I'm not saying fixes will never happen - that's a strawman - just pointing out the immense scale of the challenges if you try and do it via moral suasion. It originates (IMO) in the corruption created when funders of work don't actually care about the results, just being seen to fund it i.e. governments, foundations. As such there are very few pressure points that can work because the system is so well insulated. Congress did make a small effort in the past on this (more than most countries did), back in the 70s. That's the origin of the OSI. However the effort flamed out shortly after and the OSI has been largely defunct since then, though it still exists and consumes budget.

To make progress here probably need political parties that take up academic reform (or defunding) as a voter wedge issue, and campaign on it for many years. Based on the failure of initiatives that tried to solve these issues so far, I'm very skeptical of any effort that isn't based on some sort of populism. Realistically this means any attempt to dramatically improve standards is going to get tangled up in culture war, as after all, you can't divorce an attempt to raise scientific standards from specific fields and claims (if you do it's admitting that they should be ignored). To get political momentum you need to be able to point to examples of claims that are wrong, and they have to be claims people actually care about.

Re: 60%, that's your personal estimate, right? My impression is that it varies a lot by field. In some fields you don't really get much invalid research at all, it's a curiosity. In other fields 100% of papers are useless because the underlying premises of the field are themselves wrong.

"You don't know that. Unless you've read his secret diary, or something."

I haven't read his secret diary, no. I have talked to someone who worked in epidemiology on malaria research, who described to me how the field is totally distorted by Gates Foundation funding, I've read many of his statements throughout COVID and read a skeptical review of his non-secret book (if you can get past the invective at the start the review is pretty decent):

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/we-must-find-a-way-to-prevent-bi...

... which reinforced the overall impression: Gates is a cheerleader. His approach to find the hierarchically most important people, ask them what they think and then repeat it uncritically, whilst distributing grants to more or less anyone who says they'll make Gates's personal goals come true.

It's also the case that if Gates was reading the outputs of his funded researchers and is as smart as usually claimed, he would have long ago noticed the problems. Yet his book boils down to: what we need next time is way more of all that. He is aware lots of people think Ferguson is a fraud, but thinks that's only because they were misinformed by the press. As far as Gates is concerned Ferguson is great and he repeats Ferguson's defences of his own work verbatim, even though they aren't accurate. As the reviewer points out, it's impossible to believe given what's written in his book that he ever actually read Ferguson's research (I have read it, and his model code, very carefully). Gates' one concession is that the vaccines weren't the silver bullets they were promised to be, but as for everything else - well, he acts as if he's completely unaware that any problems exist.

Now, as you observe, this might be an act. Nobody wants to spend decades lavishly funding people to engage on a noble mission and then one day admit, actually, they were mostly scamming me and we didn't get much out of it. The loss of face would be impossible to handle. Even if Gates did know, we might expect him to act as if he didn't. Still we'd hope he'd find subtle ways to improve things without outright admitting to the problem in plain language. I've never seen any evidence of this.

At least with Gates there's the theoretical possibility he could have a Damascene Conversion and start enforcing rigorous standards. With governments it really does need to become a political issue before anything can happen, as every time people try and improve standards via government, or purely internally inside academia, the new rules seem to be immediately subverted and everyone carries on as before.