No. There are some routes that are obviously pointless in foresight, and funding them is just giving money to someone's pet project, for example: Everything Julius Rebek does.

Then, there are people who are defrauding by making claims that are for SURE easy to know are sketchy. I promise you every active researcher (grad student, postdoc) can off the top of their head tell you AT LEAST three results that they know are on shaky ground.

"There are no right answers" is perfectly valid. Saying "there are no wrong answers" is a recipe for disaster, and cronyism.

To put it bluntly: Should the DOE fund perpetual motion research? Of course not. You 100% should block dumb paths of research. We don't do that enough.

▲

FrustratedMonky 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, but was it really obvious we shouldn't pursue String Theory? It seemed promising in the beginning.

Even for Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine.

Recent discussion on pro/con of Alzheimer’s controversy. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

I'm just super wary of the 'right's tendency to throw the baby out with bath water, like JFK JR, and set the US back a few decades. Just because they don't understand science, so it must all be bad.

▲

throwawaymaths 3 days ago | parent [-]

yes of course JFK jr is brainwormed to hell but he's not setting back the US decades. many things he tears down will be rebuildable and some things he puts in are fine, actually. what is far far more dangerous is the rot in the science infrastructure. because that will take decades to unwind (if we even do), and it's not an obvious problem like the way anything in politics is. people implicitly trust science, which is the problem. people implicitly distrust at least the politics on the other side of the aisle so there's some adversarial challenging going on and the opportunity for growth and integration. science is devoid of that right now.

the FDA is all fucked up anyways and if you doubt that, look up propublicas expose on serious drug safety lapses there.

> Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine

it wasn't perpetual motion level fraud, but it was bad. you weren't there. everyone doing work in the salt mines was like why the fuck arent my experiments working but nobody really stood up to say this is bullshit, because that would be the end of your career if you were a junior researcher... much easier to half ass a result, get the publication, and move on with your life.

> String Theory, It seemed promising in the beginning

maybe it shouldn't have been. there is a heuristic for what actually makes discoveries in science. and the string theory approach is not it. people were sounding the alarm at the time, like, among others some guy named richard feynman. but nobody was listening to them evidentally.

	▲	FrustratedMonky 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		For JFK, and current regime, anti-science, Nasa cuts, etc... I think what you are espousing is the theory that sometimes you need to burn it down in order to rebuild. I really hope you are right. That is only silver lining to current times, is that maybe sometimes the current calcified structures need to be hit hard in order to re-form. I'm hoping it is that, as opposed to actually just burned down so far it never builds back. Not to go off topic, it could be like Vorlon and Shadow war in Babylon 5. You need the side of order that can become stuck, and the side of chaos that can't really build anything. And they fight back and forth. Neither is really good/bad. For research, FDA. I don't have an answer. I still think current system of scientific method, peer reviews, publishing openly to public, providing the raw data. All that, while it can have problems, I can't think of another way. Of course, humans are fallible, and for any system to work, people need to stand up to fraud and bad ideas. But that comes down to individuals doing the right thing.