> People funding research that interests them seems like a pretty innocuous statement by itself. Sure, it's connection to Epstein is blatantly problematic, but if you remove him specifically from the statement, what is the problem being highlighted?
There are two issues here. First, if it would be politically or financially more convenient to not know something, there is no money provided towards knowing it.
Second, in many cases the donors get to decide whether to publish the results after the research has been done. Naturally if only one of the possible results is inconvenient and the study reaches the inconvenient conclusion, that one doesn't get published. Then all your results are totally invalidated by selection bias.
There are two issues here. First, if it would be politically or financially more convenient to not know something, there is no money provided towards knowing it.
Second, in many cases the donors get to decide whether to publish the results after the research has been done. Naturally if only one of the possible results is inconvenient and the study reaches the inconvenient conclusion, that one doesn't get published. Then all your results are totally invalidated by selection bias.
It also provides the opportunity to do this:
https://xkcd.com/882/
Study doesn't say what you want? Fund another one, maybe tweak it a little, sooner or later it will, and you only publish the one that does.