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"Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest." It actually does have an incentive to be internally honest, that is, to speak honestly within the corporate entity doing the research. If it isn't honest, it won't work, and what doesn't work can't be monetized (to a first approximation, anyhow; I can come up with crazy exceptions too, but they really are the exceptions). It does have an incentive to be externally dishonest and/or externally silent. Public research, by contrast, appears to have no particular incentive to be honest either internally or externally. And lo, there's been a whole slew of problems lately about the problems that the largely public research community is facing with honesty, reproducability, and the skewed incentives around publication. Personally, I think the only defensible position is that both approaches have shown to have serious problems with incentives, and the idea that public researchers are above corruption and have no negative incentives and are just generally "better" than private ones is a point of view that can't stand up to five minutes serious examination. And contrary to naive beliefs about the incorruptibility of politicians controlling the public research funds, both systems have a serious problem with needing to flatter the opinions of the one with the purse strings and make sure not to disprove them too hard. Very, very serious problems. |