You know there's little we enjoy more than getting reader email. Overwhelmingly, our readers are highly intelligent and well-informed, and every time they write us it's always interesting and valuable.

A few days ago we wrote out some policy prescriptions to fix science, which is increasingly being shown to have an epidemic of fraud problem.

"The first is to make a law to the effect that if a study is taxpayer-funded, it cannot be published in a peer-reviewed journal, instead it must be published on some open-access forum, along with the underlying data," we wrote. We pointed out that Albert Einstein managed to win two Nobel Prizes without once submitting his work to peer review. We noted that peer review too often quashes independent inquiry and independent thinking. But we also added a moral point about the use of taxpayer funds: "science that is funded by the public should be available to the public."

Our other suggestion was that "a significant amount (15% at least, we would aim for 25%) of the budget of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health should be earmarked towards funding reproduction studies." Our rationale was the following: "Currently, there are no financial or career or prestige incentives for scientists to test studies done by other colleagues, rather than try to come up with their own study designs. In fact, the incentives point in the other direction, since trying to reproduce a study done by colleagues and failing will not make you any friends, and it turns out, scientists, even those with tenure, really don't want to look bad to their friends."

One of our subscribers pushed back ever so gently. "Saying that a taxpayer-funded study 'cannot' be published in a peer-reviewed journal may be too strong of a suggestion here. Instead, I would propose that publication in a peer-reviewed journal cannot occur unless also it is also published on an open-access forum of taxpayer-funded research, either with the open-access form first or at least simultaneously," they wrote.

Why? "You're absolutely right that peer-review can and has been abused; however, the scientific inquiry process is deeply collaborative and promulgating the results of that inquiry should reflect such a nature. 'Independent inquiry,' as you put it, is not the foundation of science, either in process or result. Novel or unconventional lines of inquiry do advance science, but they are not pursued in a vacuum. Each step of the scientific investigative process is built on the work of others. Problems that arise are not often solved independently either. The majority of scientists are not Einstein, nor are the majority of scientific papers submitted for peer review single-author papers."

"I would argue that a lot of the issues of scientific/academic publishing lie with the journals themselves, not the peer-review process. It's journals who make money from paywalls and subscriptions and purchasing articles, not the authors of papers nor even the reviewers. To reform publishing, you have to reform the ones who are actually profiting here. It's not an immediately obvious distinction, but an important one to make if we want to 'fix science,'" our subscriber went on to write.

It's a fair response!

There's a good case to be made that the figure of the lone genius coming up with brilliant new insights has been exaggerated. There's also a good case to be made that peer-review, while currently broken, is potentially salvageable and that, as our correspondent put it, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Personally, we would be happy with this compromise. Putting everything that is peer-reviewed also in an open-access format would essentially make peer-review irrelevant, or at least go a long way towards that.

But we are more interested in what you think. Feel free to chime in!

Policy News You Need To Know

#Life — Speaking of peer review… You may have read that researchers have found an increase in child mortality since Dobbs. That statistic is highly misleading, as EPPC's Patrick Brown writes on his Substack.

#AI — "When LLMs are prompted to generate policy recommendations for the EU, LLMs responses tend to contain left-leaning policy proposals," finds the excellent bias researcher David Rozado. Given that the biggest AI companies seem to be colonized by purple-haired speech commissars, it seems that absent a direct policy response the best thing for conservatives to do is to support open source AI so as to get an alternative.

#Infrastructure — Remember how Congress appropriated billions for rural broadband and nothing ended up being built? The $5 bilion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure charging program, passed in 2021, has so far led to exactly eight charging stations getting built, according to a report by House Energy & Commerce. (Via Thomas Hochman)

#LeftWingAntisemitism — The hashtag here is a bit of a mouthful, but it's appropriate… Remember Covid? (Yes, we'd rather not, too…) Remember how draconian lockdowns were in New York, and remember how it seemed that enforcement was being strangely targeted at Orthodox Jews? Well, it turns out, that's literally what happened. A FOIL request by The Post Millennial shows that NYC government specifically targeted Jewish schools in Brooklyn in the Fall of 2020.

#LGBT — A UN report has computed a staggering figure: 890 medals across 29 sports have been stolen from women athletes by biological males competing in women's sports.

#VotingRights — Last night, Virginia filed an emergency stay in the US Supreme Court against an appeal courts ruling blocking it from purging its voter rolls of noncitizens. Of course, it's astonishing that this should even be an issue.

#Education — AEI's Frederick Hess, whose work we always enjoy, has an interesting column out at EducationNext: taking a step back, he points out that the discourse has shifted from "an eat-your-vegetables ethos that celebrated rigor, results, and efficiency" to what he calls "sugar-frosted politics." Our cynical explanation for this phenomenon: we tried everything to try to get better results out of kids, but everything failed. So we are back to fuzzy good intentions because those aren't measurable.

#Housing — You keep hearing about a "housing shortage" in the US and it certainly feels intuitive given the skyrocketing costs, especially in NIMBY jurisdictions. But measuring shortages is tricky, Brookings' David Wessel reminds us. "The estimates of the housing shortage most often quoted in the press, by politicians and by White House economists, rely on vacancy rates—the number of vacant homes as a share of all housing units—as a key indicator," he writes. However, this may not be the best indicator.

#Politics — You may be curious about the content of the discussion between President Trump and Joe Rogan. You may not have the time or the inclination to sit through all 3 hours of it. (Your correspondent enjoys both but, he must confess, in small doses.) In that case, we have you covered with this excellent X dot com thread with a point-by-point. Seems like it was a good conversation.

#BlueAnon — This has been the funniest bit of news in the past several days. You may have heard that the Washington Post refused to endorse a candidate, and that this has led to a mini-meltdown in a few sectors of the right. Well, Semafor media reporter Max Tani reports that "the NYT has been experiencing a small but noticeable wave of cancelations since yesterday, as well as emails to the effect of “f*** Bezos.” There’s been some internal discussion about what (if anything) to do about the confusion."