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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.
The people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research
The people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research
The research that other experts have published
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.
The entire enterprise is political. You have to claim you're an authority first by creating an argument and then defending that claim. That is politics.
The time it takes to learn about a subject costs a fair amount of money. The people with money, by and large, aren't experts. They need to be convinced by the claimant that they deserve the money because they are experts and able to do something valuable with that money. This is politics.
This idealized views of science knowledge creation is a thin investigation into the social and political aspects of science. It makes no room for starts, transitions, different levels of expertise, or old experts, often revered in the field, defending their positions because of their political status in the field.
Addressing these issues at depth take time and is exhausting when dealing with the self assured idealist.
So, you keep saying money this, money that, and I 100% agree that money makes everything political.
Science is not inherently political until you bring money into it, which is why well funded, independent and public research institutions are such a benefit. And why threatening the operating capital of those researchers like we have here is such an insult. They don't care about these squabbles.
Its political not because of money but because of people.
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.
There are well documented processes and methods for removing biases from research, it's basically 3/4 of the work.
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.