[ahartmetz]

I think the state could simply allocate money to long-lived scientific institutions and let the experts there handle things as long as there is no obvious corruption.

[dsr_]

Self-regulation has a tendency to either work well for a few years, then gradually become corrupted... or be corrupt from the beginning.

A distressingly high percentage of humans like zero-sum status games. More people are happier when status is recognized as a semi-unbounded positive-sum game.

[philipallstar]

What does "let the experts handle things" look like in practice that's much different to fakeable impact metrics such as citation count?

[ahartmetz]

It doesn't foster bad publication practices (volume over quality).