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One of the more frightening concepts in recent times is the notion that there can be more than one truth, and that the truth is relative or determined by consensus. But rational people know that there is only one reality, one truth. Science must accept that as a given. If you believe that reality depends on consensus then you must believe that the sun once revolved around the earth or that the earth was once flat.

Good science seeks the truth and, yes, truth can be used for good or evil, but the nature of evil is that it uses lies as often as it uses the truth. The truth, therefore, favors good.

Crichton thinks that that bad science can be overcome by establishing an independent research organization with all kinds of cross-checks but I don't believe this is the answer. People who will deliberately distort the truth will not be stopped by any schematic process because they will always find a way around it.

The way to combat dishonesty in our institutions is the way that has worked for centuries -- exclude dishonest people. But lately, honor codes and sanctions against disreputable people have fallen out of favor and become politically incorrect. We need to return to the times when a man's reputation was the most important thing he had.

When enough dishonest people populate an organization they will begin to exclude the reputable -- and there is no cure for that except for the rest of society to isolate that entire entity.

Read Kostler's "The Sleepwalkers". One of the best history of science books ever.

The rot set in after WW-II when the government got involved and scientists became overwhelmingly government employees. (Most university scientist live on government hand-outs.) Einstein was a patent examiner who dabbled in physics part-time. If he'd been professor at a modern American university he'd be too worried about giving offense or too busy pontificating on Republican perfidy to accomplish anything useful.

Just as credentialism and unionism has ruined education, it was visited its blessings on science.

Critchon never even got to lynx hair, I noticed.

We need to return to the times when a man's reputation was the most important thing he had.

Okay, and how do you go about it? Crichton's article had a reasonably specific, implementable plan. There were two keys to his idea. One was to institute 'blinds' in the data collection and analysis systems. The other was to have a body that had a reasonable chance to be considered objective review the various findings. Both are probably good ideas, but your basic point is valid - neither guarantees success.

What's the real solution? The first step to that is to determine what the real problem is, and that problem is socialist control of academia. People with no grounding in ethics or understanding of good science are gaining degrees. It's no secret that the best and the brightest don't go into teaching or journalism. However, lately they haven't been going into science/technology, either. As long as socialists control the universities, no 'peer review' or 'independent review' system will work.

In a larger sense, many of the hypotheses which may reveal something about the universe are inherently untestable. How do you directly measure temperatures from 10,000 years ago - or 100 years from now? (By the way, the models are testable - and not one of the 'global warming' models, if applied to the conditions of 1900, comes at all close to predicting the conditions of 2000.) However, the need to use proxies is used as a smokescreen. The absence of absolute certainty (or at least, testable hypotheses verifed by test) means that there is no way to disprove many of these hypotheses, either. And there is indeed a lot of money to be made by scare tactics on science. There is now a vicious circle, where journalists with inadequate training gain money and influence by 'crisis' reporting (and also gain influence when power is concentrated in accordance with socialist principles), and so-called scientists gain money and influence by 'crisis identification'. Until we break that cycle - and Crichton's proposal at least attempts to do so - we're not going to return to a situation where scientists gain influence by legitimate science.