WTF??

If I save them 5 mins/day, it pays for itself 100 times over. I may sick Europa and Thomas on them…

Please remember that it takes incredible amounts of time and effort to produce a quality information product. If you steal and redistribute it, you’re just removing the incentive for me (and others like me) to produce more. I have to make a living, and I’ll find another way to do it if necessary.

If I’m really lucky, I may actually see royalty income in a couple of years. If I’m really, really, really lucky, I may even make enough to pay for the book launch.

“Information wants to be free” is stupid. Quality information is expensive to produce. Crappy information is free to produce. By paying nothing for information, you gradually select only for the crappy information produced by people and organizations who can do it for free. In other words, hacks and shysters.

You wouldn’t walk into a stereo store and take one home without paying. Don’t do it with an audiobook, or an online program or an electronic program. Ease of theft does not translate into the right to steal. And when people steal, ultimately they simply drive the quality producers out of the marketplace. (Or at least they will for me, since if I can’t make a decent living at this, I have no intention of producing more content. If there’s no income that comes from my podcast, it makes no sense for me to continue.)

The researchers are indignant at the idea that the consulting fees may have influenced their research. And indeed, no one has yet re-reviewed the research.

But hey! These are friggin’ psychiatrists. Social psychologists have known for decades that when you accept money from someone, you become biased in their favor. The bias happens even if you consciously try to keep it from happening. The bias happens even if you know about the bias effect. It’s part of the “commitment and consistency” principle of social psychology.

I’m in the middle of reading a book on the topic by two of the most prominent, well-respected social psychologists in the world, Mistakes Were Made. I’m only partway through, but I just read pages 43-55, which lay out specifically the studies that have shown than (a) scientists paid by industry tend to be influenced in favor of the ones making payments, and (b) doctors given gifts by pharmaceuticals (oddly, small gifts actually show a greater effect than large gifts) tend to overprescribe the company’s products. Exactly the issues highlighted in this article!

What I’ve read so far convinces me that any research conducted by a researcher who has received fees from a vested party should be considered suspect. Furthermore, any drugs prescribed by a doctor who has received fees or promotional gifts from a pharmaceutical should be considered suspect.

We’re trusting our minds, bodies, and children to prescriptions and research done by people who have powerful unconscious reasons to find problems and prescribe drugs. That doesn’t mean the research is bad, nor does it mean there was any conscious wrong-doing. But the very fields of psychology and psychiatry have known for decades that the more powerful motivations are those below consciousness, and those are the very ones motivations triggered by the gifts, consulting fees, and promotions.

Click here to read the entire Happy or Successful podcast as an article.