Looks more like you're wearing an accountant or auditor hat than a scientist hat on this one.

>is there some moral principle that all scientists should disclose everything and you can't hire them for confidential work?

Yes. The search for scientific truth shouldn't be a narrative for the people who pay for it.

>I was a scientific adviser to $LAWYER, and my job was strictly to help him, his client, and only them understand things better.

And when it comes down to it, the client and their representatives (you, $LAWYER, etc) have or will have certain obligations to truth under the law; you might be muzzled but it's more of a reassignment of responsibility to somebody else.

So I guess you criticize every corporation who hires scientists to work on proprietary products? Elon Musk is such a fiend!

Look, a much better way to accomplish this is robust intellectual freedom. Rather than expecting every individual scientist to be able to say anything they want, regardless of employer, create a system where any scientist who hasn't chosen to be muzzled can state controversial ideas and expect them to be received with only intellectual criticism. You need far more than just legal protection, you also need a culture where dissenters are tolerated and not socially shunned.

You also need a culture where replication and debunking are given equal respect to finding novel results. The unfortunate fact is that if someone publishes a new result, that gets vastly less prestige than if they replicate (or fail to) an existing study, or spot statistical flaws in someone else's work.

Those are engineers, not scientists. Even at that, the whole purpose of the patent system is to publicize developments while protecting those who create it for a short time.

For my part I don't see much of one. In all cases one attempts to learn true facts about the world via careful analysis of data and experiment - the label is just for potential employers.

>So I guess you criticize every corporation who hires scientists to work on proprietary products? Elon Musk is such a fiend!

Then it's not science. If the scientific community does not participate it's maybe development. There is nothing wrong with it.

But there is something wrong if the public sectors stop doing science and get's castrated to be a thinktank for the current administration.

I don't believe the parent comment is arguing on behalf of "merchants of doubt". He or she is suggesting that it should be possible to enter into a contract with a scientist in which the scientist agrees to investigate a scientific truth without disclosing it publicly in exchange for money. Whether you have herpes is a "scientific truth" a scientist might discover, but it's your prerogative whether that fact is publicly disclosed.

I was clarifying that the OP did not appear to be defending the sale of "credentialed" opinions on political issues. The intent behind the "muzzling" matters. There are situations where a contracting party has a legitimate interest in enlisting a scientist to investigate a truth while maintaining confidentiality. Harper's suppression of scientific evidence was not one of these, but my comment addressed the notion that there are no such circumstances.

It's like the equivalent if the gvnt (instead of oil companies) studying climate change, and then hiding the results. except that the government is SUPPOSED to be morally engaged beholden to the best interests of society at large.

I think the argument is that released scientific knowledge is generally in the public's interest, and since the research is in fact funded by the public, government scientists should be allowed to release whatever they want. The government is a public institution, so some feel that "confidential government research" should be restricted to very limited things.

That said, I do agree that it is all a bit overblown.

I use this term to contrast to, e.g., university researchers receiving an NSF (or Canadian equivalent) grant and (in name, at least) given political independence.

No wonder you find Harper's policies unobjectionable.

You were employed by a private party. The muzzled scientists were employed by the citizens of Canada.

To make your example comparable, you would have been employed by an attorney on behalf of the attorney's client, and then the information you found would have been withheld from the client who was paying for it. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but it would be a breach of ethics on the part of the attorney to do so. Just as, in this case, it was a breach of ethics for the Canadian government to force scientists to withhold information from the people of Canada.

I don't see any way to draw a strong distinction between what I did during my physics days and what I do today. Different math, sure - PDEs vs statistics. But then again the math changes when you go from quantum physics to statistical mechanics also.