Apparently, many such coffee studies are sponsored by firms with an interest in publicizing coffee's benefits. It doesn't mean the science necessarily isn't good. Although, consider the opportunity cost: we could instead be researching many other things that don't carry as high a cost as coffee (in terms of production labor, refining, and transportation), and may commute even greater benefits. Of course, we shouldn't expect big corporations to sponsor that kind of research, because it's not in their interest.
It is decidedly in the interest of coffee conglomerates to demonstrate that coffee is good for society, because it justifies the great fiscal and human expenses they go to, to bring fresh coffee to your breakfast table. Not passing judgement either way, it's just an interesting lens to consider.
Edit: oh boy. I misread the parent comment. I thought they had declared a conflict of interest. Sorry. I didn't intend for my comment to read as a corporate-research apologia.
>Apparently, many such coffee studies are sponsored by firms with an interest in publicizing coffee's benefits. It doesn't mean the science isn't good.
Usually the science isn't good even with no conflicts of interest, with 80% or more of studies being non-reproducible BS full of errors and cherry-picking.
Now consider the percentage when there's also conflict of interest...
I think you may have misread the tone of my comment.
> It is decidedly in the interest of coffee conglomerates to demonstrate that coffee is good for society, because it justifies the great fiscal and human expenses they go to, to bring fresh coffee to your breakfast table.
I don't think that coffee is necessarily good for society, and that they're doing us a great service by revealing supporting information to us.
> consider the opportunity cost: we could instead be researching many other things that don't carry as high a cost as coffee (in terms of production labor, refining, and transportation), and may commute even greater benefits
I actually think we (as a society) should be more uniformly investing in the basic research: not only in things that make certain companies marginally more profitable, because now their expensive products are scientifically-proven to be "healthy".
However, I do think it's unreasonable to expect corporations to do this research for us, because they have no incentive to, as a sibling comment of yours pointed out. This vein of thought is nuanced, and I concede that it could be easily misinterpreted as apologia, given the context of my original message (which was misinformed).
It's not the tone as much as the omission of the elephant in the room, which is that "coffee is healthy" is a revenue-generating narrative for the coffee business/cartel. Especially in light of this research being funded by said business.
Ah, got it! I admit that I didn't want to come across as disputing the claim by addressing the elephant, since I'm not really qualified to dispute the claim. I wanted to plant the seed of skepticism in my links, which make your present point better than I could in an hn comment. I actually agree with your analysis.
To try and rescue the discussion, it's interesting to observe that many "healthy" things are "also" revenue-generating narratives. For example, "exercise is healthy" is great for the sportswear cartel, which has a similarly poor track record on human rights.
It doesn't mean that the thing itself can't be objectively healthy, but I totally agree with you that we should take these projections for what they are, especially when they're sponsored by the business that profits from them.
If you're curious in reading something that builds on the "revenue-generating narrative" idea more, I recommend the new yorker link, it's quite good. :)
> K.K. and S.M. reported no conflicts of interest.
People need to understand that "conflict of interest" does not mean "proof of wrongdoing", it means being in a situation where serving one interest could be a detriment to another. There is 100% a conflict of interest here.
In my opinion to improve the reputation of this research-branch we should start both moving conflict of interests in the abstract of the publication and dedicate mesh-keys to conflict of interests in public medical databases. Much crap would be more easily flagged and moved on with.
Thank you for being a Fakespot user. I thought I'd bring in some perspective to your question.
Your observation of the preponderance of unreliable reviews on Amazon matches what we see across the board.
Unfortunately, ever since Amazon opened up to 3rd party sellers, the reviews have become a marketing tool by a lot of these sellers to move ahead of other products. These sellers use everything from pure fake reviews to gamed verified purchase reviews. This is major reason why so many reviews nowadays are unreliable, it is truly a wild west out there in the eCommerce world and fake reviews can mean $$$.
With that said, we just launched Fakespot Guardian as part of our new Chrome extension which solves the 3rd party seller problem by telling you if a seller is reliable or not. By knowing if seller and reviews are reliable, you will be able to purchase anything with confidence.
Once upon a time I was responsible for a high traffic site with ads as a primary revenue source.
The constant problem was that competitors would automate clickbomb attacks -- fake traffic with click throughs that would ultimately get the site banned from ad networks (or severely devalue CPM rates) for fraudulent traffic. The irony was that we never used the same tactics ourselves, assuming that the risks outweighed the rewards. The malicious bot traffic ultimately spelled the end of the site.
I would imagine that an Amazon product/seller would suffer from high quantities of any fake reviews, whether positive or negative:
Too positive? Amazon or Fakespot & similar services penalize them.
Too negative? Consumers penalize them.
Seems like with a modest budget and a Fiverr-like service, smaller retailers could be harmed with relative ease.
Then, faced with these attacks, I'd imagine many companies with means might try countermeasures, triggering a sort of review arms race.
How do you separate the signal from the noise from deliberate fake reviews (of any kind) from third parties with malicious intent?
And from our internal research at Fakespot, we concur. The positivity bias from influenced reviews such as the Vine review program and multitudes others is rampant.
Our ML based algorithms will penalize any biased reviews and show case them to our users.
Hi, Saoud from Fakespot here. My co-founders and I all got scammed and duped by fake reviews and Fakespot was built to bring back trust and transparency to the e-commerce experience (and others).
We have a strict policy to remain neutral in our analyses and we do not in any way, shape or form accept bribes or copt partnerships.
But don't you need to say that? What policies or strategies are you using to prevent this from happening beyond the shared experience of being burned and avoiding a deep sense of shame if one were to abuse their position?
We have been bootstrapped and funded by institutional investors that allows us to function freely from being in the "unnamed but big review website starting with Y" business model. Ethically speaking, I personally would never support that as it goes against our mission as a company and what we are aiming to build here.
We actually get consistent DDoS attacks which are coming from angry e-Commerce sellers that have dismal grades on Fakespot, and that is occurring ever more frequently.
Fakespot CTO here. That's a good observation. Our engines utilize NLP heavily conjoined with proprietary ML models to detect influenced reviews that basic statistical analysis will never (or with low levels of success) be able to infer from review data sets, unless there are very basic signals such as 100 5-star reviews posted in an hour.
Fake review authors and providers are increasingly becoming sophisticated to bypass various filters in place on Amazon and other websites so you need to be able to leverage SOTA analysis to detect them. We also don't reveal how we detect certain fake reviews due to the fact that they will use that information to their advantage to further exploit our system, which allows us to be a couple steps ahead.
Anyone interested to know more about this topic feel free to email me at [email protected].
One of the main authors was compensated by the largest coffee retailer in Germany.