While this may be largely true at the level of results of individual experiments, STEM is plagued by equally significant issues around funding. i.e. selection of which experiments will get performed. Consider the politics required to fund LHC and the necessity of there being a "God Particle" to discover. Or the reasoning applied to research in astrophysics, where at the end of a chain of tortuous logic there always should be something like "this could help us understand whether we are alone in the Universe". Or the quota of experiments needed to justify the budget for Space Shuttle. I am not objecting to these researches per se, rather highlighting that in STEM research funding at least, the Emperor has no clothes. As you say, experiments are largely sound because not easily faked, yet the distribution of research actually performed is driven by political expediencies more than it should be. Good researchers are those who understand and work within the distortions inherent to the funding landscape; a form of self-censorship.
> Or the reasoning applied to research in astrophysics, where at the end of a chain of tortuous logic there always should be something like "this could help us understand whether we are alone in the Universe"
I went to the NSF grant database and searched for "astrophysics":
> Result 1. Deliverable: a terabyte-scale real-time data exchange and correlation platform. Ultimate purpose: expediate collection & analysis process for data sourced from multiple observatories.
> Result 2. Deliverable: "the coordinated observation of nearby supernovae with optical and near-infrared spectrographs on 4m and 8m class telescope..." Ultimate Purpose: The study of thermonuclear supernovae ... [which] have played a central role in the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe and have a key role in attempts to constrain the nature of dark energy.
> Result 3. Deliverable: "an underground accelerator laboratory" Ultimate Purpose: " address three long-standing fundamental problems in nuclear astrophysics: solar neutrino sources and the core metallicity of the sun; carbon-based nucleosynthesis; and neutron sources for the production of trans-iron elements in stars."
> ... that's all I care to summarize
Where is the tortuous logic and bullshit justification you keep going on about? It looks to me like the grants are going towards funding legitimate scientific inquiries into legitimate scientific questions.
