https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

“3M Execs convinced a Scientist…” ok

“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS Found”… ok, the PFOS found the scientist?

“3M Execs convinced a Scientist PFOS found in Human Blood”… PFOS found a scientist in human blood?

The problem is that there are gramatically valid ways to parse partial versions of the sentence, which you have to reparse as you go through the sentence.

executives from the company 3M

convinced a scientist (presumanly to sign off)

that PFOS (chemicals used for certain non-stick properties in domestic and industrial products)

that seem to leak into human blood when using said products

are safe

You can also help convince by giving false assurances or falsified statistics and results for their investigation.

    * They kept relevant information from her, including studies they'd done on the subject before
    * They sidelined her research efforts and made her feel unwelcome there
    * She grew to dread the subject and avoided staying involved with it
    * "when friends asked Hansen about PFAS, she would change the subject. Still, she repeatedly told [her husband] — and herself — that the chemicals were safe."

> But first, she decided to have one last blood sample tested for PFOS: her own. The results showed one of the lowest readings she’d seen in human blood. Immediately, she thought of the rats that had passed the chemical on to their pups.

> Hansen told me that, for the next 19 years, she avoided the subject of fluorochemicals with the same intensity with which she had once pursued it. She focused on raising her kids

She WAS meticulous in her research for YEARS, but ultimately held too much unquestioning trust in the company line that PFOS was safe. She got worn down and burned out... Which is pretty understandable.

At one point TFA quotes her asking her husband to walk her through the car park after work lest she be threatened by other 3M employees who now saw her as some kind of traitor, so at one time she was pretty worried about being victim of a Boeing-Type Incident.

If you want people to remain scientific, you gotta foster a culture in which it is safe to do so, and the impact of the findings matches its significance.

Apparently the theory is that the word "How" in titles is always meaningless clickbait so HN automatically removes it. I don't believe this actually improves things.

Sort of like people misusing the phrase "Ponzi scheme" to refer to basically any kind of unsustainable and ethically-dubious thing whatsoever.

You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.

> By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it.

> You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.

That's not sufficient though. The people who did the bad acts need to be punished, but the owners who profited from the bad acts need to be punished too. If you don't do that, you just create situations like Amazon: set a sounds-good internal policy but have internal incentives for employees to violate it (e.g. exploit 3rd party seller data to unfairly compete with them) and lax enforcement, then fire the employees as scapegoats when caught to deflect blame when the violations become a PR or legal problem. So some harsh action needs to be taken against the owners and the shareholders.

A "corporate death penalty" doesn't really work, because shareholders can always sell. You don't want the guy responsible to profit, while some innocent schmuck gets punished because he happened to be holding the bag when the music stopped. You need action against the shareholders who were owners at the time of the bad acts.

Instead, since we have computers with big disks now, there needs to be a registry that tracks the historical beneficial owners of a company's stock. Then when something worthy of a "corporate death penalty" happens, those people are tracked down, fined, and any profits they enjoyed get clawed back. If they go bankrupt, tough: as owners, they should have proposed or voted for shareholder proposals to keep the management under control.

Of course there would be some finer details to work out (e.g. breaking the veil on shell corporations, policies to deal with straw ownership, letting other shareholders off the hook if some small group (e.g. founders) have complete voting control of the company), but I think the idea is workable if you don't consciously let clever-assholes exploit loopholes

For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.

The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.5 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". . . . CalPERS manages the largest public pension fund in the United States, with more than $469 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2021.

And how many people own no stock, and how many people own the other 50%?

That argument relies the same bullshit conceptual framework that's used to excuse so much capitalist dysfunction: since some of the ownership is spread very widely and very thinly. all ownership gets to dodge responsibility. It's still murder if somehow you arrange it so a million people pulled the trigger.

Edit: IMHO, the 401k was a genius stroke of manipulation and propaganda. It's convinced so many people to neglect or even argue against their own core interests in the off chance their account could be worth a few bucks more.

Going there is a derail. And it doesn't even work because my analogy relied on the relationship between private groups/individuals and the legal system, which is quite different than the relationship between a country/government and the legal system.

That being said, you're absolutely correct, and I don't think that it is on you to solve the Government level issue, and there is nothing about the Government level issue stopping us from slapping some additional constraints on legal fictions it spawns. The devil, however, is in the implementation details; many of which tend to cross increasingly hairy and controversial lines.

Things like limits on freedom from compelled speech for corporations with regard to privately funded research. Revocation of trade secrets (therein tend to lay the fertile ground for corruption). Mandatory recordkeeping practices that start violating the human dignity of everyone to be free from constant scrutiny, as it is only with complete comms records that one could actually piece together the facts of what happened; which still runs into the issue of criminals gonna crime; so what you effectively do is partition your population into two groups. Those that aspire to comply, and those deadset on success even at the risk of non-compliance.

These are not low-stakes social changes we're talking about here. This fundamentally refactors just about everything about our ways of life, from lowest employee to the hoghest level exec, to every small business owner.

A retirement system like we have in France where older peoples shift the pension responsibility to younger generations regardless of their efforts as parents/cohort is not better at all.

Sure, some people would lose money but didn't intend to cause harm. Those are victims of the fraud. Their shares of the criminal company still get wiped out and they get in line to get bankruptcy proceedings.

Is there another way that makes sense?

Pushing the externalities back into the company is exactly the thing we want - and the fewer companies that conduct themselves like this, the better off we all are.

But they aren't. A small probability of huge return makes likely crash a non-problem.

I.e. you couldn't sell off the stock, make your huge return, and avoid the consequences

Subsequent litigation would claw back those same huge returns.

However this deterrent effect is unfortunately conditional on the full risk of the outcome being apparent in advance to investors and indeed investees. I fear that often it is not, as in this 3M case. This boils down to our drive for progress leading to employing new technology beyond our ability to evaluate its risk, as e.g. currently with "AI". Deterrence of that cannot be acheived at the corporate level. It is a societal problem.

Plus - reduced mass poisoning will improve the long-term prospects for the whole economy, also helping the investments of all those everyday retirees.

That doctor has many things they can do:

1. Make and vote on shareholder proposals.

2. Refuse to own stock in any company that does not take sufficient action to "discourage corporate misconduct."

3. Etc.

And if a policy like mine were ever implemented, it's not like rugged individuals would only be able to take rugged individual action. The legal risk would reduce returns, and sophisticated mutual fund managers would have incentive to choose stocks that don't have those risks or vote their fund shares to make corporate policy changes to eliminate them.

I get the feeling behind the desire, but this is why I don't think it's good.

You wrote up-thread:

> That's not sufficient though. The people who did the bad acts need to be punished, but the owners who profited from the bad acts need to be punished too. If you don't do that, you just create situations like Amazon: set an sounds-good internal policy but have internal incentives for employees to violate it (e.g. exploit 3rd party seller data to unfairly compete with them), then fire the employees as scapegoats when caught to deflect blame. So some harsh action needs to be taken the owners the shareholders.

And sure; but is it possible to determine when this incentive was created? If it is, can't it be stopped the moment it happens? If not, then the shareholders can't reasonably be blamed.

Unless the shareholders are the incentive, in which case sure.

That's fundamentally different. Everyone has to be citizen of some country or other, and it's difficult to change citizenships, but no one is forced to own stock in any particular company.

> And sure; but is it possible to determine when this incentive was created? If it is, can't it be stopped the moment it happens? If not, then the shareholders can't reasonably be blamed.

> Unless the shareholders are the incentive, in which case sure.

That example was meant as an illustration of using scapegoats to deflect consequences, and why the consequences have to bubble up beyond an individual doing a bad act on behalf of the corporation. I'm not sure what you mean by "the shareholders are the incentive."

My mental model for how this would work legally with shareholders would be modeled more on torts like negligence than on criminal law. So it wouldn't be necessary to determine exactly why the bad act was done to go after the shareholders, just that there was harm done on such-and-such date.

I don’t think punishing stock holders makes any more sense than punishing all of Germany after WW1 did. You need to cut the head off the snake, not nibble at the tail. A hypothetical corporate death penalty should start at the top, then cascade down some amount of “tiers” down the executive chain. Executives tend to be the ones with the biggest stock rewards and the ones lining up unethical incentives in the first place.

Come on, stockholders are nothing like the subjects of a hereditary monarch.

> You need to cut the head off the snake, not nibble at the tail. A hypothetical corporate death penalty should start at the top, then cascade down some amount of “tiers” down the executive chain.

You need to do both: punish the owners and their agents.

What you're proposing is akin to punishing the generals and general staff, but letting the Kaiser get off scot free (including keeping his position).

E.g. if a shareholder says "you need to make more profit or I will close the company", they are a direct incentive to cut corners.

Don't we? Governments revenue is mostly taxes. Government pays settlements from revenue.

Ergo, every individual pays when the government is found liable.

There's no "country death penalty" for CO2 or CFC emissions, agent orange, etc.

These lawsuits have been decently successful as far as I can tell from what stories make it to the media.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

Currently, 'the company admits no fault' (but pays a fine), helps head off shareholder lawsuits.

If prosecuting entities and companies were instead required to include admitting fault, then shareholder suits would be much simpler.

The company has already admitted liability -> process directly to negotiation over amounts.

As a passive investor, you generally hope that active investors, who have very large stakes in a company's stock, and who care about their own returns, will steer company boards responsibly.

It seems to mostly work, if it didn't, there'd be waaaaaay more fraud in the SP&500. It's noteworthy that the overwhelming part of bad corporate behavior is stuff that doesn't get seriously punished.

If “every day people” lose their money because they handed it over to someone else—that’s on no one but themselves.

People need to be investing in local businesses instead and take FULL responsibility for an investment that they actually understand.

Now I'm not saying that's necessarily /worse/...but we should be clear about what the real downside is.

Find a job at a local honest establishment, or create your own service.

Make it a priority to stop supplying these establishments with power.

Use your skills in a place where you have direct control over the outcome of your work.

Anything less is just you trying to convince yourself that you can carry on blaming others for the problem you/we created/are creating.

When corporations are unable to find people to work for them, something will shift.

Only reason current system works is because mistakes get diluted and peoples don’t have much choices because of monetary control.

HN is way too liberal bordering on communism…

We want people to be scared to buy a company that's well known to be a ball of shit. If some people get away with it anyway, well some people get away with murder. That doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to punish it.

I'm usually more in favor of broad responses and then try to patch the loopholes afterwards than try to solve all loopholes beforehand. The shareholders already have the "can't lose more than the investment" guarantee, which should still be pretty damn good for non-evil companies.

You could always tailor this so the penalization only applies to private equity and throw in a lookback. That would encourage companies to go public (which, IMO, is a good thing) and would encourage private equity to be responsible.

You could still kill a public company that violates the public trust, you just don't have to penalize shareholders in that case because they are likely to not have the same level of information/control as a private equity holder/owner would.

The simplest solutions are best: target the corporate officers. C-suite execs are richly compensated on the basis of their social connections. The Boeing CEO, for example, will be walking away from the dumpster fire with almost $100M.

Introducing some additional risk would add minimal costs relatively speaking.

I think it should be more about profits. In case of something like that, the corporation should be taxed the amount of entire profits they got from this. Also individuals in decisive positions should be investigated and indebted for the amounts they earned while the company was poisoning people plus interest since it happened.

This is fines with extra steps. That’s the point. Talk of a “corporate death penalty” is a red herring.

The article mentions the $62bn “researchers estimated…that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to,” which “exceeds the current market value of 3M.” A $62bn fine would cleanly end 3M.

You know what 3M would love instead of a $62bn fine? A “corporate death penalty.” Unprecedented and thus practically infinitely appealed in the legal system, riddled with ambiguity, and a political football they can play with for years.

What is done with it afterwards is debatable, but at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out.

This, again, is fines with extra steps. Another novel procedure that gives targets years in court to appeal technicalities around the APA, eminent domain and expropriation.

> at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out

As they would with large fines.

Corporate death penalties are nonsense invented to sidestep discussions of monetary penalties. Fines are liabilities. There is zero ambiguity around what happens to a company when it owes more than it’s worth. There is infinite ambiguity around applying a “death penalty” to fictitious entities; that is the point of this caper.

The C-suite gets paid millions to set the direction of the company. They shouldn't be able to "get out of jail free" by throwing a mid-level engineer under the bus. At least not without some strong evidence the scapegoat was acting in bad faith own their own. Similar for the BoD.

This means companies doing more to prevent illegal behavior become worth more and companies have a financial reason to prevent crime greatly exceeding mere fines.

It'll drive prices down for riskier stocks, more involved larger shareholders will have reason to get more involved and ask more questions about compliance and corporate responsibility, etc.

Being able to punish shareholders for bad corporate behavior for corporate death is, to be honest just good capitalism.

At least then the enormous money matches a little bit the effort.

US (and others, but US is famous for it) peeps are for tougher on crime, but not for actual corporate mass murderers. If I bomb a plane with 200 people, I will never see the light of day; the Boeing CEO gets a bonus package.

It's much better to go after the individuals responsible for it

In theory their insurance costs would go up and fiduciary duty would compel executives to act properly.

Most countries have the equivalent of corporate manslaughter which in theory should send executives to prison for the behaviour of their subordinates.

The problem with both is that the powers at be don't prosecute very often.

Executives often weasel out in court by simply saying "I didn't know"... when it is 100% their job to know.

* When you dismantle a company, you have to figure out what to do with its assets. You could just burn them all down I guess, but if the company did something wrong that we want compensation for, it usually makes more sense to try and maximize the value you can get.

* A large manufacturing company is going to have factories, distributor contracts, etc. with no liquid secondary market. The value-maximizing play is most likely going to be selling the package to an existing company or setting up a new one, rather than holding a piecemeal fire sale.

* But if you have a new company/division with all of the old company's assets, doesn't that mean you've just renamed the old company? Kinda, yeah. You could disrupt the sameness by firing all the employees and hiring new ones - but that's going to hurt the value of the assets too, and it's not clear what the point would be of punishing the employees for executive misconduct.

In the Purdue case, the family should have lost everything, not retained billions. And they damn sure shouldn't get protection from civil liability, as a few courts of tried to do.

It'll be interesting to see what SCOTUS ends up deciding (I think the bankruptcy landed there, with arguments in December 2023).

More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public.

Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.

Seems .. iffy but I remember reading it and being both shocked and excited that it was possible. I want to say that it was intended for things where the SEC and FTC would be involved today.

Maybe I dreamt it. Or maybe it was revoked via an early constitutional amendment that I’m not familiar with.

We can probably assume that some people who belong to the group are both unessential and innocent of the crimes of the group. The janitor at one of Dupont's buildings isn't to blame for this, at least under most theories of culpability. But there is a core subset of people who are, and whether they are punished individually or not, at the very minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to participate in business (any business) again. Otherwise, they run off and get C-level jobs (or really, vp/director-level jobs and up), and perform more of the same stunts.

Not that it matters, the companies that commit these sorts of crimes are always large enough that their political sway would protect them even if there were laws on the books that could theoretically dismantle them. And certainly, all such companies collectively have more than enough mojo to prevent the passage of such a law.

Making bad decisions under duress is understandable but it’s still a serious issue to withhold this information.

The execs need no less than life in prison.

The janitor can lose his job if the company goes under, and is unlikely to be prosecuted for anything major; but the shareholders can lose their investment, even if they're not prosecuted.

Call it "corporate civil forfeiture".

I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world.

All the major offenders, all the companies who have wreaked havoc on us: Fossil fuel shitheads who sponsored climate doubt, arms manufacturers who lobbied us into illegal wars, social media companies responsible for polluting the minds of our most vulnerable, advertisers who greenwash and whitewash crimes.

It's only a fantasy, for now - we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers. We need to do something though. I'm sick of paying for the privilege of being gaslit, and tired of subsidizing the strip-mining of the planet.

Switch the major offenders and monopolies by force to a co-op model, and let's see if we can't turn the fate of the planet around.

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Le Guin

What if we could tame these gigantic, bloodthirsty monsters that casually wander into big cities and just start stomping skyscrapers down for shits and giggles? Think of how wonderful it would be to have one of those creatures under my control!!!

> I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world.

Nothing would make such a kaiju safer than putting it beyond the reach of even sovereign nations. And when it's under the direction of some weird-assed UN committee no one's heard of, that has Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China put in charge, think of all the wonderfully progressive things that will happen then!

> when it's under the direction of some weird-assed UN committee no one's heard of

Er, not what I had in mind, but there's probably some useful energy behind that pessimism.

What I know for certain is that the current system can't continue.

Try playing the tape that's currently in the player to the end. It's not very pretty: Ask any climate scientist. Ask any historian, any ecologist.

Even (or especially) the billionaires know the current trajectory is not great; they're building apocalypse bunkers at a record pace.

Seems a lot of people expect someone to come along and offer a perfect solution out of the box, and somehow not get taken out by the people who like things just as they are. I don't think that's reasonable. There needs to be a critical mass of people pushing for radical change, or we're pretty much fucked.

0 - https://ica.coop/en/media/news/new-ranking-worlds-300-larges...

We need all new laws and enforcement against these companies, that can retroactively “pierce the veil” and go after the individuals and their assets. It’s not enough that just the company (which is just a legally established entity) goes away. Consequences are what deter future crimes.

Source: I live about 12 miles west of there.

The people involved in that practice should be jailed for murder.

Though it's implied that Johnson's leaving is connected to the PFOS revelation, I don't see the article indicating whether Johnson had told Hansen anything more about it.

(Such as discussions behind closed doors, ultimatums, his own disillusionment/despair, etc.)

> At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contrac­tors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.

> Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.

> Out the windows of IHOP, I watched a light dusting of snow fall on the parking lot. In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: Not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-­ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.

* Johnson thought Hansen knew everything she needed to know;

* Johnson had been incentived/threatened not to say anything;

* Johnson told Hansen something more (possibly NDA-violating), but either Hansen didn't tell the journalist, or the journalist didn't write it; or

* Johnson was too troubled (emotionally, or physical health problems triggered by the stress) to think of where this left Hansen.

I might be off, but my sense from the journalist report of the meeting is that Johnson was/is a jerk.

How generous. Psychopath was what came to my mind. No idea why he thinks that is funny. He is complicit in a scheme that is, according to the researcher estimate cited in the article, costing up to ~$60 billion a year; undoubtedly an enormous amount of harm and suffering has been caused (with more yet to come) and that is all he has to say for himself?

Possibly is/was a jerk, but also strangely candid about it. Like he takes/took some pride in loyalty and his importance, and is asking to be grilled by a prosecutor, and perhaps held accountable (contempt of court, co-conspirator). That's not taking it to your grave.

> Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.

Sometimes that behavior seems illogical or inconsistent, but if the problem is unsolvable... can we judge whatever comes out?

"My job is to accurately analyze chemicals" + "My job is to protect the company" + "My job is to protect the public" is a hard set to satisfy.

It's fascinating how that famous Upton Sinclair quote about it being "difficult to convince a person of something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it" (paraphrased) plays out with two different people in different ways. One who has convinced herself for a long time that it's not dangerous to humans, the other who sees himself as a "loyal soldier", and doesn't want to create liabilities for the company.

There are tons of examples of situations where risk is very different depending on how long or how much/often something happens.

It seems like business schools, who train many of the people who ultimately make these decisions, do a "right shit job" of discussing the actual potential outcomes at scale / over long periods of time. Maybe that's intentional; "hey, you'll have a new job by then" and maybe it's not.

The more I think about it, the more I think all this is an example of the Gervais principal at work.

"Prevailing opinion" is very hard to determine, so I wouldn't be so quick to label one or the other as the default or majority.

I somewhat frequently downvote comments I'd otherwise agree with if they violate various of the HN guidelines. The principle goal of HN is not truth, fairness, or justice, however admirable those may be (and I rate those highly myself), but intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>.

There are definitely times I feel that HN's guidelines should take a back-seat to truth / fairness / justice, though those are comparatively rare.[1] But I understand why the values are as they are, even if I don't necessarily share in degree dang's apparent belief that HN rides on the bleeding knife's edge of sliding into chaos.[2]

HN contains multitudes. Trust that there are those I disagree with quite strongly. I've found a few things that seem to help:

- Voting and flagging can moderate, in all sense of the word, flagrantly extreme or antagonistic discussion. If you think someone is truly violating HN guidelines, both in terms of how they're saying it as well as their overall site activity, most especially ideological battle,[3] email the mods at [email protected]. They really do respond, though they don't always agree, of course.

- It's often more helpful to write a top-level comment which lays out the strongest version of your own argument rather than try to duke it out deep within a thread (where few will see your comments). Remember that yours is always the last comment on a discussion when you submit it ... but so was anyone else's. I've often found that my own attempts to steer conversation back to what I suspect are more productive tracks are at least modestly successful, not just in terms of votes, but often in terms of a productive following discussion whether or not it's in agreement with my own views.

- Rather than write from an aggrieved perspective, or to attack others, it's helpful to write effectively as if you'd already won the argument overwhelmingly. That is, you don't have to cast all HN into a single hive mind, or denigrate your opponents' or their views, but just make your own case. I've had several of my own best-received comments come from this approach.

Finally: making blanket assertions about what HN does or doesn't do is highly fraught if you've not systematically looked at actual behaviours. I've done my own poking at the platform (about a year ago now) looking at front-page activity,[4] and the results were ... surprising.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Most recent notable example here, and yes, it's still eating at me: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39023516>

2. I'm not finding a good specific reference to that thought, but in searching for it I did come up with an excellent and long essay by dang which explains his moderation rationale ... which broadly read gives some vaguely corresponding insights: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098>

Notably: [The] non-siloed nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, i.e. someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. ... This is a misunderstanding because it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though certainly they do. It's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. ... It's easy to miss because of these conflicts, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart.

The epigram on dang's profile page is also worth reading: <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang>

3. One of the most frequent of dang's admonitions, with 1,382 results as I write this: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>

4. Less systematic than I'd like, and no comprehensive write-up, but a number of comments scattered across HN and the Fediverse: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> and <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>

There wasn't a consensus like that when the OpenAI circus was going on iirc.

I think this often repeated myth of the HN hive mind¹ is both wrong and harmful². Yes, there are several people on these discussions who fit into the mould you describe, but there are also many who think that position is crazy and dehumanising and say so.

Literally every time I see someone on HN complaining the website has a prevailing opinion, I could think of counter-examples. I think we (people) may have a tendency to focus on the negative opinions that boil our blood and become blind to the voices in support.

¹ Not your words, but it encompasses the sentiment.

² It perpetuates a stereotype and prevents people with different views from joining the site or its discussion, narrowing the amount of differing views.

I think it's totally fair to call the top comment (most upvoted) the "prevailing opinion".

That said, I suspect it's a side-effect of HN's voting ethos (don't down vote because you disagree, which is lopsided because its opposite - people upvoting because they agree - happens disproportionately, generally the comment that activates the most would-be voters wins, unemotional comments that confirm boring old truths rarely do, unlike the incendiary ones about how $GROUP is ruining the tech workplace.

There are some comment threads I close after reading only part of the first thread, for various reasons.

(And especially if you see the top comment, and disagree with it vehemently, you might dig through the replies to that comment and start posting rebuttals. You might get tired of the topic before you get down to the 2nd-top comment, and leave the submission or the site entirely.)

Being the top comment is self-reinforcing, even if other comments actually do reflect the majority opinion better. I don't think we can say that the top comment is the majority/prevailing opinion. That's just the opinion that, due to lucky/random circumstances, got the most initial views and upvotes by people who agree, which then feedback-looped itself into staying the top comment.

I just realized were using different meanings of prevail - you (and likely gp) are using it as a synonym for majority/widespread, I was using it as a synonym for victorious or overcoming competing top-level opinions. Re-reading gps comment, the majority interpretation is clearly the ine they intended, but ai feel its self evident that the most-voted comment had the most people agreeing with it.

I was, yes, hence the “hive mind” reference.

> but ai feel its self evident that the most-voted comment had the most people agreeing with it.

Maybe, but you can only say that for that specific submission at the specific point in time you looked at it, it can’t be extrapolated to the “prevailing opinion on this site”. The time at which one looks at a thread makes all the difference. I’ve seen stories explode to the front page, then get flagged, then unflagged, the top comments being replaced with the previous opposite opinion.

I don't think that's fair at all. Moderation/voting isn't a perfect reflection of a site's tastes. HN's seems to be better than most at reflecting that, but sometimes a post gets popular long-term because it got popular initially, and sometimes that's just luck of the draw.

> don't down vote because you disagree

This is repeated a lot, but isn't true or correct. A lot of people do downvote because they disagree (myself included, though I try not to downvote when I disagree but also think it's a substantive, thought-provoking comment), and there's a comment from pg from many years ago (can't seem to find it) where he says that's a perfectly acceptable reason to downvote.

The most common example is from marketing where there is something that nobody notices until the internet noticed, or when a foreign company releases internationalized copy by someone that is not a native speaker so that the translation is nonsensical jibberish.

On the positive note, it works in so far as once it's said, the folks in charge can't hide under the blanket of ignorance. But it doesn't work in that it you're seen as the problem rather than asking "why the heck do we keep suggesting illegal things"?

Unfortunately, not many organizations will have the aligned incentives. If businesses that conduct potentially dangerous operations, were required to get an insurance, then insurance companies would have incentive to pay money to the whistleblower vs paying out a much larger claim down the line.

If you need this, your culture is beyond lost and your management team will sabotage it to ensure they maintain autocratic control.

> Enron, Theranons, Volkswagon... Boeing

Every one of these companies either was or had become quite autocratic and bureaucratic.

> hard to know what lengths people will go to when the stakes are high enough.

It's pretty easy to see it in action, and all it takes to beat it is a call from the CEO or someone above the manager of an employee that seems to be holding back in a meeting or in a email. "Fran, you seemed to be holding back. You are the kind of person that I count on to let me know what is really happening. Why were you holding back?" usually results in "My boss will fire me if I tell anyone"... And what comes after this is exactly what the CEO needs to know.

Maybe filtering blood would help other tissue by proxy, allowing the blood to hold more? but from what I understand PFOA doesn't just hang around in those organs inert, it binds to proteins which is why it can cause problems.

Also consider that we probably accumulate most of this through ingestion, since it's in pretty much all food and water, but to differing concentrations. So we are constantly consuming this stuff in tiny quantities, but it's always there. People worry about things like teflon in non-stick pans and other products, but that's a product of PFOAs, i.e they were manufactured using them, they are not themselves PFOAs and do not readily break down into them just by handling them (you have to heat your pan to >250c roughly to get it to start vaporising the teflon into an aerosolised PFOA. So while the firefighting foam story is awful, most products are not themselves toxic, the real danger is in what the manufacturing processes has already released into the environment and is now part of the global food chain (particularly in sea food).

In other words, it doesn't matter what you buy or use (personally at least), and we are all eating and drinking it. Any kind of blood filtering would be a continuous process, and it's not clear how effective it would be considering one of the primary routes to exposure is through ingestion, and how it readily binds to and disrupts various tissues in the body.

I suspect anything that would help substantially reverse the process in the human body would need to be more active, e.g a drug that interacted with the PFOA either to render it harmless or reduce it's "elimination half life" (currently thought to be 3 years) to allow it to be released faster than we accumulate it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Human_d...

Because most of the harmful effects of PFOAs seem to be due to it being an endocrine disruptor, which means it messes with any hormonal system. I'm wondering if there would be a higher probability for chemicals we identify to bind to it to also be some kind of endocrine disruptor or have a hormonal interaction due to the close chemical relationships... then again, if it's similarly disruptive but at least reduces the half life and allows the body to release it, then perhaps that doesn't matter long term. i.e a little bit more poison to allow your body to release all of the poison.

I'm totally unqualified to answer this question, biochemistry is extremely complex, just pointing out it's probably not that simple.

[edit]

Sorry I misread your comment as applying to the body. For the environment it's a different type of problem, the only known way to remove them is expensive indiscriminate filtering of water (i.e not specific to PFOA), reverse osmosis (basically using a huge amount of pressure). To actually destroy them is particularly difficult, short of shooting it into the Sun, but there has been progress there too:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/18/pfas-for...

The smallest dialysis machine is about the size of a laser printer. Many folks become confined to their dialysis schedule, and kidney disease, dialysis or no, has many side effects and can be very painful.

You also can't just have a catch all "filtering of toxins" like that. There are many molecules and proteins in your serum that need to be there and any sort of aggressive filtration will be a problem.

Somebody know some bio engineers, I’m hiring.

With regard to toxicity, PFAS is a term so broad that it is meaningless. It covers everything from Teflon (which is perhaps the most chemically inert substance ever created) fluorine-containing acids like PFOA, which are water soluble and bioavailable, and tend to accumulate in the environment.

Because of this, you'll see all sorts of silly claims on every thread related to this topic, claiming that (for example) fry pans are toxic. This is silly, and driven by a poor understanding of chemistry, as well as some unfortunate hack scientists who continue to promote the idea that "alkyl-fluorine-containing = toxic", which isn't supported by evidence.

You can see this hyperbole in the sibling comment, where the quote "man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body" is asserted as some kind of fact. Even if you're predisposed to believe this (extremely general) statement is true, this isn't a claim that you can really defend with an evidence-based argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Toxicol...

PFOA was explicitly banned in the US in 2014, after being phased out the year before, due to it's toxicity. Teflon changed their manufacturing process so it's made with polytetrafluoroethylene instead. So yes, pans made with teflon before 2014 absolutely due contain a toxic chemical.

> Teflon changed their manufacturing process so it's made with polytetrafluoroethylene instead. So yes, pans made with teflon before 2014 absolutely due contain a toxic chemical.

Incorrect. Just because something is used as a chemical precursor in a manufacturing process, does not mean that it is present in the final manufactured product.

Teflon is an solid, non-reactive material. PFOA is a liquid acid. They are very, very different things. Even if manufactured Teflon contained any residual PFOA (it doesn't), it would be washed away the first time you rinsed the pan.

> A 1999 study found that 98% of people in the United States had PFOA in their blood. This was due to environmental exposure to the chemical. As a result, the US EPA put up a program to eliminate the use of PFOA by 2015.

https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/is-teflon-coating-safe

They just assumed it burned off, but never tested it. It wasn't until 2021 that they had to actually test and report for extra chemicals left in, well after it was banned.

What happens when you actually test it?

> In this study, we identified and measured perfluoroalkyl carboxylates (PFCAs), particularly PFOA, and fluorotelomer alcohols (FTOHs; 6:2 FTOH and 8:2 FTOH), released from nonstick cookware into the gas phase under normal cooking temperatures (179 to 233 degrees C surface temperature). PFOA was released into the gas phase at 7-337 ng (11-503 pg/cm2) per pan from four brands of nonstick frying pans.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17593716/

So yes, it absolutely contained residual PFOA, and no it didn't wash off.

> The use of PFOA in the manufacturing of Teflon-coated cookware has been completely stopped. But, even when PFOA is used, it poses little or no harm to your health. Teflon on its own is safe and can’t harm you when you ingest it.

...not that I think webmd is worth citing.

But OK, one paper you dug up found an incredibly tiny amount (500 picograms per square centimeter, at the highest), which they said declined over time for half the pans tested (I'm guessing the ones with the highest initial readings). Meanwhile, other groups didn't see the same thing:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16096677/

> Commercial grade cookware was obtained, then extracted with water and ethanol/water mixtures at 100 and 125 degrees C, and the resulting extracts were analyzed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS). Detection and quantification limits as low as 100 pg cm(-2) were demonstrated. None of the fluoropolymer treated cookware samples analyzed showed detectable levels of PFOA when extracted under simulated cooking conditions.

Anyway, I'm not going to get excited over a single paper, showing incredibly minute amounts of something which, as you say, is now ubiquitous in the environment (hello, cross-contamination risk!). The paper may or may not have been methodologically valid. You do you.

Is there actually evidence here that these chemicals are harmless, or is this an absence of evidence of harm? Because the latter is a whole lot less persuasive than the former.

“The real issue is this stuff accumulates,” the professor said. “No chemical is totally innocuous, and it seems inconceivable that anything that accumulates would not eventually become toxic.”

> man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body

It's a horrible experience; the constant gaslighting grinds you down.

I can especially relate to the idea of being paid to do something that nobody in the company actually wants you to do. The better you are at your job, the more they hate you.

I wouldn't be surprised if they actually wanted her to fail. I bet if she had lied and started reporting that there were no PFOS and made up some BS that the old methods of testing were arcane and her new (intentionally flawed) method is better, they would have given her a huge raise and she would have been made employee of the year.

That's the kind of stuff that happened at my previous employer. All the liars and saboteurs at that company ended up being promoted within the company or hired by other companies with big salaries to help them run projects into the ground; which they did diligently.

If you want to create conflict, you better have integrity and leave instead of continuing to use the resources of the group for your crusade. Yet she stayed there and waited literally decades to create outrage about something that has yet to be proven problematic in the long run.

They even alerted the EPA pretty quickly so it is clear to anyone reading between the lines the one acting the most in bad faith is actually her.

Steps:

(1) Say it is beneficial to health (there are always doctors in ads)

(2) When 1 is disproven, deny it (make it a lifestyle thing, expand into more demographics, there was a recent comment/post how there was an ad guy who convinced women to smoke with the right marketing)

(3) Also deny that workers who are exposed more are getting sick, they didn't follow proper procedures, etc. Its the workers fault!

(4) Keep the controversy alive (this will run for 3 - 5 decades), the science is not settled, etc.

(5) If we don't have this, it will stop industrial/economic progress.

(6) It is unfair to ban this until definitive proof exists.Further tests and studies required.

This playbook is used by all industries.

This is a really good summary of some of the strategies employed by Lead: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.75.4....

Bureau of Mines released its preliminary findings on the possible dangers of leaded gasoline to the general public. The New York Times headline summed up the report: "No Peril to Public Seen in Ethyl Gas/ Bureau of Mines Reports after Long Experiments with Motor Exhausts/ More Deaths Unlikely."

"Dr. Henry F. Vaughan, president of the American Public Health Association, said that such evidence did not exist. "Certainly in a study of the statistics in our large cities there is nothing which would warrant a health commissioner in saying that you could not sell ethyl gasoline," he pointed out. Vaughan acknowledged that there should be further tests and studies of the problem but that "so far as the present situation is concerned, as a health administrator I feel that it is entirely negative." Emery Hayhurst also argued this point at the Surgeon General's Conference, maintaining that the widespread use of leaded gasoline for 27 months "should have sufficed to bring out some mishaps and poisonings, suspected to have been caused by tetraethyl lead.'"

Lead is a gift of God: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2023/jan/12/the-gi...

How gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37917235

Tobacco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research

The 3M CEO is a 61 year old man, which is typical for high level execs. According to most studies PFOS particularly affect children, and the damage is over long term repeated exposure over a lifetime, not high dose, one time exposure like a PFOS injection would be, and that's to someone who is at 2/3 of his life. Furthermore, endocrine disruptors seem to exhibit an unusual dose response curve, where lower doses may be worse than higher doses.

In fact, getting a PFOS injection at a well calculated dose could be the kind of stunt a CEO could pull. Sending the message "see, I put my life on the line to show you that PFOS are safe" (CEOs are usually not risk adverse), completely misrepresenting the real risk profile. Similar stunts have happened on occasion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

> On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.

There have been stories about how "sane" individuals were slowly radicalized because they only saw a particular perspective of the real world

They just seem to really heavily play into people's luddite-based fears and lack of understanding.

It would be even more great if the EPA was wrong about PFOS and PFOA being “likely to cause cancer.”

We'll have answers eventually, but some clues are out there.[0] I don't think the smart money is on this being a panic raised by luddites, though.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3855514/

TFA itself talks about such dumping events at length ("at least 45% of U.S. tap water is estimated to contain one or more forever chemicals"), Dark Waters is about such events, the EPA's standards were brought about as a result of such events...?

Factory workers who poured out PFAS sludge bled to death in factory floors, 9 of 10 women (or some similarly awful stat) who worked on the factory area gave birth to deformed babies.

awful stuff.

and i truly hate executives. "profit above health. profit above morality. profit above society. profit above nature. profit above everything."

If a corporation is a collection of people driven by a charter, and that corporation commits a crime, the people who drove that decisions have two forms of protection from liability. One, criminal liability is in effect treated as diffuse and it is near impossible to charge any person for a crime. Two, assets not associated with the company are protected from liability involving the company's actions

This is madness. When a collective of any kind commits a crime, this is conspiracy. If someone is a voting shareholder or board member or top-level executive of a company that did a crime, they should automatically be liable. Executives should be resigning out of fear of being held responsible when given an unjust order. In the current environment, everyone involved is heavily tilted toward continuing to harm people for profit, because no consequences besides being lambasted in the media (If someone dares do journalism, in an environment where oligarchs punish and discourage exposes by buying up news orgs and socially discrediting all criticism as "cancel culture", and seemingly will outright murder whistleblowers in their own organizations), but heavy consequences can be inflicted on them by the explicitly authoritarian hierarchies within the corporations themselves and the outsized influence on your entire career prospects that defying someone in a position of power in a concentrated industry (which is at this point most if not all industries) can have should you choose your ethics over their marching orders

Not only should no one have this much power, ever, for any reason, but we have cleanly separated power from responsibility of any kind. This has never been conducive to a functional society, and it will continue to get worse as long as this structure remains intact

They spy on us.

They poison us.

Why does 3M still exist? Their company charter should be revoked. Their assets should be stripped and sold. Every employee fired. Everyone complicit should be in a prison cell. Every single one of them.

Adhesives, abrasives, protection equipment (ironic, heh), etc... You are probably using many 3M products personally, and whoever worked on your house, car, etc... even more so. If everyone complicit should be in prison, make the entire world in prison. Remove all 3M products from the market and everyone life will be a little worse.

Does it mean 3M shouldn't respond to all the environmental damage, of course not, but there are many products 3M makes that are not particularly bad for the environment.

Also, what would happen without 3M? There are needs to be fulfilled, other companies will take over (maybe directly by buying sold 3M assets), but there is no reason to believe they won't be as bad as 3M, especially if it is a company located in a country that doesn't care that much about the environment. China will probably love the idea.

Yes, they lie, spy and poison us, so work on the lying, spying and poisoning part on a company that can be controlled in some way instead of throwing off everything and have the problem move elsewhere.

It's not just at the organizational level, it's at the societal level in democratic politics, too.

Just take deregulated modern capitalism, broadly. It has all kinds of clearly-observed bad or unfair outcomes for lots of groups (to various degrees, pretty much anyone not in the ownership class), but its structure is so slippery that the ownership class and its lackeys have been able to use the characteristics you outlined stymie positive change.

For instance, there is market incentive for corporations to behave badly, but then that bad behavior is defended by pointing to those market incentives and making the bad-faith argument that, due the markets decentralization, the complainer is complicit unless they took the impossible action of being totally independent from the market we've used to organize our economy. That confuses the situation so much that a lot of people just tune out.

People make me fucking sick to my teeth. I bust my guts trying to make things a little better, and I earn very little and get back nothing. Then you realise every effort is undermined by an avalanche of shit from people actively trying to make things worse.

Fuckfuckfuck.

Why bother even trying? Why bother even being alive?

Doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to do good. It’s good for you, if nothing else. But you have to let go of the idea that you control more than the tiniest fraction of it.

Don't.

> I earn very little and get back nothing.

Exactly. You need to be more mercenary.

> Why bother even trying?

For things you care about. Your family, your self, maaaybe some close friends. If you're going to invest in a project, make sure you own it or have significant equity.

The world is chock full of vampires looking to exploit helpers. Don't let them get you.

More importantly, don't let this dissuade anyone from helping. Some caution is needed yes, but cynicism is the greater foe. A life of public service is a life well spent.

Because you helped somebody.

If the world is drowning, and all your work amounts to a millimetre off the water level of one city, what good have you done? A millimetre might make the difference between a submerged nostril, and not. The difference between the water flooding a building's walls, and it not. Nobody can determine the absolute level of badness in the world, but we can make local, relative changes to it. All big things are made of small things.

You can never know whether you have helped anyone. That does not mean you haven't.

You managed to do both.

There's a couple things to note about "forever chemicals":

They're around "forever" because they are extremely unreactive. The concentrations the public is concerned about are ridiculous. With such small concentrations, huge timescales for the cause-effect chain to take place and countless confounding factors in between it's basically impossible to make the bold claims the general public makes.

That being said: Workers are exposed to much higher concentrations and they should have been protected from it. New chemicals shouldn't be used as widely as they do by simply assuming they're safe. There are uses (like cosmetics etc) were no risk is really warranted so they should be more restricted with what they use.

At the end of the day though, when you ban something you need to really understand and take into consideration what kind of damage you'll do to people by banning a substance and all the products that depend on it vs. what kind of damage the substance will do. You can't pretend that you can just ban a whole class of really important compounds without any societal side effects.

And that's coming from someone who's really concerned about dangerous chemicals. If you know chemistry, and look around you, you can tell there's a lot more dangerous issues than PFAS that aren't being tackled and nobody seems to care about. Primarily how nobody seems to check what's really included in tons of "cheap" (in terms of manufacturing, not always of price) imported cosmetics, personal hygiene products and parapharmaceuticals.

People are buying protein powders and supplements of unknown producers, raw materials and manufacturing methods by the kilos, plastic cooking utensils from the internet and boil/oven bake them with their food, buy sketchy adhesives for their PVC water pipes, and then complain about some 1ppt concentration of inert chemicals in their drinking water. I understand how the public is easily swayed on things that are technical, and I am happy with people being aware of potential dangers, but the focus is really misplaced on something that looks new, scary, unsolvable and interesting instead of tackling the old, boring but important and serious issues we come across every day.

> What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.

the only propaganda about PFOS was made by 3M, telling us these chemicals were safe, when they knew they weren't.

> This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest

to wit: lead dropped the average iq of the americans since 1940: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh...

how do we measure this kind of toxicity, except well after the damage is already done? if we know something is toxic, why don't we stop using it?

Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. Sometimes that kind of throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified, as in the leaded-gasoline example, while sometimes it's not.

the point of the article, and what i think you're ignoring, is the decades of cover-up by the corporate producers of these chemicals to protect their profits. that's not a good look if they're convinced their products are worth the damage

We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off.

> Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto.

No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.

Or is it because just because that you think it's not important that a study found that some aspect of coffee could cause cancer in rats, and you also don't care about studies about PFOAs, so they're the same?