Not to mention, the scientific method is itself a culmination of a type of epistemic nihilism. I'm not sure why you'd abandon it at the funding level—in this context, having epistemic values is just called "bias".

Certainly, I'd hope the phrase "We can't ever know who or what will be successful" is a trivially true phrase for a trained scientist. If not, they better read some damn Hume and justify their semantics.