Scientists are the new priest class. They deliver edicts and answer the public's questions about the universe. The problem is that the answer to 99% of the publ

Scientists are the new priest class. They deliver edicts and answer the public's questions about the universe. The problem is that the answer to 99% of the public's questions is "I don't know" or "It's very complicated." We don't like that. We want the right answer, right now, delivered in one simple sentence. We find the one goober who hasn't walked inside of a lab in decades who wants to feel important to give us what we want. Worse is that people envision scientists as unbiased saints. That's just not real. Real science is about one thing and one thing only. Money, aka grants. Grants get you labs and underlings which bring more money and maybe someday tenure. And once you have tenure, you can finally publish what you really think about what interests you instead of chasing funding fads. Except that part never happens. That means you study the subjects that give funding. You give papers that increase the chance of more funding for more papers. Your accuracy? Doesn't matter. Funding matters. No one is going to check your work anyhow beyond simple peer review. Someone tries to recreate your work or recalculate your numbers? Tell them you lost the data. It's a bit embarrassing but no one is going to call you on this stuff anyhow. There is only one solution to the replication crisis. Funded third-party replication for all experiments. Money is the root of this problem. It has to be the solution. How many scientists are going to publish "mistakes" if they know that four different teams at four other universities are going to automatically attempt replication?