Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding

Anyone who thinks we're not in the midst of a cultural revolution is deluding themselves.

It's one thing for corporations to follow the money in societal trends (i.e let's go woke for as long as it increases sales), but there's a monotonous tone with these DEI themes now throughout media, academia, ... and increasingly science as TFA shows.

It's really the homogeneity that hurts the natural sciences, when it can strike deep enough.

Politics just drive homogeneity across the board, and favor the softer targets.

But Feynman's certainly not alone.

I first noticed this trend in the 1970's myself.

Plain to see it was only going to get worse.

If you don't want to experiment on the same old Shinola the same old way, the mainstream's not really going to be for you.

As for the article, in kind of an anti-meta meta-analysis the only worthwhile data are the "Measures of Document Similarity" and everything else is the political stuff they are ranting about but they're not doing it in a scientifically similar way to be very comparable.

Even though the graphs are all equally pretty, in natural science you get the only data solid enough to make fair political decisions based on it.

Any science that's not "natural" enough to overcome all serious doubt (other than things like superstitious doubt[0]) would ideally have all agendas removed then become fully "naturalized" before becoming a basis for decision-making, especially political decisions.

Oh, well.

[0] "Superstitious doubt" includes an unrealistic lack of belief in cause & effect for something that's definitely going to happen, the opposite of a cargo cult which I would then term as "superstitious anticipation" which is their unrealistic belief in cause & effect for something that's definitely not going to happen.

When NIH/NSF sets funding priorities, provides information on what they think is important, etc, it is natural that scientists will submit applications more homogeneous than otherwise: Funding keeps the lab going. I wish that they'd instead create a system of block research grants to Universities, who'd then allocate funding. The whole grant process takes up too much time and makes Scientists into perpetual salesman.

Is this a funding issue, or a request for funding issue? Or a bit of both? After all, the cheques don't write up the results.