Comment by timr

> The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.

Well golly. Mind numbing!

> Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.

What "false beliefs" are those?

> The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from.

You literally just bragged that you were a member of countless NBER meta-science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors. Tell me more about how the "universal lesson" is that you don't pick and choose. We do it all the time.

You just don't like my opinion, but you can't argue on the merits, so you resort to this stuff.

> You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from.

Great. I'm not doing that.

This isn't hard: there's such a thing as derivative, bad science that is unlikely to lead to novel results. It's fair to critique research on those grounds. "Social determinants of health" is a perfect example of this kind of science. I don't even disagree with the conclusions. I just think the science is terrible and shouldn't be funded. It's not just this area: observational nutrition research is generally abysmal science, and shouldn't be funded, yet is common. There's a replication crisis across the sciences, with certain fields being overrepresented.

This is not an imaginary problem.

Arguing that we don't filter science for quality, is of course, dumb and wrong. We do it all the time. It's just that some fashionable fields are able to bypass this test, because some folks substitute politics and indignance for logic.

> You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.

You know, for a person who wants desperately to appeal to scientific authority, you resort to personal insults a lot. You'd think, if you were truly on the winning intellectual side of this, you could deal with the actual argument.