Again, at what level of fraud do we consider defunding if not now? When 90% is irreproducible crap? 95%? 98%? Yes, you will lose out on 'healthy tissue'. That damage is necessary when the cancer is spreading.
Most of the opinions you hear online about the importance of funding science come from science fanatics who don't have any idea how the sausage is made, and are not themselves scientifically minded. It's part of their self constructed identity as a "smart person" who "believes in evidence".
Press your face against the glass, and it's much more complicated. The institutions that we have made for funding science don't reliably channel money towards the best ideas. All the experts in the field have figured out how to work the system well enough to build lives for themselves, and this leads to the tautology that "experts" support the status quo. We don't consider someone an expert if they aren't thriving in the current institutions.
Anytime someone mentions new institutions e.g. prediction markets that might better allocate funding, or even enrich the best scientists, there is a visceral backlash.
Every scientist I've talked to about my pie-in-the-sky funding mechanism - getting past a "top 50%" triage and then a lottery has met said idea with "Yeah, that would probably work. better."
I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky research is less likely to be funded, as are new investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better able to weather the storm.
This is interesting because it was the reversal of prosperity overall due to the spiraling inflation of the 1970's that caused the defunding responsible for the pivot toward financialization and away from academic excellence.
Like the vast majority, everyone had to focus more on financial survival than was ever imaginable before, and this permeated the universities also and was never recovered from. This is when the reliance on foreign students began to skyrocket too.
i don't think its a good faith argument to compare science with cancer. Do you have numbers? Are you sure 90% is irreproducible? How is cancer similar to whats going on in science?
Arguing for defunding science is about as asinine a mindset as one can possess. I doubt he has any figures to back that up. The article cited shows how the self-policing nature of science is improving.
Honestly, i'm tired of Hearing this. I am a Scientist and i work in science. On HN i feel a breeze of Anti-science sentiments which are only dwarfed by the Anti-Vax Community. I Don't Like my Profession being called a fraud, i also do not call a programmer, a Typewriter Monkies.
