I’ve had a thought recently about the ancient Greeks. You’re probably wondering why this isn’t a digression. Bear with me.
OK, in many ways they invented much of modern medicine and gave us the Hippocratic oath. “First do no harm.”
Around the same time they introduced the scientific method. This is one of the greatest cornerstones of Western Civilization. It’s why the western nations “won” (at least until the progressives, and other leftist strains sapped the will to live and succeed of the West and they started to eat out their own innards).
What they did lack was an equivalent to the Hippocratic oath. Thus we get scientists willing to lie and falsify data to suit outside agendas. On top of this the scientific community will not even uniformly condemn this.
We need an Aristotlean oath. “First I will not lie.” The world of science would be a lot better off for the existence of such a thing. This is not to say scientists could not speculate, but they damned well should be clear about what they actually know and don’t know. That boundary should be explicit and they should be not causing hysteria based on half baked theories unsupported by facts.
I would say that most university researchers are addicted to government grant money. Their ability to achieve tenure is, to a large extent, determined by their ability to attract grant money. Universities like grant money. The problem arrives when the grant issuers have a political agenda which is advanced by certain results, and harmed by other results, and they focus their money on people who tell them what they want to hear.
We saw this kind of thing in Global Warming, where the existence of Global Warming justified lucrative scams like carbon credit trading, gave more power to the EPA, and more power to legislators who could convince the EPA to back off from constituents who paid enough campaign money.
By a Darwinian process, the scientists who were left, were the ones who were good at giving the grant issuers the results they wanted to see.