> Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud?
I didn't suggest any such thing. Deconstructing fallacious arguments around publicly funded science was the only objective here. At no point did I stake a position on whether science should or should not be publicly funded as a whole, or what mix of public or private funding would be optimal. I would love to live in a Roddenberry utopia with no resource scarcity so we can all research to our heart's content, but we don't live in that world, and the evidence is mounting that we're not in a good place or on a good trajectory.
In a very real sense we are stuck in a local minima: innovation as measured by patents have been decreasing every year for decades, researchers spend more time writing grants than doing research, they are heavily influenced by publication bias and celebrity status, the replication crisis has rightly undermined trust in a lot of scientific disciplines, and cases of decades old fraud indicates that academia is not as self-regulating/self-correcting as we might have hoped, and the skewed incentives in academia are largely to blame. You can take these changes coming as some kind of authoritarian oppression, or you can take them as an opportunity to remake research and academia into something better. As Wheeler said, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
I didn't suggest any such thing. Deconstructing fallacious arguments around publicly funded science was the only objective here. At no point did I stake a position on whether science should or should not be publicly funded as a whole, or what mix of public or private funding would be optimal. I would love to live in a Roddenberry utopia with no resource scarcity so we can all research to our heart's content, but we don't live in that world, and the evidence is mounting that we're not in a good place or on a good trajectory.
In a very real sense we are stuck in a local minima: innovation as measured by patents have been decreasing every year for decades, researchers spend more time writing grants than doing research, they are heavily influenced by publication bias and celebrity status, the replication crisis has rightly undermined trust in a lot of scientific disciplines, and cases of decades old fraud indicates that academia is not as self-regulating/self-correcting as we might have hoped, and the skewed incentives in academia are largely to blame. You can take these changes coming as some kind of authoritarian oppression, or you can take them as an opportunity to remake research and academia into something better. As Wheeler said, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."