out of a genetic profile, they'll report the broadest version of risk, and then slow roll more detailed analysis.
Things like this are why I strongly think certain profit motives and business models should be extremely restricted. Just like private prisons create a profit motive for creating crimes, medical services have a profit motive for spreading inaccurate and twisted medical advice, whether it's things like alternative or new age medicine, treatment modality choices, or DNA information.