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.
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.