Science should be globally coordinated, well-funded, and focused on advancing humanity, not driven by institutional agendas.
Science should be globally coordinated, well-funded, and focused on advancing humanity, not driven by institutional agendas.
Who gets to be on this board? Who gets to decide who gets to be on this board? Being on a board like this which decides all global science funding would be pretty prestigious and likely would be lobbied heavily and come with all kinds of perks. People who are driven by money and personal ego would likely do a lot to be on these boards. Maybe even things that aren't in the best interest for science but will none-the-less put them in a better position to be selected. Who is selecting for these boards again and how?
I like the idea. But how is this possible? Pretty much everyone is driven by ego.
Ego dissolution is not easy. And once dissolved substantially most people might not probably care enough to spend their lives in laboratory/university for a future breakthrough instead of enjoying here and now.
So ego is a requirement to engage in this kind of work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_on_Int...
Personally, I dislike idea, as competition can be a powerful motivator in science. I think three things would go a long way to improving the current situation: (1) more rigorous peer review, perhaps even paid reviews or something like bug bounties, to incentivise scrutiny; (2) the normalisation of replication; and (3) publication of negative results, so the community can quicky identify if something is not replicating.
But global problems require global solutions. Without that, many critical challenges may go unsolved, especially when there’s no immediate economic reward driving the effort.
Even in underpaid positions competition is fierce and personal ambition sky high. Better fraud prevention systems is likely a better way.
It's like that top to bottom, from the shittiest uni to the most prestigious institute it's all a big game of thrones, absolutely rotten to the core with a few exceptions here and there.
Centralization like this just makes the matter worse in a larger scale.
It doesn't work. The understanding of human nature that leads to these suggestions is just incorrect. Profit isn't a bad thing, it's actually the only way to keep people on the straight and narrow.
The motivation for scientific fraud is to extract money out of someone (and secondarily, social status). Science in aid of customer happiness is inherently difficult terrain in which to do fraud because customers don't care why your product works, only that it does, and if you sell them something that doesn't work there are lots of laws on the book that let governments or customers go after you legally.
But academic fraud is deployed against people who care more about how science-y your method sounds than whether it works. Scientists get away with it exactly because they don't promise to deliver anything, so nobody can really claim to have been damaged when they don't deliver.
What kind of people are the softest targets for such fraud? Government bureaucrats, who are tasked to spend tax money so the government can tell voters they're supporting science. What they spend the money on hardly matters. And philanthropic foundations, who are tasked to spend rich guy money so their founder can tell dinner party guests they're a good guy who is funding Alzheimer's research. These two groups of people simply don't care if the research they fund is fraudulent, as can be witnessed by the fact that after a decade+ of these stories the standard outcome is "they are still working in a lab and still publishing papers", whereas people like Elizabeth Holmes are sitting in uniform in a prison camp. The difference: profit driven commerce vs virtue-signaling driven philanthropy.