Michael Brown                                 D594                 Summary notes

The Young Billionaire Behind the War on Bad Science

John Arnold and his wife founded the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. They were a young billionaire couple from Huston. John had made his first millions as a natural gas trader at Enron. He managed to walk away from Enron’s 2001 collapse with a seven-figure bonus and no wrong doing attached to his name. He then became started his own hedge fund Centaurus Energy and retired at age 38 to focus on full time philanthropy.  Many researchers who were soul searching and critique in their own fields have received unsolicited emails from the Arnold Foundation, most couldn’t find funding’s elsewhere because they were questioning the findings of other researchers and the false results from studies which were biased. He Arnold foundation has given more than $80 million to science critics and reformers in the past five years alone. There was a backlash from those in science who didn’t’ see a crises or nee for reformation in the science field.

Growing up Arnold questioned everything according to his former teacher.

At first Arnold and Laura’s plan was to locate he most effective organizations and write them checks. He had devoted the beginning of his life to making money and now wanted to devote the rest of his life to doing good. He found out that the non-profits were good at reporting their success rates and citing the science behind their interventions but if he looked deeper he found they often omitted relevant context or confuse correlation with causation. The more you read the research the less you know, he said. It was frustrating but then in Nov. 2011 he was listening to the Podcast EconTalk hosted by libertarian Russ Roberts, the guest that day was journalist Gary Taubes as he was talking about the dietary wisdom of the past 40 years arose from the flimsiest of facts , questioning if eating oo much fat leads to obesity and heart disease.. and the broken scientific culture. Arnold was impressed and sent Taubes a seed money grant and promised 35.5 million more. Arnold found that he could no longer believe he findings of any scientific study unless he or someone vets the paper., believing the system rewards the wrong behavior