[JuniperMesos]

Why do you think this is an accurate characterization of how the Islamic Caliphates of the medieval world worked? How much of what we label "science funding" was happening anywhere at all then, why was this more important to the European Renaissance than traditional explanations like "an influx of Byzantine Greeks with ancient texts fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453"? (And how much of what we characterize as the European Renaissance involved" science" or "institutional science funding" as we understand it today?)

I think you're taking an extremely basic, high-level narrative of history - something like "During what westerners call the middle ages, European powers were backwards and the Islamic powers at the same time were flourishing and did a lot of scientific discovery" - and then immediately using your basic understanding of that narrative to argue for a policy position today, without thinking at all about any deeper historical complexity of what was happening across an entire civilizational sphere centuries before our time when the entire world was different - what would an ancient Islamic caliph have actually understood about the value of basic scientific research funding by the state, for instance.

And this bugs me mostly because it's such an unscientific worldview.

[expedition32]

I was saying intellectual curiosity. As in one morning waking up and realising everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit. That attitude became heavily discouraged in the Islamic world.

[JuniperMesos]

Is it actually consistent with intellectual curiosity to wake up one morning and realize that everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit? It seems wildly implausible that every single belief held by your ancestors was wrong, and probably some beliefs were correct and others were incorrect and it's not necessarily trivial to distinguish which ones were which; or even to know from many generations removed which beliefs your ancestors actually held.