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People should be free to choose what is best for themselves as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same. I created this blog to discuss issues I have with big government, liberal media,and to talk about my support for capitalism and the Iraq War.
8 comments:
Wow they found a correlation, better publish a study claiming causation fast before our grant gets reviewed.
I was about to say that this is one of the problems with state-sponsored research until I realized that of course privately-sponsored research would be much much worse.
Right publicaly funded research is so much less biased than privately funded research.
PS: that makes no sense.
I'm referring to the GreenPeace sudy into the effects of Global Warming and the Marlboro's study into the health effects of smoking.
There are extreme examples on both sides.
Of course, but I'm more concerned about the typical example than the extreme example. It seems to me like the most common source of private science funding would have to be sorporations, just because that's where the money is, and that corporations wouldn't fund science into things it didn't have a stake in. That seems to me like it would have much more of an effect than anything I can think of for publicly funded studies.
Publicly funded studies may get screwed up by the experimetner's personal biases, but private science would face the same problem, as well as issues of being funded by people with a stake in the outcome.
Burreaucrats charged with handing out money will be biased in the same way coroporations are. Experimenters are very aware of this and write grants in speficic ways to take advantage of those bias. For example, fMRI is realy exciting so much federal funding has gone to it much to the detriment of other kinds of psychology experimentation.
I agree that scientists on public money have to go out of their way to adress topics of interest - that's why every study looking at face processing has to have a paragreaph about autism in the proposal - but I'm not sure that that affects the results of the studies. Marlboro clearly has a stake in the results of a study into the health effects of smoking; but while the government may want to look good by allocating a certain amount of money to autism research, I don't think they care whether it ends up being caused by a problem in the fusiform or in the amygdala or in prefrontal cortex or whatever.
My response is quite lengthy so i took the liberty of moving it here.
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