Comment by crabbone

Recently I read some lectures from Jacob Bronowski. If you never heard about him, he was sort of a predecessor of personalities like Bill Nye or Neil Tyson: he wrote books that popularize science, gave simplified introduction to philosophical and scientific topics etc.

He advocated (very naively, as it appears today) for science as a human endeavor that has no reason for falsification. His justification was that scientists have nothing to lose from being proved wrong, and, as an example, he gave some University dean who published some works that were shown to be completely wrong in a course of few decades, but still retained his position in a university (because his approach was valid and he never attempted to manipulate the truth, he just made an honest error).

But, the more I think about how did we come to this, in many human activities it is often the case that whoever undertook such activities relied on their own wealth and not being incentivized to commercialize their discoveries. It was the aristocrats or monks or some other occupation that made their life affordable, and boring enough for them to look for challenge in art or science. Once science became professional, it started to be incentivized in the same way any other vocation is: make more of it--be paid more; make more immediately useful things--be paid more.

I don't know if we should return to the lords and monks system :) But I'm also doubtful that we can make good progress by pulling the levers on financial incentives of commercializing science.