People in the notes are all like "yes sometimes The Government or The Lobbyists remove funding from sciences that might reveal things that they do not want known" and yes yes covid and climate change and vaccine denialism and racism and all that, but it's not just the obvious stuff. When I was working in labs, metagenomics was the next big thing, so EVERYTHING was metagenomics. If you worked in environmental or medical microbio, there was an 80% chance that you were taking some mud or poop or something and doing metagenomics on it whether or not it was the best way to analyse what you wanted to analyse, and bam, that was a paper, possibly two, it kept the lights on. And if 100 labs run 100 experiments where they do metagenomics for random things to do with the human body, then at a 95% confidence interval, 5 of them will find a completely nonexistent correlation for any random thing you can think of if they happen to check their data for it, and they need to keep the lights on and the PhD student who's running the experiment needs a paper so even though that wasn't what they were looking for, bam -- everyone's seeing that men and women have different microbiomes in their large intestine! People with autism nave different microbiomes, people with MS have different microbiomes, kids who are vaccinated have different microbiomes so watch out! And there's not enough papers to do a review paper for six or seven years, and when that review paper is done only other scientists will read it, because Everyone Knows that vaccines alter your microbiome so stay away from them, and Everyone Knows that men and women are so so different because why else would their large intestines be so different? Look at this paper!
And the psych guys are doing MRIs because that's the Next Big Thing, and any bias culturally relevant enough will get positive papers for it because the 100 labs will check their 100 papers and the 95 that show no difference at 95% confidence are of course never published because there's nothing to say. And the medicine guys are running ten thousand seaweed extract experiments to kill cancer cells, and their confidence intervals do tend to be better, but there is no defense against an industry where the only way to survive is to publish and the only way to get funding is to look into something that the grant committee wants you to find something interesting about, and you'd better find that something interesting even if you kind of have to publish your study before repeating it to check for that confidence interval -- someone else will repeat it, or you will once the paper's out, but you've got to get the paper out. And that paper had better be useful for other scientists to reference, even if you have to change the tone and the implications and choose which results are worth referencing, because getting more references is how you keep your job and how you convince the next grant committee.
Big Bad Government Lies About Covid is a problem, but it's not the problem. A perfect government with a massive science budget does not solve the problem. The system of research is inherently political because it is inherently competitive and because it deals with numbers and statistics that are not intuitive to humans.
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