Davey, I'm not going to let you call me a liar or slander me by mischaracterizing my positions to suit your narrative. If you want to let it lie, then let it lie. Don't decide to get additional digs in after we agree to disagree.
I get where you're coming from. I used to believe that things like independent, external review keep the process pure, but then I spent time inside the belly of the beast. In practice, they work about as well as a board of directors does in a corporation. The existence of either suggests that there's a problem, and because people are constrained by time (and corruptible) they only commit so much effort to either. It's certainly better than not having them, but it's like putting a filter on a cigarette. It doesn't solve the underlying problem.
You are 100% correct that most studies denied funding are poor. This is not true with respect to all of them.
Everything that goes on in today's scientific process, from funding to publication to tenure, is the output of an entirely political process. What you are missing is that the politics that are relevant are usually internal to the field, and involve future funding and prestige.
If you want other people in medicine to tell you about the problems in the field, go here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294645/
I explain the problems differently than they do because I see them differently. My background is conflict theory, so I see the empirical problems they observe and apply conflict theory to explain
why we observe them. What I'm telling you about the funding problem is more or less a first-order derivation from the problems those authors describe. If science is a pyramid scheme where most of the rewards attribute to the few, and the few are influential over what gets funded (and they are), then it follows that they will use that power whenever feasible to discourage competing ideas to protect that stream of rewards.
I assure you that they do. It just doesn't get talked about publicly, because when people try to talk about it they get treated the way you treated me. You dismiss the argument out of hand because there are so many liars in the dataset of non-funded research that you mistakenly infer that everyone is a liar.
The whole system is deeply flawed. Many people inside it will admit this to one another, but rarely to an outsider. The journal review process is never double-blind, because both the person submitting the paper and the reviewers know good and darned well who they're dealing with. I have been on both ends of that one. Who gets tenure where is the result of the interaction of political alliances and the volume of research dollars brought in. These processes all have a substantial amount of logrolling that an external observer can never see. Funding is then determined by the people on committees who do business in secret, and are comprised of people who brought home the most bacon and those expected to do so in the future.
If you want to see an argument for why believing science is pure when making policy, even if you assume all of the above problems away, I'll send you here:
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-science-cant-fix-politics/ That link will also tell you that science is inherently politicized, but it does a particularly poor job of explaining why if you ask me.
