Comment by coldpie
19 hours ago
> they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests
You seem to be pushing an agenda, not asking questions in good faith.
19 hours ago
> they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests
You seem to be pushing an agenda, not asking questions in good faith.
My agenda is that I think it's completely rationale to ask about the merits of publicly funded research and debate that topic. You may not like that question or my responses, but that is my assertion here.
> completely rational to ask about the merits of publicly funded research
Sure, but asking asking non-experts on some web forum to make guesses at the answers, and insulting the people whose job it is to do this work based on your assumptions of how it works, is a bad way to go about answering that question.
I was rooting against you in this exchange until you said this , because I took your initial plea for authority to be a cop out from joshmcginnis's argument, because I'm a human and have biases and sometimes put the quality of "earnestness" behind my beliefs above others' (i.e., whether I agree with them or not, my counterpart is equally sincere in what they believe in as me). That disposition is unwise and I think my realization of this underpins what I found striking about the comment that you just made.
In a way, I think this is what joshmcginnis is guilty of here...but I want to believe that he's aware that he's being provocative, but being provocative is the entire point. Your initial response of deference and the overall response that his comments are receiving from others are decent representations of how the mere questioning of certain institutions (online, pseudonymously, through relatively obscure channels) can be seen as problematic.
It is something like social science as performance art. Or the other way around?
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