Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
I don’t understand how you’d prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.
Let’s say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There’s only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?
Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you’ll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.
Are committee meetings immune to runaway political madness? Who’s on the committee? How does the committee make decisions? Can those decisions be revisited?
I’m not convinced that today’s state of science is any different than in eras past, tracing all the way back to kings and wealthy patrons throwing their political and economic might behind their preferred scientific endeavors.
I don’t understand how you’d prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.
Let’s say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There’s only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?
Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you’ll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.
Necessary evils, such as committee meetings, vs. runaway political madness suppressing actual work.
The former is implied by organization, the latter is more prevalent than ever in the state of modern science (because money).
Are committee meetings immune to runaway political madness? Who’s on the committee? How does the committee make decisions? Can those decisions be revisited?
I’m not convinced that today’s state of science is any different than in eras past, tracing all the way back to kings and wealthy patrons throwing their political and economic might behind their preferred scientific endeavors.