Quote of the day - how Science gets done

This is 100% pure, distilled truth, and explains why so much junk science gets tossed around in the Universities:

The reward system for academics is to have a provocative idea get published in a high impact journal, and increasingly to garner some media attention for the research.  Whether or not the idea turns out to be correct is not of particular importance in the reward system for academics.

For professionals in engineering, finance, the world of regulations, etc., there are typically serious penalties for getting it wrong, i.e. if the bridge collapses.  As a result, due diligence, verification and validation, uncertainty analysis, auditing etc. are essential elements of the profession.

Now if the principal activity of a field of science is to push the knowledge frontier, then being right in a long term sense isn’t all that important.  However, when a field of science is operating at the policy interface, e.g. climate science, then that field could learn some valuable lessons from the professions.

As Curry says, this isn't a real problem with a lot of science - say, a new taxonomy of dinosaurs.  However, this becomes critical when public policy gets made based on the published findings.  Quite frankly, this is likely the single most important reason that public policy should be extremely skeptical of science as it's currently done.