Why politically guided science is bad⁠↗

the idea that science should be devoted to finding the fact is itself an ideology. It’s an ideological belief that humanity is better off knowing the facts than not knowing them. That’s a deeply humanistic ideology. Knowledge is power, and the idea that human society always deserves more power — that in some general sense, we’ll eventually do the right thing with the knowledge science gives us — is an article of faith. It’s easy to find cases where reality tests that faith — the most obvious and famous example being the building of the atom bomb. Like many of the people who built it, I still wonder whether it was right to give humankind the power to wipe itself out; my faith in the goodness of science is not absolute.

Scientists are humans like everybody else, and they have a right — and perhaps even a duty — to try to make the world a better place through politics.