I think we are 80% in agreement but still using words differently.

> when I get grant money I need to account for how every dollar is spent

Yes I know, but that's not what I mean by accountability. Again: nobody is upset with academics because of expenses scandals or taking too many expensive flights. Well, except maybe for climatologists who supposedly take more flights than the average academic, but that's due to the perception of hypocrisy rather than concern over cost.

People are getting upset because when they download and read papers, the papers turn out to be bad and there are no visible consequences for that. Even just getting a clearly fraudulent paper retracted is reported to be a nightmare, according to people who search for scientific fraud as a hobby like Elizabeth Bik. And I've read endless reams of terrible papers that were useless or outright deceptive, I tried reporting a few and nobody ever cared.

Now, you're arguing that there is accountability of the following form:

> It's accountability in the form of: if you didn't do what you promised you'd do, then you don't get any more money

This is true given that scientists are promising the NSF to publish papers, not strictly speaking to do research, and therefore by implication promising to come up with interesting claims, not necessarily true claims. But that's not what we want.

This is an inevitable problem with government funding of research. The buyer, the government, cannot really check if the claims they're buying from scientists are true, so they need proxies like did it get published, did it get cited, etc. But those aren't the same things. Corporate research doesn't have this problem because the corporate will try to apply the research at some point and if it was fraudulent they will discover it at that point, and of course they're strongly incentivized to ensure it never gets to that point in the first place.

In theory the government could write grants in such a way that money is awarded independent of what claims end up being made, instead awarding money for the quality of work done. That's what you're arguing for here. And indeed corporate labs write contracts in this exact way. Scientists get a salary in a corporate lab, they don't have to write grants. They do have to convince their management chain that the research is worth funding, but there are many different ways to do that which don't involve continually publishing astonishing claims in scientific journals.

You're asking me to propose how science should work instead but, indeed, you already know my answer: eliminate the NSF completely, and stop subsidizing student loans. All science should be funded by companies. They have already solved the problems you're treating as novel / intractable above. Scientists are awarded salaries and promotions by firms on a more flexible basis than the NSF. Importantly, they are rewarded for doing research not producing claims. Companies can do this because they have management structures sufficiently well staffed to closely monitor what scientists are doing. That means if a firm is truly committed to research then the scientists will get paid even if their programme has some dry years. Plus there's a huge body of law handling fraud and corruption in the workplace.

At the same time, firms are incentivized to eliminate the research that is probably always going to be nearly useless. Outside of firms selling books or self help courses I doubt many would subsidize sociology or gender studies for example, and it's also unclear that would be a loss.

Your argument about who it would or wouldn't be good for seems a bit contradictory and I struggled to follow it. You're arguing it would be both bad for Google and Microsoft yet also make them stronger. I disagree with both possibilities: I think they would hardly notice the difference and it wouldn't affect how powerful they are. Having worked for one of those companies and also worked at a startup where we often read research papers in a certain subfield of CS with views to maybe applying them, my view is that even in the relatively good field of computer science, most academic output is useless and has no impact. These firms do not rely heavily on government funded research:

- The web was very briefly funded for a couple of years as a side project of CERN, but then R&D was taken over by the private sector where it remained ever since. Page & Brin never even finished their PhD before moving their research into the private sector! It's hardly a mystery where the next Google will come from - probably the same place the previous one did, a garage in Silicon Valley.

- What government funded tech was Microsoft built on? The internet? Microsoft is still with us in spite of the internet, not because of it! Or are you going back to military computers in World War 2? Military R&D is different, governments can fund that semi-effectively because they actually use the outputs.

- Neural networks were a backwater until Jeff Dean resurrected the field using the resources of the private sector, academia has been chasing to catch up ever since.

There are a lot of other examples. The DARPA Grand Challenge is not an example of what I'm talking about because:

1. DARPA is military research and therefore structured differently to how the NSF does things. The very structure of it as a Grand Challenge is a clue here: the output of the programme was cars (not) going round a track, not papers and citations.

2. I'm not arguing for prosecution of researchers who end up with null results!