Now imagine that there might be more depth to social sciences as well? Do you think we have it all figured out? Is Economics solved as well?

I don't follow. Are there not sciences that primarily study a type of human relationship? Economics, for instance, which covers our financial relationships with each other.

Having mingled and worked at length with PhD-level folks in both STEM and the social sciences, rest assured: social scientists are some of the smartest researchers out there, almost to a frightening degree. So your dismissal is genuinely chuckle-inducing to me.

> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research.

Ah yes, the post-modernist rebuttal. There is no objective reality, so let's not have any standards at all.

This isn't new, and isn't responsive. We've never had a normative standard, yet we pick and choose projects all the time. One can still tell the difference between someone asking a repetitive question and a novel question. I can also tell "good research" thanks to years and years of advanced training, which I have used here to tell you that most of this stuff you like is bad.

> Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenience for utility.

If you can't do the experiment, you don't deserve scientific funding. Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_in_China

Data and research are actually useful when you're working on getting people out of poverty. It seems like you're hung up on some American culture war shit but this is a common sense observation.

(Parenthetically, the reason poor areas of China are poor is that they were always poor. They didn't have 2-car garages and color TV and then Mao made them into peasants. They were always peasants. This is obvious. Mao made a lot of mistakes because he believed in ideology and rhetoric over reality and measurable fact. That's the lesson to learn.)

The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.

Not only have I worked as a science funder for the past 15 years as the founder of Experiment.com and with countless partner foundations and grant programs, having personally funded and peer reviewed thousands and thousands of projects, I've also sat as a member of countless NBER meta science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors where everyone's main pressure is earnestly trying to improve the efficiency and returns of science funding. Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.

The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from. You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from. That's not any of this works. The funding of a random jellyfish protein that eventually turns into the discovery of GFP only ten years later is not the kind of thing you can try and predict ahead of time or concoct on paper.

If you don't understand how basic research and impact works, then yeah you shouldn't be allowed to have hot takes about the system that millions of scientists rely on. You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.

My bad, on mobile, I think your stance deserves a more thoughtful critique.

Source: was in academia for a bit post 2010 and pre-2024, there was some seriously weird unscientific stuff being peddled.

I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research, and so I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.

Is this a field you've been following closely, or am I listening to the equivalent of a person with no interest in quantum mechanics complaining that nothing new has happened in quantum mechanics?

> I am against bad research.

Most people are against bad research, but not everyone agrees with you on what bad means. Maybe the research you label "bad", I label "good". Your opinion has just as much weight as mine. So where does that leave us on the question of who gets research funding? Or did you have a different definition of "bad" in mind that doesn't consult your biases?

> One's desire to do research into irrelevant questions

Who decides what's a relevent question? The president? Political parties? B/Trillionaires? Big Tech / Oil / Pharma ? You?

> Well, I proposed one way (which you completely ignored, in order to accuse me of being biased): just fund stuff at random.

Sorry I ignored it, but you only included it as a footnote to your reply, so I wasn't sure you were actually serious. You gave two ideas really: fund stuff at random and fund continuations at random but holding a minimum objective bar. I'll take them in turn:

> just set some minimum objective bar for competency (degrees, institution, basic review for research viability, etc.) then fund whomever passes the bar at random.

This is more or less how the system operates now. You get a PhD, you go to a good institution, get some results, publish some papers, submit a proposal, and then it's a dice roll from there whether it gets funded or not. You said you had a career in research so you know this. How do you do "basic review for research viability" to your liking that's different from what's done now? Because now it's done by experts in their respective fields. You seem to think that means "bias is built into the system", yes? How do you evaluate basic research viability without consulting people specifically for their biases to determine that viability?

But funding continuations at random means that good research and bad research, whatever that means, would have a random chance of just not continuing. How does a country build long time-horizon research programs if they can just be defunded at the roll of the dice despite good results? How does that improve the system if good research can just randomly die and bad research can continue randomly as a matter of policy?

> just fund stuff at random.

Doesn't prevent bad research from being funded, as you admit. So to me, since both of your ideas aren't really designed to eliminate bad research but do work to eliminate biases, it seems like you're less concerned with not funding bad research, and more concerned with how biased you perceive the funding process to be.

> you've stumbled upon a legitimate class of argument: how does anyone separate their personal bias from objective evaluation of science?

That's my whole point, you can't. The system we've built is a compromise because so many people have an opinion on what should / should not be funded. You and I are biased and will never agree, so we leave it up to experts who are biased and will also never agree, but at least they know what they're talking about. So at the end of the day some things we both don't like get funded from a very small pot. Maybe a dice roll improves the whole process, but given the system has been wildly successful in producing technological breakthroughs despite inefficiencies and biases and disagreements, we shouldn't just go throwing wrenches in it just because it's biased.