Emil O W Kirkegaard

I object to the idea of "right-wing" and "left-wing" research. By definition data gathering should be a neutral pursuit.

It's done by monkeys, monkeys have motivations. It's mostly OK if the process is highly resistant to the bias from monkey behavior, including QRPs. Unfortunately, so far much science hasn't been that resistant.

Well....technically apes.... But if I'm counting bees in a field year after year, that is data gathering. That is research. That is apolitical. How you interpret the data to make policy decisions is something else.

Politics influences which questions to investigate, interpretation of data, etc. Unavoidable so the process has to be robust against political imbalance because scientists are heavily leftist. There's other biases too eg preference for positive results. By itself apolitical.

I agree POV is a problem in the sciences. But scientists can/should be vigilant in keeping data gathering as clean and bias-free as possible and publish the data in completeness so it can be used by others to ask different questions. My "leftness" doesn't affect the mass spec.

Most data is locked away behind IRBs who have the same polit bias. Data must be open access. But inclusion decisions of variables is also affected by politics. Lots of studies collect social data, self reported discrimination etc, but few datasets have even rudimentary IQ tests.