Arnold Foundation takes on poor scientific studies

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A bit of a fascinating story on Wired of John Arnold who made billions at the trading desk and retired to develop the philanthropic Arnold Foundation.
Nonprofits are very good at reporting their success rates and citing the science behind their interventions, but dig into their claims—as the Arnolds would try to do—and you find that they often omit relevant context or confuse correlation with causation. “The more you read the research, the less you know,” Arnold says. “It became extraordinarily frustrating.”
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Arnold is careful not to lump all researchers together when he talks about the problems in science. But he tells me that listening to Taubes and reading his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, had been an “aha moment” for him. “Science is built like a building,” Arnold says. “One floor on top of the next.” In nutrition, “the whole foundation of the research had been flawed. All these things that we thought we knew—when we step back and look at the evidence base—it’s just not there.”
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Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a researcher’s work, he no longer believes the findings of any scientific study until he or someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. “A new study shows …” are “the four most dangerous words,” Arnold wrote on Twitter.
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If John Arnold does have an identifiable ideology, it is that of a lifelong trader and quant: unsentimental, metrics-focused, interventionist. He is unapologetic about having worked at Enron, and he can be defensive about the moral standing of Wall Street in the public mind. In 2015, after a cancer researcher was found to have falsified research data and defrauded the government out of millions of dollars, Arnold complained on Twitter that the penalty, a five-year funding restriction, was too light. Had something similar happened on Wall Street, he tweeted, the perpetrator would have been sentenced to 10 years in jail and the bank would have been fined a billion dollars. “Is there something special about frauds in the securities biz that they should be penalized infinitely more harshly than other business frauds?” he went on. “Or is Wall Street just an easy target while cancer researchers and universities are not?”
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So it’s no surprise that, in practice, the Arnolds’ approach to giving has a lot in common with John Arnold’s approach to investing. Laura tells me she sees her husband’s appetite for risk—an appetite she says she shares—as the most obvious link between his approach to trading and philanthropy. Once the foundation has identified areas where they believe they can make the biggest difference, they go all in. “We’re not looking to create an organization of safe success,” she says. “We’re looking to create an organization of thoughtful failure and fantastic success.”
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Made a Fortune at Enron. Now He’s Declared War on Bad Science
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👍

The left thinks God is dead.

The right thinks science is dead.

One thing is for sure … philosophy is dead.
 
Wow. Not only is philosophy dead, it’s corpse is being dragged through the streets.
 
Roseeurekacross said:
Do you think its valid? If so why ?
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I do believe the pursuit for more accurate data, transparency in research (which can encourage independent replicating of experiments) and promoting scientific collaboration is a noble goal. The concepts promoted by the Center for Open Science may even help alleviate conflicts of interest.

I’m sure there may be a downside but don’t see a glaring one.

Your thoughts?
 
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