The vast majority of science research doesn't affect public policy. It's toward some goal, like making a process work better. Those scientists still need to be honest, but nobody is throwing big money at them to sway their agenda. Then sometimes, suddenly, huge money depends on a question of science.

I assume concussion research was like this for a long time: they were just trying to find the best way to heal brains after damage, and it was fine to take money from whomever would fund it. Then suddenly there's a question relevant to policy: do football players suffer a lot of permanent brain damage?

In fact it's crazy that such research would be funded by an organization that would be destroyed if the answer turned out a certain way. One should expect no better than with cigarette companies funding lung cancer research.

When an organization "funds" research that comes to a conclusion said organization knows to be false, that is fraud, outright. We should not accept fraud as "par for the course" or "we should expect no better." Actively attempting to defraud customers, employees, or government should be a crime.

That doesn't seem like a very well thought out way of defending a logical endeavor like scientific research. I don't know how you plan to learn what an "organization knows", but lets pretend that is economically feasible - what do you think the logical move is for these bad actors? Well there would be a pretty strong incentive to never "know" anything, so that wouldn't be very good. As it is now, if the funded research is bad then it won't survive for long, and neither will those with their names on the papers. Also, fraud is already a crime - but again I don't know how you plan on demonstrating the "attempting" part.

"if the funded research is bad then it won't survive for long" that is not necessarily true.

Ok, I can be more explicit:

If the funded research is bad -- and it is an area of interest (political, social, industrial, etc) -- then it won't survive for long. So you are correct, if Philip Morris funded bad research relating to the mating habits of fruit flies in a zero gravity environment - it is unlikely to be challenged in a timely manner... but as nobody cares, it doesn't matter.

I'd also argue that it is possible for cultural bias and injected money to suppress truth over longer time scales - generations.

How could they know something to be false, when their own scientists said it was true?

They should have known it was bullshit (in Frankfurt's technical sense [0]), though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit: "As such, bullshit can be neither true nor false; hence, the bullshitter is someone whose principal aim—when uttering or publishing bullshit—is to impress the listener and the reader with words that communicate an impression that something is being or has been done, words that are neither true nor false, and so obscure the facts of the matter being discussed"

Maybe when the stakes go up, it's harder to call something out as bullshit. One $10M study saying the NFL is safe for mental health will outweigh 100 $10k studies too scared to state the opposite.

tbh, the NFL was smart to lump so much money as a promise to the NIH, pitting all of the institutes against one lab at BU.

>there is hardly any authentic science left

I'm sorry, but what? You list a half dozen of the hottest-button research areas, but those represent (with the exception of pharma) probably less than 2-3% of non-proprietary research. The rest of the iceberg is just normal scientists working on hard problems that aren't going to make anyone rich, and scraping by on whatever money they can find. And keeping the 'science=corrupt' idea out there doesn't make it any easier.

Hot button issues, like toxicity, health care, education, evolution, weight loss, endangered species, sleep, habitat, oral hygiene, etc. Just about anything related to either people, land, products, processes, faith, or stuff has someone who would like to influence the results.

Even if it's simply do the experiment 100 times until you get the result you want. Or just quietly pull the plug when it's not going the way you hope. There are many ways to manipulate even honest research done in good faith.

If you do the experiment until you get the result you want you are never doing it in good faith.

This assumes only one group gets funded. Bad actor A vs 100 grad students or whatever.

Alternatively, same experiment with slightly different formula.

Would you like me to list more? The point isn't hot button topics, like gun control research, GMOs, transportation, etc, the point is that it's a feedback loop. The system is set up so that the rich get richer. The top 20 research institutions by NIH grant funding (representing 0.7% of receiving inst.) haven't changed in decades, combined receiving 20%+ of total grants [1], meanwhile the bottom is dropping out.

The reason why the NFL (or gun lobby, or energy lobby, or whatever button topic you want) go to those particular universities or researchers is because of their publishing clout, making it more likely for their findings to be accepted, making it more likely that they'll receive more grants.

[1] http://www.genengnews.com/insight-and-intelligence/the-top-5...

[2] http://grantome.com/blog/rich-getting-richer

In their defense, they did note "publish or perish" as a "system of perverse incentives", which presumably affects a far broader swath of science than the few politicized topics they mentioned.

Senior scientists spend a lot of their day chasing grant funding and you better believe they tailor their proposals and research to the goals of the organization that is funding the grant.

I'm curious when the golden age of authentic science ever was. Phrenology, Darwin, Galileo, Lysenkoism, Astrology, etc.

Research is always biased by whoever pays for it. Even self-funded research is biased.

> intellectual inequality

I have no idea what that is or how it applies here.

If you can think of a better way to fund science, let's hear it. There's no funding pathway that is clear of humans, and it is humans who exercise their preferences in funding paths.

BTW we just detected gravity waves, which opens up the first new way of perceiving the universe since Galileo. And we can't really explain about 95% of the known mass-energy of the universe. Oh, and we just figured out a way to custom-edit genomes.

Science is doing just fine right now.

Macroecnomics is a public policy discipline. It's inherently political. And I'd say there's plenty of macro critical of the present ... regime, but that's not the sort of people who become, say, Fed governors.

If anything has been political, it's been the anti tobacco lobby. Seen these "truth.com" or "truth.org" ads? Full-metal propaganda. Quite creepy, really. All the tobacco companies did was curry doubt.