alt Hacker NewsWhen a political party controls the science, you end up with say, Trump pushing one set of results, and Biden pushing another. It then becomes either pick the science that agrees with your politics, or throw up your hands in frustration. The average reader probably won't be able to dig into the fundamentals of the research and pull out the salient results, nor are they guaranteed it isn't policy pushed through overstated claims. It really undermines good science. It also falls back on the researchers who push science based on politics as well, so it isn't just the politicians.
That’s all true but it’s orthogonal to what i think you are responding to IMO.
I don’t think that studies are bunk because of corporate money, I think they are bunk because of how many studies I read. I am not a very fun person so when I see news reports about studies, I try to look them up. I find it more peaceful than memes or celebrity events. Think “coffee is good/bad for you again” style studies we read about daily.
These studies always suck. Ok, maybe 90% if I’m not being hyperbolic. It’s small sample sizes sure, but it’s also faulty logic, unsupported claims from evidence, lack of looking for alternatives, lack of ruling out confounding factors. And don’t get me started on soft-science an arts theses, I don’t have time.
I know that science moves forward mostly in millimeters, and I would agree that we have more and better scientific knowledge now than we have had in the past. But it certainly isn’t for the amount of publish-or-perish, p-hacking, storytelling, or outright fabrication.