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The political right is obsessed with minimizing Type II error. They feel it's better to miss good research results than to have the wrong people performing the research or chasing the wrong ideas to start with (a false negative) and the further to the right they are on the spectrum, the more important minimizing the wrong people and ideas becomes. This leads to less discovery and successes because more research gets falsely rejected at the funding level.

The political left, of course, is the opposite and obsesses over Type I error. Accepting the wrong people and ideas is less important than getting good results. This leads to things like Lysenkoism, but also tends to reject less successful research, given the other checks and balances built into a healthy system.



>This leads to things like Lysenkoism

If the first point of comparison you reach for is the Soviet Union in the mid 20th century, that would suggest that the American political left has not in fact, in recent times, been interfering with science to the same extent as the Trump administration currently.


The American political "left" is way to the right of centre compared with everywhere else in the world.

Yes, I know. That is one of several reasons why what Communists did in the Soviet Union in the 1950s isn't particularly relevant to what Democrats have (or haven't) been doing in the past decade or two.



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