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this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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There is no such thing as an impartial sponsor; some are more obviously biased than others, but the belief in a fictitious impartiality is part of the problem. It shouldn't take a meta-study for people to see am obvious conflict of interest.
I'm biased. You are biased. Everyone is biased.
What if the sponsor is the blanket university funding for a professor's research? It may have some bias, but there is no steak in the actual result.
I expect to see "these results call for more research on the topic", but that's pretty much it.
stake?
Accepting funding from sponsors responsible for pollution & publishing environmental toxicology studies that disfavor those sponsors was pretty common at the university medical office where I worked.
Hi, please, don't. These baseless "corrections" that are really just semantics aren't helping anyone, and just contribute to anti-intellectualism.
We know what an impartial sponsor is in the context of this study - it's a sponsor that doesn't have a profit motive.
Obviously humans are biased. Scientists know that. Scientists train on that concept from day one. Observational studies are hard to control for bias, but that doesn't mean the field of science is silly for trying anyway.
The placebo-controlled double-blind study is the gold standard of scientific experiment for a reason.
An impartial sponsor is not a sponsor that is inhuman and has no preconceptions. We all know that's impossible.
An impartial sponsor is one that does not have clear signs of partiality - like a literal profit motive. That's all.
Edit - and for the record, in science, everything requires study. If you want to claim that conflicts of interest are impacting scientific results, you study it.
That's what it means to be impartial. To not trust assumptions based on your preconceptions. Assume as little as possible, consider as many possible explanations as you can, and verify everything.
I guess I didn't communicate my point effectively. I wasn't trying to nitpick semantics. I was trying to say that people don't think critically because they assume impartiality.
If the first thing people did when they looked at a study was to ask what possible biases or conflicts of interest the sponsors have, then conducting a meta-study concluding that biased studies are biased wouldn't be news to anyone.