Comment by nilirl
15 hours ago
Well, your deduction was unsound. And continues to be unsound. You can critique anything as long as you know you can be wrong too.
> Yes yes. What's "normative" is now "political" (for some reason), and my standard is also "political" and therefore is not relevant.
You're hand-waving. Your stance is political but not irrelevant. Your stance is philosophical (resting on chosen assumptions) and not empirically irrefutable.
Not acknowledging that is why you fail to convince.
You've made this argument about you and your ability to "catch" people. You have no argument that stands on its own construction.
Having read through this whole discussion, and as an outsider: they're approaching this from a much stronger and consistent position than you. This is most obvious given how far you've moved the goalposts along the way.
Maybe they've been more consistent but the strength of their position is not measured by my inconsistency.
Look at how much "trust me, I've got training, I know what's good, I know what's already right" is in their argument.
What is their actual point? That we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?
Good research is field dependent; some fields are younger than others, some fields have an easier time controlling experiments than others.
I'm saying what matters is what people care about. My point about stances being political is because what gets funded is what people care about, not what can guarantee the highest confidence using research design.
My point is that their stance is political too, because it says 'I don't care about this like how they care about this, so I think it should get cut'.
Their position is not some innocent defense of empiricism, it's a political stance that says "these questions don't matter, I already know how the world works."
> That we can say across the board that good research must have easy-to-control experimentation and guarantee novelty?
That is not my point, but it is a true statement, yes [1]. Science without controls is not science. Science without novelty is called an undergraduate lab exercise.
> Good research is field dependent
Controls and novelty and rigor are not field-dependent. If you want that, go do English Literature or Philosophy or something. They love to entertain unresolvable debates about post-modernism.
[1] Modulo the "easy" part. I feel like you put this in as some kind of emergency exit slide from the debate, so I'll just say up front that good science doesn't have to have "easy" controls. It must have controls.
1 reply →
What is your point man? Can you state simply? Is it that cutting funding for "science" is bad, without exception?
Beyond doing the best research you can do, given the conditions, there is no apolitical norm for what makes a researcher legitimate or illegitimate.
There is no bad cutting or good cutting, there's only politics. Meaning, an argument for what make some problems more important or worthwhile is not an apolitical argument, it's an argument of how other people should live.
As in, you don't get to conclude that you're obviously right and they're obviously wrong.
So you elect leaders to make those "political" decisions. I don't see the problem here. I think no politician or leader would say that they are "obviously" right, but they don't have to be. That is what a leader is supposed to do. If they only did the absolute "right" think, they will do nothing.
And about the "good/bad cutting", I think it only mean in relative terms, because funds are not infinite...