Re: Great example.....
They decide to fund the spacecraft first, then researchers have to apply for funding by producing a model that is testable using the pre-decided experimental setup. They don't get funded unless their hypothesis is consistent with the instruments built onto the spacecraft.This is not a good way to do science.
That's post-normal science for you, or policy driven science. These are the expected results, produce them. Never mind any null hypotheses, those can go unfunded, ignored, or denied later. So pretty much how climatologists science. Went from a quiet academic backwater where people weighed wood to that wood becoming highly precise thermometers capable of justifying trillions of dollars in spending. Scientists would have to be very brave to bite the hands that are feeding it so well.
I think the solution should be to try and achieve more neutrality between the bagmen and science, but of course that's a huge political challenge to overcome vested interests, whether those are commercial or academic. As an example, one of my favorite experiments is OCCO-2. A simple orbiting spectrometer tuned to look for CO2 (and oxygen). So one budget figure for DBO, another for analysing and interpreting the data.. or ideally just publish the data, especially if funding was public. In theory, peer-review gates some interpretations and provides QC, in practice, it can (and does) act as a biased gatekeeping function.
TL;DR though, post-October 31st, the UK would be able to decide funding priorities.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
