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weker01@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Ephera@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Capital has certain interests. If your research doesn’t produce the results that capital is looking for, you’re unlikely to get more funding. As such, it leaves a bias on what we have research for, which can already skew our perception of reality, and sometimes researchers will even fake their results or select certain data to reach a conclusion that’s in the interest of the capital.

  There are mechanisms in place to try to prevent that, namely peer reviews and reproduction of previous studies, so we’ll hopefully get to the truth eventually, but the bias still has a big impact.

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  • WarlockLawyer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Plus publish or perish is real thing

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  • weker01@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes this all presupposes that this bias is a bad thing. Not saying that it isn’t mind you

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    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I mean I used an example in another thread but take this.

      Imagine there is a new disease starts affecting people. We don’t know if it is physical or mental.

      The two biggest funders in medicine are government and insurance companies, both of them would benefit from this illness being mental, because due to laws and regulations they have to spend less money on mental illness patients. So we have a mountain of research funded trying to portray the disease as psychological. And no research attempting to find biological causes.

      This legitimately happened to an illness called ME, only 40 years later through patient crowdfunding and tens of thousands of deaths later was enough research funded to disprove that it is psychological and show it is neuroimmune.

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