I think you grossly underestimate how hungry scientists are to prove each other wrong. This is part of how you build status to begin with. Yes, there are collaborative relationships, but there are also a great many adversarial relationships. There is no top-down hierarchy, so silencing dissent in this manner is unavailable.
I do think some degree of self-censorship occurs, absolutely. Are there biases, sure. But I find the claim that any given person is so influential in epidemiology that there is a conspiracy of silence lasting quite this long rather absurd.
Are you aware of any meaningful contributions they have made to overall "progress", aka advancing the general capabilities of humanity?
Not sure if this meets the bill, but off the top of my head I thought of the HIV sequence database which has been around since 1988.
According to this 2009 paper, seahorses aren't actually an exception, and the males are indeed the more choosy one, at least in this one experiment. (They're an "exception" to Bateman's principle in the sense they have the smaller gamete, but this is explained away by their greater parental investment.)
In general, yes, parental investment can "outweigh" gamete size in some situations, and typically this ends up happening in cases where investment in offspring isn't as strongly physiologically sex-linked as it is in most mammals which allows different strategies to evolve more readily.
For instance, in birds, the egg is quite large, but because incubation is quite time consuming (as is feeding) and this can be shared between parents, you end up with more bi-parental care, as a male can increase his reproductive success by staying and incubating. Because there are many species of bird with bi-parental care, this opened up the pathway for evolution of the jacana, where the male does all the parental care, and the male is rate limited by how many eggs he can incubate and is more choosy.
In mammals, since most of the energetic investment is in gestation and lactation, both of which only females can do, and you end up with bi-parental care being more rare than in birds. One notable exception being humans, which have an exceptionally long childhood that extends long after weaning.
Insects in general and fruit flies in particular were a particularly bad species to detect Bateman's principle in, because they're r selected rather than K selected. In K selected species, genetic quality of the mate matters much more because of how few offspring there are; in species where the goal is to produce as many offspring as possible, genetic quality and therefore mate quality and ergo choosiness has a much smaller impact.
I accidentally published this draft before finishing it and was surprised to see comments on it! I've decided to leave it as is, conclusion-less, as an exercise for the reader :).
See also:
The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds Nature Human Behavior
And also relevant Curb Your Enthusiasm clip.
Firing decisions for engineers are claimed to have been based largely on code commitments.
Typo - should be commits, not commitments.
"Airconditioningitis" sounds about as epistemically sound as "fan death," which is to say, not at all.
There are indeed odd cultural beliefs about the use of fans and air conditioning in Korea, but these are urban legends.
FYI but ABC Mouse is a Scientology run company and was recently fined by the FTC for $10 million for illegal billing practices. Personally I did not like it from an educational perspective either; there are lots of other better educational websites and apps out there.
Could the spreadsheet be updated too? That still has the old location.
California does not, in fact, require that home schoolers take a standard exam and we do not, in fact, have this data.
There are two states that require testing exclusively (other states have alternative options to an exam) and those are Oregon and South Dakota. To my knowledge no one has made a concerted effort to actually use these data to answer this question in a statistically valid way. One complication is that they are using these tests to force children back into public school if they do especially poorly. Given that some portion of these children are probably performing poorly due to more innate factors and not wholly educational neglect, this artificially inflates the home schoolers' scores, because any low performing students are removed. But in theory, this can be modelled - it's just that no one has done it yet.
The reality is we simply do not have any studies that show either is clearly better. Erik Hoel has more to say on this.