Agenda-drive science is not a problem when the agenda driving science is a scientific agenda... Agenda-driven science is a problem, however, when the agenda driving science is not a scientific agenda, but a social, political, and cultural agenda.
The most momentous problem of agenda-driven science, as I see it, is that agenda-driven science is a half truth, and the other half of a half truth is a half lie – a lie of omission rather than commission. Agenda-driven science can be rigorous, it can be – as we often say – the best science of its day, and yet by exclusively pursuing a particular line of research and passing over other lines of research in silence, this rigor and scientific excellence is brought to bear only on half truths, which leaves the society that produces agenda-driven science awash in half lies.
Moreover, agenda-driven science, by allowing much of human knowledge to remain in non-scientific forms, condemns all that lies outside the charmed circle defined by the agenda to the status of “anecdotal ‘evidence,” and we all know today that “anecdotal evidence” has become the scientific equivalent of an insult, intended to deprive the anecdotal of any legitimacy. In a society in which all legitimate knowledge is scientific knowledge, and scientific knowledge is the result of agenda-driven science, people can experience things every day and know them to be true, even while these things remain merely anecdotal because they are excluded from the agenda of agenda-driven science.
http://geopolicraticus.tumblr.com/post/171197214777/the-problem-of-agenda-driven-science
Depends what's on the list. Specifically, as the article points out, lists written by politicians rather than by scientists.
ReplyDeleteMycll d.D There's no harm in having a list, even a highly selective list. In the early stages of the development of an idea, especially, it is necessary to have a sympathetic circle of like-minded individuals who can constructively criticize that idea. This is tribalism in the realm of the intellect. The problem is when there is only one list.
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