{"id":99838,"date":"2026-03-22T01:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T05:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=99838"},"modified":"2026-03-23T10:26:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T14:26:00","slug":"qotd-the-treason-of-the-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/03\/22\/qotd-the-treason-of-the-scientists\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The treason of the scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><strong>Luca Barbato<\/strong> @lu_zero_<br \/>\nResearch is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.<\/p>\n<p><em>And that&#8217;s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve &#8220;institutions&#8221; the correct first step to amend course.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One of those people is me.<\/p>\n<p>I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the &#8220;scientific&#8221; literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.<\/p>\n<p>I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.<\/p>\n<p>But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political &#8220;science&#8221;, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.<\/p>\n<p>And the worst of it wasn&#8217;t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn&#8217;t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it&#8217;s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists. <\/p>\n<p>Because the lesson needs to be learned. It&#8217;s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price &mdash; that if you don&#8217;t call out politicization when it&#8217;s happening, you don&#8217;t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.<\/p>\n<p>ESR, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/esrtweet\/status\/2002732316959936816\" target=\"_blank\">The social media site formerly known as <em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, 2025-12-21.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Update, 23 March<\/strong>: Welcome, <em>Instapundit<\/em> readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my <em>Substack<\/em> \u2013 <a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@nicholasrusson\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/substack.com\/@nicholasrusson<\/a> that you can subscribe to if you&#8217;d like to be informed of new posts in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Luca Barbato @lu_zero_ Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with. And that&#8217;s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve &#8220;institutions&#8221; the correct first step to amend course. One of those people is me. I can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41,16],"tags":[1235,194,39,290],"class_list":["post-99838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-science","tag-esr","tag-fraud","tag-junkscience","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-pYi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99838"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101491,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99838\/revisions\/101491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}