[medymed]

I agree, SJW is a pretty useless term. You're right. And I don't know much about string theory funding. I can only postulate. Regarding short term vision, medical research funding has consequences on huge outlays of public resources outside of the short-term vision of research funding you mentioned. Maybe string theory has very close parallels, but for example when it was recommended everyone get interval colonoscopies at certain ages, hundred of millions of dollars of government money suddenly shifted to this purpose yearly for just one procedure (in this case a heavily vetted evidence backed decision). When, in contrast, attention is cast on politically popular issues with questionable research methods and publish-bait articles, it siphons funding away from less hot-topic issues that stagnate or die (for example, the defunding of even the best state psychiatric programs, which are popularly are associated with horror movies and don't get much too love by activists). The impact is immediate and severe outside of the world of researchers, and enormously politicized throughout the nation/media. I'd love to hear the string theory side of this though!

[Intermernet]

This has a lot to do with PR and how it relates to research and development funding. The root problem is that, with regards to funding (as far as I can tell), a headline in a popular newspaper or popular-science magazine is worth orders of magnitude more than a peer-reviewed paper in a journal. This will be a problem for all of the sciences in the near future, as long as there are differing tracks of research being explored.

The scientific method dictates that something should be ideally explored until it's dis-proven. Unfortunately, the realities of limited R&D funding dictate that only the most popular, or public, research tracks tend to attract the funding. This has a carry-on effect in that new students in these fields are forced to go into the most popular fields of study, lest they not get funding.

WRT string theory, have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics . I'm not sure I 100% agree with Lee Smolin on this (he has a definite axe to grind), but the points he raises are equally applicable to any field of contentious, or cutting edge research.

Solving this is difficult. Obviously education of the general populous will help, but in lieu of this, perhaps we need mandated percentages of funding to each viable research track (a solution rife with problems of it's own).

In any case, this is a hard problem to solve, and will certainly cause problems in many areas of fundamental research in the future.