You are defending a way of doing biology that plagued by various problems. It's a field where people literally believe that they can perceive more when they blind themselves.
There are huge issues in the theoretically underpinning of that approach because the people in the system are too busy writing research that doesn't replicate for top tier journals that requires expensive equipment instead of thinking more about how to approach the field.
So every field has problems, but that doesn't mean those problems are "huge".
There are huge issues in the theoretically underpinning of that approach because the people in the system are too busy writing research that doesn't replicate for top tier journals that requires expensive equipment instead of thinking more about how to approach the field.
Outside view: An entire field which is generally pretty successful at actually finding what is going on is fundamentally misguided about how they should be approaching the field, or the biologists ar...
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)