This is about the politics of science.
I am a cisgender Caucasian male. My primary job is a (soon to be tenured) academic research professor at an R1 university in psychological & brain sciences. My laboratory has historically well-funded for its age by the NIH*, industry sponsors, and donors. You'll understand why that's relevant in a moment. To understand what science
is, you need insight into what it can look like on the front lines, and where the money flows.
I'm not surprised when it is people who share those first three personal identifying words that I shared above (as usual) have the loudest and most often-repeated opinions. I really, really didn't want to write anything at all. I just want to say a few things from the perspective of a very prematurely jaded academic scientist who has seen more than his fair share of skeletons in closets. I want to mention some of them and learn if in some small way I can help.
I keep seeing this word "science" coming up everywhere and I'm having a hard time seeing anything remotely like what I mean when I use that word. As someone who spent a significant part of his training in psychology clinics, all I see in most of these online interactions that supposedly refer to science is a lack of citations to primary sources and outstandingly
bad faith arguments. I can't remember the last time I saw a good faith argument on the topic at hand here that involved directly interacting with scientific publications. For the record, Jeff Spring definitely wasn't doing it in my estimation, and was doing a poor job masquerading as a politician who just wants to move on from the issue "for the next couple of years." I want to sidestep that for a moment and just focus on "real world" science and how it looks from the perspective of someone who is "successful" at it in the eyes of certain power structures. You can tell by my quotation marks that I'm a little cynical about that too.
In my research group, we hit all the benchmarks that Big Admin marks as a "good lab". We're not perceived as the "best" in my entire field (whatever that would be), but we do very well in our local environment. Sometimes good things happen to us just because we're "on the map" now. I'm saying this because I'm someone who escapes into disc golf as often as I can to get away from the stressors of what that process entails. It's utterly exhausting.
It's easy to become very cynical about science in practice. There are no shortage of well-known issues in funding models from our national agencies, including the perverse yoking of base salaries to extramural funding, which exacerbates all manner of competitive dynamics. When the optimizing function is for "grant dollars in" as a function of "published units out," strange things happen. It is important to understand a few of these oddities.
Tenure-track hiring committees are notoriously economically and politically conservative even in progressive universities. The rationalization is usually "risk minimizing" - tenure track hires are increasingly a career marriage for a department. A "bad hire" (what would that mean?) is perceived as a tragic loss for a department. Guess who (demographically) still gets hired the most? I probably don't have to tell you. Guess what their science needs to be? If you think it doesn't have to do with money, you'd usually only be half correct these days.
I am in one of the "good scenarios" with a 9-month contract, meaning I get 75% of my annual salary from the university. I'm not paid in the summer unless I bring it in myself. An alternative model is to work in a medical school, which is anywhere between 50% or more likely closer to 100% self-funded these days even for primary tenure track investigators, meaning you need to show up with the bucks. Oh, that includes by the way the pay for your own benefits, the same for your supervisees and staff, research funds and overheads, and so on, unless you've already convinced some university you are so extraordinarily valuable that they will take that pressure off of you, usually by stealing you from a competitor. Most funding for biomedical science goes to medical investigators these days, not people in "hard money" positions. There are all kinds of dynamics that prop this structure up and put all of the risk on the investigators, not the institutions.
Traditional "hard money" positions or "soft money" medical positions, did you know that there is a legitimate "pecking order" of hires and what counts as "legitimate science" in the United States? Diversity researchers (in any construal of the word) are still generally treated like second-class citizens (at best), because their work is often treated as derivative of the "real science." They're all just interested in moderating effects and not the "primary" findings, right? It couldn't possibly be that we only keep them around because it fulfills a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion quota, could it? Ever notice that the people studying transgender topics are usually "instructor" or "adjunct" or other positions? That Universispeak for "you and what you do aren't important to us to keep around more than a year or three at a time like the
real faculty, so we'll pander to you in the meantime. I'm really not being hyperbolic, nor am I really taking a stance on that in this moment. This is to say nothing of the gamification of diversity variables among the student population, which of course are all inflated and distorted by university rankings and various federal upheavals I don't have the energy to get into right now. Start adding up all of those things and you start to see why we know pitifully little about transgendered anything, much less disc golfers.
Bad faith arguments happen all the time in academic science, just like in the rest of life. But I also still have plenty of good faith arguments too, which is part of why I don't quit completely and why I work on processes that encourage more of them in my day job
despite the whithering, ever-growing BS in our modern universities. Call me old fashioned, but I believe the core mission of academia is still to create and disseminate knowledge despite the perversion of the power and money structures. I also believe it is outrightly irresponsible to make applied conclusions from basic science without well-designed studies, and usually scrutiny from multiple parties. Sometimes it doesn't seem that way in science, but when you realize that you're meeting a small group of people at all the same conferences who all really know who is behind the "deidentified" work, real conversations start to happen in the long run. So far, I have seen nothing like that happening in disc golf.
Where is all this "science" people keep talking about, and why isn't that part of what we actually talk about? Does anyone actually care about it or what outcome measures are used to inform decisions, or how they relate to what happens in the real world? Or did we all just decide where we stand and use the word "science" like it's referring to something happening mutually in all of our heads? I mean it, I'm not a rhetorical politician. It isn't surprising to me due to the issues above and more that we don't have more transgendered studies, much less well-designed ones, much less ones specific to athletic development, much less ones specific to disc golf. Who's paying for it? What are we even trying to answer, and is it even a scientific question? I'm asking.
I'm willing to learn that I'm wrong, but I don't think it's about the science.
*National Institutes of Health (NIH) gets $51-ish
billion of our tax dollars, which might sound like a lot but turns out to be woefully low for the demands on our society according to various metrics, even after accounting for the BS.