I’ll give you another example. The visitor’s center for Johnson Space Center here in Houston used to have a few space suits and a tour of Mission Control. They didn’t have much interest in keeping it up so they privatized it. They added a food court, a playground, and then they did an exhibit on Roswell with the UFO museum. That’s right, the vistitor’s center of NASA was pimping a conspiracy theory that implicates them as one of the bad actors. Then, to add insult to injury, they had a crop circle exhibit that had blow ups of fake news stories to pump up the idea that they were “real”. The scientific view was not presented. Does that assume a Golden Age? I don’t know. I think it says market forces are not the best pursuers of truth. The one set up with government money was sparse, but far more accurate.

I guess I do think the integrity of science could be on the decline, so I guess any time you argue that we are doing anything other than progressing, that suggests a “Golden Age”. I thought I was fairly clear about recognizing imperfections in any system.

You’re right – Feynman’s funding was motivated by creating a bomb. But the incentive was to get accurate results because the bomb had to work. When it becomes a problem is when funding is given to get a certain result – this is why industry science is so good at technology (producing something to sell) and so bad at determining if it’s own products are safe. The incentive is to only produce research that says they are doing no harm (like the American Petroleum Institute’s recent shopping for research that would show Benzene is safe).

Science is under attack in the areas where it does not benefit industry (utilitarian, if you prefer). Evolution, health, safey, issues related to environment, these are where the debate will focus, I think. There is very little incentive to produce research that goes against industry/religious interests. So how do you set up a system that does not encourage particular results, but just wants to know?

I know this goes against current thinking, but I still think it’s federal grants based on merit. Sure, there are always corruption or pressure brought to bear. But look at PBS: the argument against its existence has been that the free market would create documentaries of equal quality on Discover and the Learning Channel.

Look at those channels now. The Learning Channel is almost exclusively “World’s Scariest Police Videos”, and Discover is mostly aliens, tornadoes and “When Animals Attack”. It’s almost impossible to find a documentary on Egypt that isn’t at least half devoted to the mummy’s curse or alien pyramid builders. There are some shows for those still clinging to their belief that the Enlightenment is not over, but none as good as Nova. And although you can point out bad shows on PBS, just as you can find good shows on cable, PBS, pound for pound, puts out better quality science shows than you’ll find anywhere else. Something is working, although I have no idea why.

So yes, you can play the same game with science grants, pointing to conflicts of interest, but for some reason that science has done a better job in non-utilitarian areas than industry has. I have no doubt the free market will do a better job of building space ships that NASA, but I don’t think they’ll ever devote much time to finding life on Mars or the Grand Unified Theory unless they see a utilitarian application.