There are significant "snowballing" effects wrt to technology adoption, more widely adopted technologies tend to improve far more quickly. So a little bit of no

There are significant "snowballing" effects wrt to technology adoption, more widely adopted technologies tend to improve far more quickly. So a little bit of noise in the early days about the true potential of a technology could conceivable sway the race in one direction or another, and I was wondering whether there were instances of where the noise signal might have been that it was considered as "Soviet" and thus less likely to receive research funding/grants. A less geopolitical example that I can think of was research in the 50's about limitations of neural networks (XOR problem,...) that some people I take seriously argue has delayed the adoption of these architectures by a generation or two (the only politics here was the battle for government funding by different researchers/labs).