“Science” currently incentivizes the wrong things. How do you change the incentives (back)?

I think it is a misconception that switching to the "right" incentives will solve problems. The very existence of incentives is not conducive for knowledge-based work.

https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work

Yup. Blindly "trusting the science" is inherently anti-science

There is plenty of things that we took as scientific fact in the past that turned out to be false. Science is supposed to question existing notions and test/prove new theories. If you just assume that we're in a post-science era where we've got it all figured out, and our current theories are all correct, that's not science, it's dogmatic faith.

Ignaz Semmelweis was destroyed by the medical community for his insane idea that doctors should wash their hands before performing medical procedures. He was attacked about to the point where he ended up having a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum where he was beaten to death by the guards. Serves him right for questioning the science!

We've optimized since Ignaz; now, you only have to infect and then cure yourself to win a Nobel after being doubted (https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/health/nobel-came-after-y... the scientist actually infected themself with helicobacter pylori, got sick in the predictable way, and cured it with antibiotics)

The process by which DNA was convincingly demonstrated to be the molecule of hereditary was fairly complex; an early experiment that was complex and hard to understand did so, but people didn't completely believe it so a later experiment that was easier to understand was done.

For the longest time, the establishment believed the functionality of the ribosome (a critical subsystem that translates mRNA into protein) was carried out by its protein subunits. Although convincing data was published in the 1960s, the general belief did not change until the crystal structure of the ribosome was published showing that RNA formed the catalytic component.

And my personal favorite, it was considered unpossible that prions could be caused by proteins that misfolded and caused other proteins to misfold, it required absolutely heroic efforts in the face of extraordinary pressure to establish the molecular etiology of prions in the minds of the establishment.

It's hard to change your mind. Some people never will.

"Science advances one funeral at a time." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/09/25/progress/

Medicine was not at all scientific until recently. There's a great podcast series about the rise of evidence-based medicine (over authority-based medicine) that I loved, but I can't seem to find it now... Anybody know what I'm thinking of?