Some academics are expressing concern that a new Pentagon initiative to fund social science research that will be helpful for our military could be corrupted by the ideological presuppositions of the military.
The Pentagon is funding academic research to better understand the attraction of terrorism and violent groups in the Middle East — among other things. But some scholars are concerned the military is only interested in funding research that reinforces its world view. We discuss the complex relationship between the Pentagon and academia.
Say it isn’t so! You mean we can’t trust all those global warming studies that were funded by government agencies, the UN and other NGOs in order to find evidence of global warming? Who would ever have guessed that the agenda of the researcher could creep into the results of the research?
OK, it’s time to just start over. What we need is not just double blind research studies; we need double blind funding of research. If no one knows what research is being funded by which agency, and if no one knows who is funding their own research, and if the people doing the research have no idea who decided which research should be funded, then the agendas of the funders, the approvers and the researchers should be eliminated from the results.
What we need is a giant game of research funding “spin the bottle”. The funders of research will just hurl money into a huge common pot of research funds, the research approvers will initiate a giant lottery system that’s so complex that even they can’t understand it (harder to cheat that way) and the researchers won’t know whom they are trying to please, so they’ll just do their best work, we hope.
Of course, we won’t be willing to actually believe anyone’s research results until someone duplicates them… and given the lottery system of funding and approval, it may be awhile before anyone duplicates anything done by anyone else. Oh well…. science demands sacrifices of us all. I’m willing to wait for the gold.
Personally, I am shocked and appalled to learn that the funders and approvers of research studies have any influence on the outcomes. It shakes my faith in science. I wonder if we should reconsider leeches in medical care….
Or, maybe the Left just wants us to think that only research studies funded by the Pentagon are tainted by their origin, but all others are golden in their investigative purity.
Sure. I believe that.
