[teamonkey]

> who watches the watchman?

There's this paranoid viewpoint that Science is this exclusive club shrouded in secrecy, a little like the Masons. They hold on to their established views despite conflicting evidence from the fringes, thus continuing their tenures, fat paychecks, international fame and ultimately control over the world.

There is no watchman. There are scientists. Scientists watch each other with a tenacity that could almost be seen as dogmatic, but really it's because errors help no-one. To become a scientist you do science. If you have a concern about a particular field of science, study up so that you're as knowledgable as those in that field and discourse. That's it!

[JackFr]

But science is an (expensive)human endeavor. Tenure committees, grant committees and budget administrators are in a position to elect which paths of research are selected.

Most of the time this is a very good thing as it prevent limited resources from being wasted, but bureaucracies can suffer from groupthink and senior scientists are often reluctant to undermine their career's work. However, the system we have is probably among the best possible. We cannot avoid the problem of the purse strings.

[akiselev]

There is a lot of politics in the process of funding science and I would argue the system is quite broken, but it still operates within the scientific community. There may be a new class of hybrid scientists-bureaucrats (aka professors) that have a strong grasp on research direction but they are still scientists. Each individual may have their biases but the sum of all of the scientists is made up of so many different people that the only common link between is their belief in the scientific method and this collective ultimately guides its progress.

Also, I have to nit pick, science is by no means an expensive human endeavor. The net global societal benefit per dollar spent, even with all of the added bureaucracy and other overhead, far outweighs other spending, maybe even spending on education. The problem is that science is long term, something few seem to have the stomach for.

[teamonkey]

> Tenure committees, grant committees and budget administrators are in a position to elect which paths of research are selected.

True, but their work is still subject to external scrutiny and you don't need tenure to do that.

[raverbashing]

From my experience in the research department of my university you are quite mistaken.

"External scrutiny" usually means "publish N papers per year and don't get into trouble". Hence the most conservative projects get funding (also because they're more likely to be successful - or better said, easier to do)

And by the way, the majority of the work is done by the graduate/PhD students, and of course their advisor's name is on every paper they publish.

[teamonkey]

No, external scrutiny means that the quality of the papers are vetted by scientists the world over. Once the papers are published they are read, reviewed, checked and, especially for important stuff, the experiments are repeated. It still has to be good science.

Sure some interesting stuff is overlooked, but any research is progress. If your university chooses to be conservative, that just means less risk on their side, but also less chance of a major breakthrough, press, status and patent rights. It's the road they've chosen but not the only road.

And everyone knows that the grad students are doing the actual grunt work. Outside of academia there are also bosses whose function seems to be solely to grab credit of those doing the actual work (but more often this is just a myopic view of what their actual job entails).