[gmunu]

No, no penalty needed. We shouldn't worry whether individuals are scientific or not, we should worry about whether our institutions are scientific.

Just like in politics, people are people. If your solution to political problems is for politicians to start always acting ethically in the interests of the greater good, you've already lost. The challenge is to design institutions that can take in people as they are and still function.

Scientists are people. They are going to have confirmation bias when they look at results. If they've worked on something for forty years, they (probably) aren't going to change their minds. Luckily, physics doesn't care what Gross thinks. It moves on. The journals start preferring other papers, young scientists don't look to make their careers in the same old stuff.

I think the institution of physics is fine. Well, except for the fact that the LHC hasn't found anything new yet and everyone is left hoping they build that really big accelerator in China.

[marcus_holmes]

Except that individuals do have a lot of power in academia. Gross's papers will be published because he is who he is. The papers of the unknown kid who comes up with a better explanation will not get published because they disagree with the establishment, even though the establishment know they're probably wrong.

I'm not involved, but it seems to me a more intellectually honest approach would be to start actively helping the unknown kids with weird but plausible explanations get some attention.

I'd have more respect for academia if it could collectively say "OK, super-symmetry didn't pan out. Who's got a better idea?" and start looking at the weird ideas. One of those weird ideas is going to be the next orthodoxy.

[jessriedel]

If the institutions' only methods for checking the insanity of men is experimental data, and that data only arrives on multi-decade timescales, then the institutions are broken. Furthermore, there are several intuitional changes physics could make to make better use of the meager data they have, but they do not. For example: forcing physicists to go on the record specifically and publicly about predictions (not just the one-off bet), and making hiring decisions based on it.

[mathattack]

Making hiring decisions based on bets may not work: time horizons are long and you may decrease bold experimental work. (There is a 1 in 100 that this works...)

I do agree about your underlying idea of having them put skin in the game. That forces better thinking in most fields though even financial markets are susceptible to irrational thinking.

[jessriedel]

You can make 1% predictions.

[mathattack]

Yes - an odds bet. But you need to make an awful lot of them to get one that hits. This is similar to why it is hard for employees to get the benefit of power law returns. There isn't enough career time to work for 100 companies. (Easier to invest in the outsize outcomes than work your way in)