Research Funding and Quality of Research Output

Helen Dale:

"Repeat after me: the bodies funding research have no bearing on quality of research output. Trust me on this. The Soviet Union & Nazi Germany kicked our arses in rocketry for years and they were, well, Commies & Fascists.

‘Who funds you’ is the most illiterate question to ask someone from a think-tank, because it assumes that only government can do good research. Well, yes, government often does good research. But those same Commies and Fascists who did great rocketry also did Lysenkoism and ‘German Physics’.

Meanwhile liberal democracies have done things like large-scale eugenics, sticking LSD in the water supply, introducing cane toads to pristine tropical environments, and crop-dusting densely populated regions with DDT. At the same time as curing polio and smallpox.

Evaluate scholarship on the merits, not the funder or the author. And if the state gets trumped by a think-tank (common in economics and law, where the really bright don’t always go into the academy) or a freshman trumps a professor (google Srinivasa Ramanujan) or vice versa, suck it up.

Because that’s what adults do.

I think I need to write a book called ‘how to adult’. Because FFS critical reasoning 101 is getting old."


The medical establishment profits from giving vaccines. Therefore they can't be trusted when they tell you to get vaccinated. Being an anti-vaxxer is being anti-capitalist!