The Worst Idea in the Sad, Long History of Bad Ideas

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This is even worse than thinking about taking dinosaurs off of Isla Sorna.

U.S. Lawmaker Proposes New Criteria for Choosing NSF Grants

The new chairman of the House science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. For good measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency.

Funding criteria chosen by the Republican congress, many of whom wouldn’t know good science if it bit them on the ass, and belittle any science they don’t understand or whose conclusions are disagreeable to their ideology. Which is most science.

3 thoughts on “The Worst Idea in the Sad, Long History of Bad Ideas”

  1. Something about this:

    1) “… in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science;

    Doesn’t sit well with me.

    Maybe it’s, the “and secure the national defense” part. It brings up echos of when the SS actually arrested Von Braun because they felt he was being frivolous in his ideas of putting rockets into space when he should have been concentrating only on making rockets for the war effort.

  2. Discovery disciplines management rewarded for enforcing process not creating product. Rather than foster brilliance we allocate for its suppression – rejection of outstanding Asian college applications for being “over-represented.” Night is dark so you can imagine your fears without distraction.

    Management exists to kill the future, for the only trusted employee is one whose sole marketable asset is loyalty. Imagination is intelligence having fun. Managers cannot manage discovery, they can only manage to end it – Lucent Technologies and Bell Laboratories. God loves the congenitally inconsequential.

  3. That’s just a variation on the principle that politicians will only allow an inquiry when they know the result and will not hold that inquiry if the result will be unfavorable to them.

    Uncle Al, ‘super-competence’ was covered in the 1969 book “The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong”.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

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