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LOL? Yes, virtually all basic research is federally funded. Does it distort science? Nutrition is not at all easy to do as science because doing research with

by rortian 16y ago

LOL? Yes, virtually all basic research is federally funded. Does it distort science? Nutrition is not at all easy to do as science because doing research with humans is not considered ethical by society. I think it's something we need to address, and it seems short sighted to me. Your example is not at all convincing evidence for you rather sweeping thesis.

randallsquared 16y ago
Yes, virtually all basic research is federally funded. Does it distort science? It would be pretty extraordinary if it somehow didn't, wouldn't it?
- rortian 16y ago
  I'd just be interested in knowing what sort of bias would it have. How would the government like new science to look? Would it be at all productive to fake experiments? The government has its issues, but funding science is a great thing. Sure, I'd like for less money to be controlled by the pentagon. But I'd love to see even money spent on basic research.
ubernostrum 16y ago
I think you're missing the fact that this is a new libertarian talking point. Laissez-faire approaches tend to result in the tragedy of the commons, where the commons is some environmental factor -- fish stocks, etc. -- and science has been consistently pointing out the problems caused as a result. Therefore, to defend itself, libertarianism must discredit science. The solution is to associate science with government; since, by libertarian definition, anything a government does is wrong, it follows that science is wrong and, by the fallacy of begging the question, libertarianism is right.
- scrod 16y ago
  This is perhaps the most salient observation in the entire thread. Free-market libertarians have an ideological imperative to deny any causality between activity in the pursuit of profit and environmental catastrophes. It's no surprise that a framework based almost entirely on individual property rights is unable to protect that which is impossible to own, to say nothing of the incorrectness of treating land as partitionable property when we know the ecosystem to be a globally-connected process. By claiming to champion rationalism, their pretenses shine through; when the scientific method reveals the impracticality of their philosophy, they attack science itself. You know, maybe we need a less-biased source of scientific funding — how about Exxon Mobil? I'm sure they'd have enough to pay for some real independent research. Oh, actually, it looks like they've been pretty busy already: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ExxonMobil_funding_recipients http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ExxonMobil_fundin...
dpatru 16y ago
Of course federal funding distorts science. How could it not? It's naive to think otherwise. Politics pervades all the other areas of government spending. Are you saying that scientists and their funders are somehow superior to everyone else? That they have a special gene that makes them bias-free? I see the bias most clearly in the science and studies that are not being funded and the changes that are not being promoted. Why, for example, does Al Gore focus on climate change, which is based on contested predictions of how the climate will be in 50 years, and not on eliminating the farm subsidies which make food so artificially cheap that about a third of Americans, many of them "in poverty," are obese? Could it be that addressing climate change involves increasing government power while eliminating subsidies would reduce government power? When was the last time government paid for a study that recommended that some department or agency of the government be eliminated? Sal Khan has videos covering all the math taught in K-12. Why don't government-funded scientists study whether thousands of math teachers can be taken off government payrolls and replaced with Khan's videos?
- lutorm 16y ago
  It can't directly distort science because a) people are applying for grants to conduct research. They don't yet know what the results are going to be, unless you accuse the scientific community of massive fraud. And, b) because research grants, at least the ones I know of which are given out by NSF and NASA, are not awarded based on what the government thinks but on how the proposal is rated by an independent panel of peer-reviewing scientists. You can of course imagine second-order effects whereby the selection of the members of the peer-review committee is skewed by the program officers, picking panels that they think will give money to the programs they want. But if they consistently picked committee members that are out of the scientific mainstream, I think you'd hear a howl from the scientific community. I've heard plenty of complaints about the awards from people who weren't funded, but that the panels were stacked by people with predetermined ideas of what results should be obtained is not one of them. As to your K-12 example, do you know for a fact that there are (competent) researchers who have applied for grants to conduct that study and were rejected? If not, you have no case. If you think the government orders what research be done, you are woefully uninformed of how the vast majority of research is conducted in the US. Aside from a small number of researchers working in government facilities, research grants are awarded based on proposals from independent researchers. If no one applies to conduct a study, it won't happen no matter how much "the government" wants it to. And as far as I know, there is no government-run research facilities in the field of education. And finally, in case you haven't noticed, Al Gore has not been affiliated with the government for a decade...

by rortian 16y ago

randallsquared 16y ago

Yes, virtually all basic research is federally funded. Does it distort science? It would be pretty extraordinary if it somehow didn't, wouldn't it?

rortian 16y ago
I'd just be interested in knowing what sort of bias would it have. How would the government like new science to look? Would it be at all productive to fake experiments? The government has its issues, but funding science is a great thing. Sure, I'd like for less money to be controlled by the pentagon. But I'd love to see even money spent on basic research.

ubernostrum 16y ago

I think you're missing the fact that this is a new libertarian talking point. Laissez-faire approaches tend to result in the tragedy of the commons, where the commons is some environmental factor -- fish stocks, etc. -- and science has been consistently pointing out the problems caused as a result. Therefore, to defend itself, libertarianism must discredit science. The solution is to associate science with government; since, by libertarian definition, anything a government does is wrong, it follows that science is wrong and, by the fallacy of begging the question, libertarianism is right.

scrod 16y ago
This is perhaps the most salient observation in the entire thread. Free-market libertarians have an ideological imperative to deny any causality between activity in the pursuit of profit and environmental catastrophes. It's no surprise that a framework based almost entirely on individual property rights is unable to protect that which is impossible to own, to say nothing of the incorrectness of treating land as partitionable property when we know the ecosystem to be a globally-connected process. By claiming to champion rationalism, their pretenses shine through; when the scientific method reveals the impracticality of their philosophy, they attack science itself. You know, maybe we need a less-biased source of scientific funding — how about Exxon Mobil? I'm sure they'd have enough to pay for some real independent research. Oh, actually, it looks like they've been pretty busy already: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ExxonMobil_funding_recipients http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ExxonMobil_fundin...

dpatru 16y ago

Of course federal funding distorts science. How could it not? It's naive to think otherwise. Politics pervades all the other areas of government spending. Are you saying that scientists and their funders are somehow superior to everyone else? That they have a special gene that makes them bias-free? I see the bias most clearly in the science and studies that are not being funded and the changes that are not being promoted. Why, for example, does Al Gore focus on climate change, which is based on contested predictions of how the climate will be in 50 years, and not on eliminating the farm subsidies which make food so artificially cheap that about a third of Americans, many of them "in poverty," are obese? Could it be that addressing climate change involves increasing government power while eliminating subsidies would reduce government power? When was the last time government paid for a study that recommended that some department or agency of the government be eliminated? Sal Khan has videos covering all the math taught in K-12. Why don't government-funded scientists study whether thousands of math teachers can be taken off government payrolls and replaced with Khan's videos?

lutorm 16y ago
It can't directly distort science because a) people are applying for grants to conduct research. They don't yet know what the results are going to be, unless you accuse the scientific community of massive fraud. And, b) because research grants, at least the ones I know of which are given out by NSF and NASA, are not awarded based on what the government thinks but on how the proposal is rated by an independent panel of peer-reviewing scientists. You can of course imagine second-order effects whereby the selection of the members of the peer-review committee is skewed by the program officers, picking panels that they think will give money to the programs they want. But if they consistently picked committee members that are out of the scientific mainstream, I think you'd hear a howl from the scientific community. I've heard plenty of complaints about the awards from people who weren't funded, but that the panels were stacked by people with predetermined ideas of what results should be obtained is not one of them. As to your K-12 example, do you know for a fact that there are (competent) researchers who have applied for grants to conduct that study and were rejected? If not, you have no case. If you think the government orders what research be done, you are woefully uninformed of how the vast majority of research is conducted in the US. Aside from a small number of researchers working in government facilities, research grants are awarded based on proposals from independent researchers. If no one applies to conduct a study, it won't happen no matter how much "the government" wants it to. And as far as I know, there is no government-run research facilities in the field of education. And finally, in case you haven't noticed, Al Gore has not been affiliated with the government for a decade...