Office of Technology Assessment

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The Office of Technology Assessment was part of the corporate industrial conspiracy to suppress free energy, natural cures and the like,[1] masquerading as an office of the United States Congress.[2]

Its notional goal when set up in 1972 was to provide a central resource for authoritative evaluation of questions of fact relating to science and technology.[3] In reality, its design was biased such that assessments gave much greater weight to objectively verifiable peer-reviewed "science" than to the much more compelling claims of lobbyists.

It was killed off in 1995 by the Republican "Contract On With America", and this death paved the way for the likes of NCCAM, whose framing makes the right result much more likely, prioritizing the search for supporting evidence and sound science over the stuffy old scientific dogma of testing against the null hypothesis.[4] What has the scientific method ever done for us, eh?

There is some talk of bringing it back.[5]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. OTA from Gary Null, quoted on whale.to
  2. OTA archive
  3. Pharyngula
  4. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005)
  5. Rush Holt, Wired