You want to change the system. I understand that.

We have many systems to go on over the last few hundred years of science. We have the pre-war system, primarily funded by private philanthropy. We have the communist system.

None of them seem to create the stream of highly replicable studies you want.

That may indicate something deep about how people work and how science is really done, and suggest that your admirable goals are not tenable.

I tend to agree, actually. In some sense the real solution is take science off its pedestal, as it does not generally deserve to be up there. The 17th-19th centuries were in some sense a fluke of low-hanging fruit, and the science of most of the 20th and the 21st centuries do not deserve to be regarded with the same worshipful gaze, a word I choose carefully. By taking it off its pedestal and subjecting it to a lot more scrutiny, we'd all win, including science in general.

This is not necessarily because we're worse people than them, but because the problem is now much much harder. It's always better to acknowledge that hard problems are hard, rather than trying to solve them by pretending they're easy.

As for the model I would propose, I believe all funding models are fundamentally flawed, and the best model is all of them at once, so hopefully the flaws at least sort of cancel out. At the moment, that generally means seeking a decrease of the current government funding strategy and breaking the peer review monopolies, not because either of them are necessarily especially bad, but because they are too powerful and their flaws are coming to define the flaws of science in general.

Some of this would just be a mindset change, to recognize that "research" isn't isomorphic to "producing peer-reviewed papers" and that there's nothing wrong with setting up some equivalents of Xerox Park in other disciplines. Potentially with government money, since my point is more about multiple models than the literal funding sources. If "science" as it is practiced today was less pedestalized, this would be a much less horrifying suggestion.

"Science" is no longer on a pedestal. The PR campaigns against conclusions for leaded gas, smoking, acid rain, global warming, and vaccine safety, and the scientific development of leaded gas, ozone-depleting CFCs, Agent Orange/dioxin, etc., plus concerns like GMOs and Monsanto, mobile phone safety, plasticizers/hormone disruptors, and more make for a decidedly mixed view of science by the general public.

As you can see from http://www.pewforum.org/2013/07/11/public-esteem-for-militar... , the military, teachers, and medical doctors are on higher pedestals than scientists.

That said, I'm all for the mixed development model.

I think it's on a pedestal where it matters, where the funding decisions are being made. The public's opinion only matters in the long term. Though, admittedly, the long term is probably coming up pretty quickly. There's a lot of things that have had their opinion trending negative for so long that people have become blase about the negative trends suddenly coming due this year.

On reconsideration, I'm wavering on my belief. NIH and NSF get a lot more support than, say, the NEA. HST, fine as it is, was extremely expensive.

I still maintain that the military is still on a higher pedestal than science, in terms of funding and prestige. You hear stories of people buying military people in uniform their meal, to honor their service. That's much less common for scientists.