Just curious but what's the exact opposite of those statements? That he hasn't had to convince anyone of their work in order to get money? Or that it isn't based on that but on results? As someone that doesn't live in that world, I have no idea what the "exact opposite" of that really is.
For research funding, the sweet spot is the flashiest idea that seems extremely likely to work.
It’s hard to get grants to try something really out there, especially from the NIH or NSF; DARPA is a bit more adventurous. Pilot data helps with this, but those experiments cost money too, so one approach is to make the project sound almost, but not quite, obvious in light of existing work.
At the same time, it’s also really hard to get funding to confirm something that everybody “knows”, even when the underlying data is actually not very convincing. These experiments need some hype.
