this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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In our recently submitted grants we had to change “traumatic brain injury” to “concussive brain injury” and “male and female mice” to “male and non-male mice” because traumatic and female are now verboten words that can get our grants killed. It’s insanity.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 days ago (11 children)

I understand that, my point was in an ideal world expert panels and not politicians would get the final say in policy-setting and funding decisions. My main example is the clusterfuck the NIH and health department has become under the lunatic in charge.

I understand that this stuff is inherently political, I had to pivot on the narrative of my own master's thesis because of the "interesting" results we generated

[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (10 children)

But

  • Who decides who is the experts?
  • Who gets the opportunity to become an expert?
  • What are the experts taught at school?
  • Who picks the experts?

All this is political.

What you’re describing is technocracy. And it has major limitations.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (6 children)

Who decides who is the experts?

The people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research

Who gets the opportunity to become an expert?

The people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research

What are the experts taught at school?

The research that other experts have published

Who picks the experts?

You just rephrased your first one here, so the answer is still "the people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research" ie peer review.

If you were actually trying to ask, who gets to become a PAID expert, the answer to that question is the people with money.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What if bias start to grow within academic institutions?

What if the public funding to those institutions influences which departments get more/less funding?

I actually am asking genuinely because I would be happy to know we can improve on what we’ve got.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

There are well documented processes and methods for removing biases from research, it's basically 3/4 of the work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

I have faith it can be controlled within the project itself, I think politics has greater influence in the selection of what gets studied in the first place.

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