The social sciences indeed have the politically charged element, but I think you've hit on a broader point here. Investigating "what is" needs to involve to at

The social sciences indeed have the politically charged element, but I think you've hit on a broader point here. Investigating "what is" needs to involve to at least some extent a true curiosity and an adaptable plan. Modern science is so formalized that I find these ingredients to take way too much of a back seat - at least in what I've observed of modern biology. I swear more often than not the way proposed experiments are framed reeks of a "what ought to be" perspective. Not because it's wishful thinking or an externally incentivized conclusion, but just because questions are often both incremental and kinda binary. So it is reasonably likely that what they've proposed to check will turn out about how they expected, and if it doesn't it may not be publishable at all. By crafting the proposal in a particular (fairly common) style, they've inadvertently turned it into "what ought to be". By contrast, I loved talking to my really old professors because there were some awesome ones that you could tell spent a decent amount of time in their day just absolutely fucking around. Should that be the universal model of science? No, but I do believe you need those types, and I've struggled to find much of a modern equivalent. The tight job market doesn't help. Of course with fewer low hanging fruit over time as well as greater experimental costs, it is indeed more difficult to effectively spitball now. And sure there are fewer random novel observations that would be worth a fun off the cuff paper for others to follow-up on. But I still can't shake the feeling that the scientific system has partially self-imposed the eradication of this style of curiosity, in a misguided attempt to formalize science. From my perspective, there seems to be a massive underlying assumption throughout the system that scientific outputs should stand as nearly atomic units, with little chance for "unscientific" pieces of work to contribute to an eventually formalized scientific result. That clashes awfully with the ever increasing scale of open questions, and it doesn't play well with the individualistic academic ego stroking credit model either.