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You can find a way to relate politics to any endeavor, but politics is central to things like tax policy in a way that it's not central to, say, N-dimensional manifolds. Equating the two kinds of relationship is a fundamentally dishonest intellectual tactic used by people who want to inject political activism into every human endeavor. People need to stop doing that.



I think people are too quick to forget the importance of funding and the impact it has. For example, if a study comes out that A suffers from f, but no study exists that says B suffers from f, is that because there was a study that didn't find it or because there has not been such a study, perhaps due to lack of funding. This then has an impact on actual law when attempting to base law on science (should we set aside funding to help A but not B with f?).

With math in particular, the way statistics are used to represent and draw conclusions from data can be highly political, especially when dealing with a very unpopular study and the level of criticism it receives compared to a popular study.




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