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by jerf 2701 days ago
When getting money from the grant system, the grant providers are not neutral parties objectively deciding what the best science to do is, since there is no such thing as an objective, neutral party. The grant authors learn to tell the grant writers what they want to hear.

This is part of why we get such a stream of stories about amazing new breakthroughs in solar, battery capacity, terrorism reduction, etc. that never seem to come to fruition. A lot of times they were never for that purpose anyhow, really; it was just a paragraph tacked on to get the grant.