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Viliam comments on Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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How much did humanity try applying science to science itself?
For example, let's say that we have a hypothesis "if we force scientists to publish a lot, they will produce better science". Well, that's a testable hypothesis. We could take a large set of scientists, randomly split them into two groups, provide unconditional income to one group, and tell the other group they will be fired if they don't meet their quota of published research. Wait ten or twenty years, and then compare which group has more Nobel prices.
Okay, that was exaggerated, but I hope you got the idea.
In other words, I am curious about how much the working conditions, education, etc. of scientists is actually based on pseudoscience or random decisions, and how much is somehow evidence-based.
I'd guess most of it is based on neither, and is just the result of coordination problems (Ctrl-F for "Tsars" in the latter link).
That still leaves the question of how you decide who get's to be a scientist. There's not enough money to fund everybody who wants to be a scientist with a decent salary.
Science also often isn't funded with the goal of producing Nobel price winners.
It appears to be an active field of study.
The first two links seems mostly about how science influences culture. The third one seems like what I wanted; too bad that the Wikipedia page doesn't contain any conclusions of that research.
The last Wikipedia article has to be written by a cynic: