Negative Space: government funding capture
- Another victim of climate change: science reporting
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The needs of religious reporting are completely different from the needs of science reporting. Treating climate change as a religion is killing science reporting. If we’re not careful, it will kill science as well.
- Back Seat Baby: Have airbags become a Rube Goldberg machine?
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The classic prescriptive mandate is the airbag. Bulky, expensive, undeniably useful, and we have no idea what far better ideas airbags crowd out of our vehicles.
- CDC warns gun owners to beware of the leopard
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More evidence that the CDC cannot be trusted doing research on firearms ownership.
- Creative Computing and BASIC Computer Games in public domain
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David Ahl, editor of Creative Computing and of various BASIC Computer Games books, has released these works into the public domain.
- Did government funding help keep Flint’s water unsafe?
- When researchers rely on government funding to keep their jobs, it should come as no surprise that they aren’t eager to publish findings that reflect badly on those government agencies that fund them.
- Does government funding hold science back?
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Abundant government funding for research probably has the effect of dividing research into crazy and conventional, with little in between for innovative.
- Future Snark
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Why does the past get the future wrong? More specifically, why do expert predictions always seem to be “hand your lives over to technocrats or we’ll all die?”
- Gain-of-bureaucracy disease
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Bureaucracies do not admit they’re wrong; scientists are always trying to prove they’re wrong. Government funding is diametrically opposed to the advancement of science.
- Government Funding Disorder
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Why would “internet gaming disorder” receive four times the research of postpartum depression? Because one promises to increase the power of government, and one just helps women.
- Left believes atheists are wasteful bullies?
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The left is touting a new study that claims to show that those without religious upbringing are more likely to sympathize with victimizers than with victims, and are more wasteful with other people’s resources.
- Let them eat solar
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The reason we don’t have an alternative to fossil fuels is that we’ve put government bureaucrats in charge of finding it.
- Of (Laboratory) Mice and Men
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If funding is your customer, the incentives are very different than if patients are your customer. Competition to meet bureaucratic definitions is inferior to competition to meet real human choices.
- Our Cybernetic Future 1954: Entropy and Anti-Entropy
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In 1954, Norbert Wiener warned us about Twitter and other forms of social media, about the breakdown of the scientific method, and about the government funding capture of scientific progress.
- Prescriptive vs. performance mandates
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Do performance mandates matter? They’re arguably better than prescriptive mandates, but they still divert progress away from real progress and toward bureaucratic definitions.
- Religious upbringing study uses odd definition of altruism
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The religious upbringing altruism study is a failure because the researchers failed to define their moral terms. You can’t study altruism and judgmentalism unless you come up with a definition of the terms. Their definition appears to have been “willing to give money to social science researchers”.
- Should the government (and the CDC) fund research into gun violence?
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Government funded research has held back progress in reducing violence and preventing suicide.
- Why does the EpiPen cost so much?
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With Mylan raising the cost of the EpiPen even as the EpiPen enters the public domain, people are complaining—but they’re complaining in ways that will raise health costs even more.
- Why government-funded cancer research is dangerously unlike the Manhattan Project
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A “Manhattan Project” for cancer is likely to delay cancer cures, and make what cancer cures we find more expensive—like the Epipen. And kill people, like the original Manhattan Project.
