> at the heart of the reasons why this structure is the way it is, you find people's utter lack of knowledge about how science does and should work I don't thi

> at the heart of the reasons why this structure is the way it is, you find people's utter lack of knowledge about how science does and should work I don't think people's lack of understanding scientific methods is the main factor shaping the incentive structure, though it's very interesting how big a role it plays and I would love to hear more detailed arguments. In order to change the system, there must be enough alignment on what the actual goals are and what incentives might benefit them, ways to effectively organize around it, and ways to actually enforce the new incentives. (Perhaps even more things...) I think there are big hurdles on each of the above. First, concerning alignment on the goal, many people don't agree that faster scientific progress is actually good. You might argue that trying to teach people epistemology might change that. I neither think it would nor that it should, but one could argue about it a lot. "Indoctrinating" people starting at a young age that "science and knowledge = good" as a moral value might work (it is being done and I mostly endorse that) but that's different from teaching the scientific method. The really important important factor here is, of course, that many individuals and organizations benefit from the current system and don't want to change it. Concerning organization, political intersts and competition hinder it somewhat, but co-operation between scientists is quite high and increasing. Hopefully that trend will continue and not sucumb to geopolitical pressures. Concerning enforcing better incentives, that's very hard. For example, we can't objectively and reliably evaluate someone's scientific contributions. Any metric you set up is going to be gamed, etc. I think the incentives have improved over the (very short) history of collaborative science and the trend looks positive. Take for example the trend towards open access publication and growing awareness of many issues (replication crisis, etc.). Generally, I would say that understanding how science (the system) works and how it should work (or would, given certain changes) is very hard. Similarly, I also think really deep understanding how science (the process) should work is also hard and applying that knowledge in practice is much harder still. At some point you get diminishing returns for the efforts of teaching it. You still haven't proposed how you would promote this knowledge. I can't think of anything that seems likely to do much good but would love to hear about it. > Remarably, nearly all the commenters here betray this very lack of knowledge by talking about it as "philosophy" I believe epistemology and philosophy of science are philosophy. I also believe that having and improving these things is very useful and one cannot overstate their role in getting science where it is now. This is in my mind perfectly consistent with there not being a great need (way?) to teach more of it to students. Perhaps an explanation of how you would teach it would make me realize we haven't been talking about quite the same thing?