> It's good that you included "maybe", because that does not follow. Yes, there is much shoddy science. Medicine really is not unique in that aspect. Verification studies are not valued, so they're not performed. The lack of independent verification also makes the primary researchers lax. But luckily, the best solution to shoddy science is more science. If all the people decrying the state of overall "science" would spend just as much time arguing for more replication studies, the world would be a much better place.

Let's funnel more money into a system that's suffering from Eroom's Law?

A different read on the situation would be to fire the majority of scientists. We'll keep 1% - 10% of them and give them an order of magnitude more funding.

Also we'll close down some branches of science entirely because they're a waste of effort. Consider that: Corporations are already doing this to entire R&D departments and the government isn't far behind them with respect to NASA and NSF funding.

Why is public funding on life support in major areas?

Here's one idea that may be wrong but I think it's worth consideration.

Maybe there is just way too many scientists. Maybe science has a scaling problem. Maybe the signal to noise ratio is mostly noise because nobody feels the pressure to replicate that comes from intense competition between researchers and maybe nobody is reading the journals they're working so hard to publish in because it's like drinking from a fire hose.

Even in computer science we're constantly reinventing 'new' ideas that were actually originally discovered in the 70s. Ceaselessly cycling through existing paradigms leads to diminishing returns.

Not being able to integrate existing knowledge is a failure mode. If you look at the early history of science you see it is littered with disciplines that don't exist in the modern era, mostly because they were fraudulent bunk. Of course that could never happen today. Preposterous,

> For the rest of your objections: yes, progress is incremental. It always has been. Before we put a man on the moon, we had people in low orbit, then high orbit. Before we sent humans in space, we sent other animals. Before we sent animals, we sent only a rocket. And since we've been to the moon, we have succesfully landed probes on asteroids. We have performed soil analysis on Mars. All of those steps were just as incremental as the lunar landing.

This is just unconvincing. You've seen 2001, so you've seen what my parents generation expected to happen by the early 21st century. The most likely positive outcome is that after 100 years since the moon landing we'll have more robots and a handful of humans on the nearest planet. If our advancements are actually impressive we don't need the journalists to prompt us into thinking so. I recall that probe that landed on that asteroid recently went dark for most of it's life because they used solar power instead of the nuclear battery that powers the Voyagers. The Saturn 5 rusting on NASA's front lawn before it got shipped into a museum. This is pathetic.

> Finally, in my view the lack of apparent progress since the 1980's is because of state divestment around that time. Many government-sponsored research benefits were privatized around that time, which meant that the benefits of the research ended up in a few rent-seeking silo's (big pharma being one of them).

This is a world wide stagnation in science/engineering/technology ex-computation, it's much bigger than a country's funding drying up. If the stagnation continues and we have a major economic hiccup we could really go from plateauing to an undignified descent. All the scientists will be ekeing out a living just to make ends meet. Some of that has been happening already. I know of several influential scientists in biology and mathematics who were or are literally living hand to mouth. This irks me when I see poppingjays with trust funds playact at cargocult science. I'm sure this happened in the past also, but for it to occur in a time it is commonly supposed that anybody complaining about quality is a crank it is especially galling.

http://67.media.tumblr.com/96064fb9c0b3371eec2349149dc15f11/...

You had a question concerning experts and their worries? I'd point you to the life's work of John Ioannidis. There seems to be one of those guys in most fields now, Jonathan Haidt in social science, even physics has Lee Smolin. Mostly for the sake of brevity I pause here.

Also;

>> What is the grit in the gears?
>
>Hoarding of capital is probably a part of it. Downward pressure on wages is incompatible with creativity in the workplace.

Agreed.