Peer allocation of Federal and Foundation funding is killing science innovation - why funding science through the government and charities is a mistake

Name a committee other than the Continental Congress that's ever taken a risk. Okay...times up.

OK now name a committee that's distributing other people's money composed of the top 10 or 20 people getting that selfsame other people's money taking a risk on an outsider who is not a protégé of one of the committee members?  No luck? You have just now described the grant making process for the United States science borg as well as for almost all the major not for profits who fund science.  The result of course is group think as the things that the "Old boys group" believes are studied and buttressed and all the 'new shit' they don't like isn't.  It's the tyranny of 'settled science' over innovation and it's become a disaster.  It's why there's so little medical innovation and why the 'settled science of global warming' has all been so bad at predicting the course of .....global warming. 

And what's worse when only one side of a public debate gets the vast majority of funding public policy gets perverted.  This has been particularly true from Anthropogenic Global Warming where studies that looked to buttress pro alarmist and 'climatist' theories have received the lions', tigers' and bears' (oh my) share of the funding while 'cyclical' and 'Solar' theories have been deliberately starved.  Likewise marijuana research has been heavily steered towards finding harm to buttress the State's brutal prohibition campaign to the great detriment of tens of millions of people like my cancer victim father who could have and now increasingly do use Marijuana as a treatment for nausea, appetite enhancement and general psychological boost.

Ars technica has a good piece giving examples of how innovators have been stymied by this groupthink.  One of the common ways that people with brilliant but unconventional ideas have gotten around the greed stupidity of state and charity committees is via rich people who fund and promote the research out of their own convictions and pockets.  Yet we have a major move among the statist left to take more wealth and income away from the rich who are the overwhelming funders of true science and innovation and hand it to the dead handed state who burns the money reinforcing the science status quo. And not coincidentally, magnifying its power and reach.

Sigh