Charlatanry is definitely a hazard. But there's already a whole lot of that in the existing system. IMO the most effective way of mitigating this is to make debate as open as possible.
As to transformative breakthroughs coming from the study of obscure subjects, well yes this does happen, but this argument is also used to justify the funding of a great amount of obscure trivia which doesn't lead anywhere.
The classic "but without the state XYZ Bad Things will happen!" -> "yes those are already happening right now and the state program is funding it" -> "yeah but that doesn't count/it would be even worse" deadlock.
While I agree with most of your points about intellectual corruption in science, it is an exaggeration to say there have been no breakthroughs. CRISPR technology, for example, will be pretty transformative in the coming decades.
I disagree. CRISPR is an extremely versatile tool. The problem is ethical concerns have stopped it from being used much in humans. Hopefully, in the coming years, this will change.
There was AlexNet which kicked off the deep learning revolution. But of course, it's likely that the corporate labs which immediately took over that field would have also made the same discovery very soon after if an academic hadn't.
Last I calculated, the US was buying a Manhattan Project worth of science every 18 months. How many Manhattan-Project-level breakthroughs have we gotten for all that money?
And MIT researchers have gotten far enough along making powerful superconducting magnets with said materials such that private money is now pouring in for making commercial fusion reactors.
There's another money hole. Expensive giant tokomak reactors that barely (if ever) get to net positive power output. At the rate they're going, they might have commercial fusion reactors by 2200.
This is something I think about a lot. Could there be an easier method of fusion that we haven't figured out, because all the resources have gone into tokomaks?
My opinion is yes. Controlled fusion was first achieved by electrostatic confinement - the Farnsworth Fusor. Though a dead end, it was a super-simple device that a undergrad could build (some smart high school students have done so). Today, the most promising designs are hybrid magnetic-electrostatic virtual cathode designs. I think that pure magnetic confinement or inertial confinement also dead ends, just really, really expensive ones. It's probably going to take a breakthrough in our understanding charge and electromagnetic fields (cue SPQR).
I'm with you on the idea that research should pursue simple and cheap solutions first before expensive and complex ones.
Rocketry is a field I suspect has suffered badly from this. The dominant existing technologies were developed through lavish public funding in order to serve needs exclusive to giant globalist militaries.
Cheaper launch technologies such as rocketoons and using conventional aircraft as a first-stage are being slowly explored by private companies, but there's very little funding for it because the government is subsidising conventional launches.
I genuinely think that if those technologies had been pursued to their potential back in the 60s we'd be living in a genuine space-age right now. The sad part is that it really wouldn't have taken much money to do so.
Tokamaks were giant due to the limits of previous superconductors. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is planning on building a commercial Tokamak south of Richmond Virginia in the early 2030s. They are in the process of building a pilot plant in Massachusetts now. https://cfs.energy/
But I saw a video about the latest liquid nitrogen superconductors with some MIT scientists talking about how they fixed some issues with eddy currents and saturation. They were talking about how the subject was becoming hush-hush because the prospect of profits was becoming real.
Then Commonwealth Fusion Systems was incorporated with two billion dollars of *private* money. It's looking like we are reaching that there corner.
I think it's a big step forward but probably not the solution. Today, everyone building new fusion test beds (or new fission systems for that matter) claims that they will have commercial systems available within a decade or two. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to get funding. I still think that hybrid systems are the best path forward because of their inherent advantages, but unless you want me write 1200-word response, I'll leave it at that.
This problem has been growing since I first noticed it in the late 80's. One of my colleges, a brilliant young Russian scientist, pointed out several things to me in the 90's: There were more papers published in the 90's than in previous decades. The papers published in the 60'sand 70's were longer, more complete, and had more consequential scientific content. I'm sure it's gotten much worse over the last three decades. He came to the conclusion that there were too many research scientists. He assumed that given the expected distribution of natural intelligence and curiosity within a given population, the number of potential first-rate scientists is fixed. Education and competitive admission into institutions can bring this population into a scientific field. Adding numbers beyond these first-rate scientists will only produce second-rate scientists. Great scientists are born, not made. As the institutions begin to fill up with second and third-rate scientists, research degrades. Lesser scientists are not going to be producing ground-breaking research, so to advance or just remain relevant, they must use the political route. Thus, the bureaucracy is born.
Your colleague was spot on. Ability is multiplicative across practitioners, but first-rate scientists are whole numbers, and second and third rate are all integers between 0 and 1. An institution filled with the former multiplies to very high numbers; with the latter, it converges on zero.
But never fear! There's a solution! We just have to import first rate scientists from all the other populations around the world (never mind that they're often not able to build bridges, let alone rockets). All we have to do is give them certificates saying they're smart and the science will start to flow.
It is said by sages, that in the Elder Days, when men still walked the Earth, whenever one "John Carter" would post something on their primitive version of the noosphere, people would scream in pain and agony for they knew they were in for HOURS of reading FASCINATING musings on topics they rarely think about.
Great analysis of Galileo! It’s so good it may make you an honorary Catholic, so look out! If I’m not mistaken, giving up the Ptolemaic model would also have required everybody to give up on the actually functioning navigation methodologies that were in use at the time. What he was proposing would not have provided a viable alternative to practices and equipment people were using day to day for basic an necessary activities. Galileo was really asking a lot from people based more on intuition than anything else. As you point out until Kepler showed that the orbits were actually not strictly circular, his math simply didn’t work.
Our Soviet style scientific funding is mostly wasted, and this article shows that very well. It’s very hard for people to get their heads around this idea, though. Everyone thinks that science is being done and it’s obviously wonderful and terribly important and the government is paying for it at all these great universities with the big, shiny buildings and expensive laboratories. If you tell them that money is actually being shoveled down the drain, they’ll go into severe cognitive dissonance. Must’ve been tough for people in the Soviet Union too. To think that they spent decades and generations being told one thing, and they believed it and built their lives around it, and it turned out that it was all bullshit. No wonder so many of them drank themselves to death when the place fell apart.
Absolutely correct regarding Galileo. The geocentric model continued in use by navigators for a very long time, because it was actually easier to calculate than the Keplerian model.
Eventually the Soviets weren't able to process the cogdis anymore, and it all fell apart. I think that's happening now.
Not shilling crypto, but I think the point of Cardano was to fund projects in a neo-patronage system? I could be wrong though, I haven't thought about it in years.
The system you describe seems far superior to what we have today, but I worry it sows the seeds of its own destruction with crowdfunding. It seems likely to devolve into a popularity contest, where it's not the best ideas getting funded but the most charismatic people. As you say, the reputation economy will keep things moving forward for a while, but eventually personality cults will develop and some people won't care how often their preferred scientist is "proven wrong". At which point peer review may start looking good again... perhaps we're doomed to repeat a cycle.
Even so, it would make the next few decades of scientific inquiry much more exciting, so I'm on board.
You've identified a failure mode that are is certain to emerge. But, I'll gently point out that we see precisely those same things happening in any case within the existing system. Thing is, you can't force people not to support people they like ... But you also can't force them to keep donating, which helps mitigate the personality cult effect. Those will exist but I think they'll largely be capped.
Agreed, even less scientific and more “debatable” fields such as Law have been utterly corrupted, I experienced it first hand in university when I was in law school, the institutions feel less strongly about truth and justice than they do political sensibilities of the lowest of the mob and the crystal tower oligarchs and their fantasies of how crime and punishment works compared to how it actually does.
The whole system of research and debate is completely corrupted by pointless bureocracy and political sensibilities!
I’ve seen law teachers defend with a straight face ideas such as the decriminalization of the act of willingly and intentionally infecting someone with contagious diseases such as HIV or hepatitis with the argument being “is it moral to stop a human being from infecting another?”, this sort of insane and ridiculous nonsense permeates all echelons of law school and this episode was the thing which made me change courses to architecture…the worse argument there will be if a building is ugly.
Thomas Sowell said something about it being no surprise, since the ideas didn’t work, that Leftist ideas were most popular in institutions that could survive with non-working institutions.
Science going woke is when our society went from badly feverish to septic.
I think it’ll ultimately take a generation for DEI to die, and it’ll ultimately be more about female status games than anything else. A lot of publicly-funded institutions are going to need to curdle and fail, and be replaced by newly-organized, meritocratic hierarchies.
The peer review process has also made it almost impossible for observational studies from in the trenches to get published. When I was in vet school we had a dog with a rare and serious skin infection that was life threatening. While waiting on culture and sensitivity we started the dog on a broad spectrum antibiotic with a well established safety profile that has been in use for decades. When we got results back it was a less common bacteria and we needed to switch antibiotics. We switched to one that had been used in other species but had only recently been used in dogs. The dog immediately went into liver failure after a couple days of the new antibiotic (a rare but documented side effect in other species using that antibiotic). We switched antibiotics again and the dog made a full recovery.
The dermatologist has me write up a case study since knowing a new drug causes liver failure is valuable information for veterinarians who might use it. It was repeatedly rejected because we didn’t do a liver biopsy to prove the liver failure wasn’t a result of the initial disease and because no bloodwork was performed between the universally known to be safe antibiotic and the new one.
Information that was valuable in the real world and came at zero cost (other than a couple of hours of my time) was rejected. This happens a lot with clinical experience, it is rejected for not adhering to rigid experimental procedures that don’t reflect real world situations in the first place. Thankfully that particular antibiotic never really took off, probably because other clinicians ran into a similar problem.
See, this is completely insane. There's no reason not to have such observations in the literature. Conclusive? Probably not but it can serve as the motivation for later, more systematic studies.
"you better kill this dog and cut up its liver or you can't tell anyone else this drug might be causing a problem" What a world we live in. Anyone with an iq below 95 shouldn't be allowed to have children.
Medical research today, appears to be mostly correlation studies and not much causative research. Usually, the results are passed on as fact to the gullible public. Some examples are the cholesterol model of heart disease, fat consumption vs carbs and protein, vaccination, and various causes and treatments for sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, etc. Given time, many of these nostrums are found false. An example is stomach ulcers, whereby the prescribed treatment made the problem worse, since they didn't realize (until a few decades ago) that the cause of many ulcers was bacterial.
I can understand the reasoning behind the correlation approach to research to human health. A complex system of internal and external variables (factors) interacting with each other, would make the finding of the cause of any condition very difficult. We all have biochemistry that can vary in a unique way to changes in general body parameters, such as pH, temperature, fitness, weight, etc.
Personally, as a chemist, I don't consider most medical doctors as scientists (although some are). Rather, they are practitioners, who over time develop a body of knowledge (heuristically, for the most part) of their patients - knowing what illnesses they are prone to, what works or doesn't work in healing them, and how they might live a more healthier life. I think this has mostly disappeared now, largely because it isn't feasible with patient loads and it just doesn't pay for most. Now-a -days, many GP's don't know how to diagnose anymore, relying on imaging, prescriptions, and referrals to specialists.
You can't have free ski trips to Colorado if you don't push the newest drug, which is a bit worse than the one that's already been around for 100 years and is a tenth of the price.
I would posit Andrew Huberman as an example. I know he has many critics, as well as fans. What is interesting about him is how he wades through the literature to provide material people actually want. Dopamine loops, how to get jacked at the gym, why I sleep so poorly etc.
I know this is more in the realms of the popularization of science, more commonly seen in writing like the Selfish Gene etc. But I think it shows a relatively modest number of people are needed to fund things, and many people have genuine interest in science, research and technology if it is well presented, which much of it is not.
They also have the intelligence and patience to watch 2+ hour broadcasts on subjects that interest them. Huberman does a better job of explaining complex subjects like neurotransmitters than many experts in the field.
Perhaps he is a poor example, but an energetic audience willing to fund good research is almost certainly obscured by today's bureaucratic monsters. This is of course an old argument made by libertarians in almost every field. As they say, if the state made all the shoes those calling for private shoe firms and cobblers would be lambasted; who will pay for shoes for the poor etc? It would be inconceivable to most the market could support something as crucial as footwear.
I am at a point now where I believe we need to get the government out of almost everything. It is simply too dangerous to allow them to interfere in human affairs.
Many find him non-boring and correct. He is popular, which is the point. More importantly, he is popularizing challenging subjects. If we used him as a crude barometer of public opinion he provides some insights into what people might be prepared to fund. Research into sleeping well, improving performance, mental enhancements etc.
I think some popularizers of science show us that JC's nominal idea of crowdfunding could work. Its critics by comparison would insist the public lack the sophistication to fund the right things. So I think the Hubermans form part of a counter argument.
Popularity has its limits. Someone buying into a popular paradigm is just herd behavior.
For example, sleep "research" doesn't investigate what pre-industrial society humans did and still do. Norming sleep to what 9-to-5 society requires and presenting it as research basic to humans rather than parameters of humans conforming to a paradigm is inexcusable.
Then you would perhaps be prepared to fund someone who did explore these issues?
Popularity is about reach. Some are good communicators of complex ideas. That is where it starts, and it is a crucial first step.
You yourself have given some thought to sleep research, more than I have although the subject interests me. Which is one of the strengths of market systems; individuals are ignorant, but out there someone knows.
So while popularity alone is not enough, it could be enough to break the bonds of the current system, which is what the author argued.
The Brazilian researchers were willing to do part of the boring replication of a 2020 rodent study that used porcine plasma fraction, i.e. exosomes, to rejuvenate rats. The original researchers got greedily caught up in IP and so haven't made progress, although the world's best known epigenetics researcher Steve Horvath was a coauthor who validated their results.
I think academia is a microcosm of the larger problem of fiat currency and government debt. If we eliminate these problems, we can begin to have real conversations about what’s important to us.
Most of what’s happening in academic research won’t even be discussed in a world without sovereign debt and inflationary monetary policies.
It would also allow us to get a handle on the DoD, which is way more wasteful and destructive than the academy.
Charlatanry is definitely a hazard. But there's already a whole lot of that in the existing system. IMO the most effective way of mitigating this is to make debate as open as possible.
As to transformative breakthroughs coming from the study of obscure subjects, well yes this does happen, but this argument is also used to justify the funding of a great amount of obscure trivia which doesn't lead anywhere.
The classic "but without the state XYZ Bad Things will happen!" -> "yes those are already happening right now and the state program is funding it" -> "yeah but that doesn't count/it would be even worse" deadlock.
Bazingo. Almost any failure mode you can point to we already have in spades.
This begs the question - what real scientific breakthroughs have been made at universities over the past few decades?
The answer to that question is: none whatsoever.
While I agree with most of your points about intellectual corruption in science, it is an exaggeration to say there have been no breakthroughs. CRISPR technology, for example, will be pretty transformative in the coming decades.
There have been a few technological advances here and there, but our built environment hasn't changed to any significant degree in decades.
I disagree. CRISPR is an extremely versatile tool. The problem is ethical concerns have stopped it from being used much in humans. Hopefully, in the coming years, this will change.
The "ethical concerns" are overblown. We could cure a lot of congenital diseases if HR ladies in ethics review boards were less schoolmarmish.
There was AlexNet which kicked off the deep learning revolution. But of course, it's likely that the corporate labs which immediately took over that field would have also made the same discovery very soon after if an academic hadn't.
Last I calculated, the US was buying a Manhattan Project worth of science every 18 months. How many Manhattan-Project-level breakthroughs have we gotten for all that money?
What an excellent point of comparison. Adjusted for inflation, though?
Also a dangerous question. Remember the image of blacks protesting the Apollo project you used for an article some months back?
That's what follows from Schantz's question:
How much X could we have gotten instead, if we hadn't funded Y?
It's also a good and valid question, but it is very dangerous.
To whom is it dangerous?
Higher temperature superconductors come to mind.
And MIT researchers have gotten far enough along making powerful superconducting magnets with said materials such that private money is now pouring in for making commercial fusion reactors.
There's another money hole. Expensive giant tokomak reactors that barely (if ever) get to net positive power output. At the rate they're going, they might have commercial fusion reactors by 2200.
This is something I think about a lot. Could there be an easier method of fusion that we haven't figured out, because all the resources have gone into tokomaks?
My opinion is yes. Controlled fusion was first achieved by electrostatic confinement - the Farnsworth Fusor. Though a dead end, it was a super-simple device that a undergrad could build (some smart high school students have done so). Today, the most promising designs are hybrid magnetic-electrostatic virtual cathode designs. I think that pure magnetic confinement or inertial confinement also dead ends, just really, really expensive ones. It's probably going to take a breakthrough in our understanding charge and electromagnetic fields (cue SPQR).
Problem is that those expensive dead ends employ a lot of people, and keeping the experiment running becomes a goal in itself.
I'm with you on the idea that research should pursue simple and cheap solutions first before expensive and complex ones.
Rocketry is a field I suspect has suffered badly from this. The dominant existing technologies were developed through lavish public funding in order to serve needs exclusive to giant globalist militaries.
Cheaper launch technologies such as rocketoons and using conventional aircraft as a first-stage are being slowly explored by private companies, but there's very little funding for it because the government is subsidising conventional launches.
I genuinely think that if those technologies had been pursued to their potential back in the 60s we'd be living in a genuine space-age right now. The sad part is that it really wouldn't have taken much money to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migma
>lack of funding precluded further development.
Well how about that.
Not just tokomaks - one tokomak. They consolidated them since it was expensive and they thought there was duplication...
Tokamaks were giant due to the limits of previous superconductors. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is planning on building a commercial Tokamak south of Richmond Virginia in the early 2030s. They are in the process of building a pilot plant in Massachusetts now. https://cfs.energy/
Here's hoping it works. Fusion has been just over the horizon for decades now...
I've been saying the same thing since researching the subject for high school debate during the Carter years. https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/proem-to-the-aenean-future
But I saw a video about the latest liquid nitrogen superconductors with some MIT scientists talking about how they fixed some issues with eddy currents and saturation. They were talking about how the subject was becoming hush-hush because the prospect of profits was becoming real.
Then Commonwealth Fusion Systems was incorporated with two billion dollars of *private* money. It's looking like we are reaching that there corner.
Like I said - I hope it's real.
Interesting. Saturation levels were always a problem for real world applications. I haven't heard much from that sector lately.
I think it's a big step forward but probably not the solution. Today, everyone building new fusion test beds (or new fission systems for that matter) claims that they will have commercial systems available within a decade or two. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to get funding. I still think that hybrid systems are the best path forward because of their inherent advantages, but unless you want me write 1200-word response, I'll leave it at that.
This problem has been growing since I first noticed it in the late 80's. One of my colleges, a brilliant young Russian scientist, pointed out several things to me in the 90's: There were more papers published in the 90's than in previous decades. The papers published in the 60'sand 70's were longer, more complete, and had more consequential scientific content. I'm sure it's gotten much worse over the last three decades. He came to the conclusion that there were too many research scientists. He assumed that given the expected distribution of natural intelligence and curiosity within a given population, the number of potential first-rate scientists is fixed. Education and competitive admission into institutions can bring this population into a scientific field. Adding numbers beyond these first-rate scientists will only produce second-rate scientists. Great scientists are born, not made. As the institutions begin to fill up with second and third-rate scientists, research degrades. Lesser scientists are not going to be producing ground-breaking research, so to advance or just remain relevant, they must use the political route. Thus, the bureaucracy is born.
Your colleague was spot on. Ability is multiplicative across practitioners, but first-rate scientists are whole numbers, and second and third rate are all integers between 0 and 1. An institution filled with the former multiplies to very high numbers; with the latter, it converges on zero.
So DEI doesn't hamper good science, it kills it.
Exactly
But never fear! There's a solution! We just have to import first rate scientists from all the other populations around the world (never mind that they're often not able to build bridges, let alone rockets). All we have to do is give them certificates saying they're smart and the science will start to flow.
It is said by sages, that in the Elder Days, when men still walked the Earth, whenever one "John Carter" would post something on their primitive version of the noosphere, people would scream in pain and agony for they knew they were in for HOURS of reading FASCINATING musings on topics they rarely think about.
"Unless science is controlled by a greater moral force, it will become the Antichrist prophesied by the early Christians." -- Charles Lindbergh
Great analysis of Galileo! It’s so good it may make you an honorary Catholic, so look out! If I’m not mistaken, giving up the Ptolemaic model would also have required everybody to give up on the actually functioning navigation methodologies that were in use at the time. What he was proposing would not have provided a viable alternative to practices and equipment people were using day to day for basic an necessary activities. Galileo was really asking a lot from people based more on intuition than anything else. As you point out until Kepler showed that the orbits were actually not strictly circular, his math simply didn’t work.
Our Soviet style scientific funding is mostly wasted, and this article shows that very well. It’s very hard for people to get their heads around this idea, though. Everyone thinks that science is being done and it’s obviously wonderful and terribly important and the government is paying for it at all these great universities with the big, shiny buildings and expensive laboratories. If you tell them that money is actually being shoveled down the drain, they’ll go into severe cognitive dissonance. Must’ve been tough for people in the Soviet Union too. To think that they spent decades and generations being told one thing, and they believed it and built their lives around it, and it turned out that it was all bullshit. No wonder so many of them drank themselves to death when the place fell apart.
Absolutely correct regarding Galileo. The geocentric model continued in use by navigators for a very long time, because it was actually easier to calculate than the Keplerian model.
Eventually the Soviets weren't able to process the cogdis anymore, and it all fell apart. I think that's happening now.
Not shilling crypto, but I think the point of Cardano was to fund projects in a neo-patronage system? I could be wrong though, I haven't thought about it in years.
The system you describe seems far superior to what we have today, but I worry it sows the seeds of its own destruction with crowdfunding. It seems likely to devolve into a popularity contest, where it's not the best ideas getting funded but the most charismatic people. As you say, the reputation economy will keep things moving forward for a while, but eventually personality cults will develop and some people won't care how often their preferred scientist is "proven wrong". At which point peer review may start looking good again... perhaps we're doomed to repeat a cycle.
Even so, it would make the next few decades of scientific inquiry much more exciting, so I'm on board.
You've identified a failure mode that are is certain to emerge. But, I'll gently point out that we see precisely those same things happening in any case within the existing system. Thing is, you can't force people not to support people they like ... But you also can't force them to keep donating, which helps mitigate the personality cult effect. Those will exist but I think they'll largely be capped.
Agreed, even less scientific and more “debatable” fields such as Law have been utterly corrupted, I experienced it first hand in university when I was in law school, the institutions feel less strongly about truth and justice than they do political sensibilities of the lowest of the mob and the crystal tower oligarchs and their fantasies of how crime and punishment works compared to how it actually does.
The whole system of research and debate is completely corrupted by pointless bureocracy and political sensibilities!
I’ve seen law teachers defend with a straight face ideas such as the decriminalization of the act of willingly and intentionally infecting someone with contagious diseases such as HIV or hepatitis with the argument being “is it moral to stop a human being from infecting another?”, this sort of insane and ridiculous nonsense permeates all echelons of law school and this episode was the thing which made me change courses to architecture…the worse argument there will be if a building is ugly.
It's hollow sophistry everywhere you look. At best. At worst, malicious deception.
Thomas Sowell said something about it being no surprise, since the ideas didn’t work, that Leftist ideas were most popular in institutions that could survive with non-working institutions.
Science going woke is when our society went from badly feverish to septic.
I think it’ll ultimately take a generation for DEI to die, and it’ll ultimately be more about female status games than anything else. A lot of publicly-funded institutions are going to need to curdle and fail, and be replaced by newly-organized, meritocratic hierarchies.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-dying-dream-of-dei
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/dei-dies-a-little-more
That's a great idea for an article you have there: how to handle female status games as a man.
I’ve thought a lot about this, how do we socially mitigate female status games as well?
WE HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU....
The peer review process has also made it almost impossible for observational studies from in the trenches to get published. When I was in vet school we had a dog with a rare and serious skin infection that was life threatening. While waiting on culture and sensitivity we started the dog on a broad spectrum antibiotic with a well established safety profile that has been in use for decades. When we got results back it was a less common bacteria and we needed to switch antibiotics. We switched to one that had been used in other species but had only recently been used in dogs. The dog immediately went into liver failure after a couple days of the new antibiotic (a rare but documented side effect in other species using that antibiotic). We switched antibiotics again and the dog made a full recovery.
The dermatologist has me write up a case study since knowing a new drug causes liver failure is valuable information for veterinarians who might use it. It was repeatedly rejected because we didn’t do a liver biopsy to prove the liver failure wasn’t a result of the initial disease and because no bloodwork was performed between the universally known to be safe antibiotic and the new one.
Information that was valuable in the real world and came at zero cost (other than a couple of hours of my time) was rejected. This happens a lot with clinical experience, it is rejected for not adhering to rigid experimental procedures that don’t reflect real world situations in the first place. Thankfully that particular antibiotic never really took off, probably because other clinicians ran into a similar problem.
See, this is completely insane. There's no reason not to have such observations in the literature. Conclusive? Probably not but it can serve as the motivation for later, more systematic studies.
"you better kill this dog and cut up its liver or you can't tell anyone else this drug might be causing a problem" What a world we live in. Anyone with an iq below 95 shouldn't be allowed to have children.
To be fair you can do a liver biopsy on a live dog but it is invasive and isn’t without risk.
Fair enough.
Medical research today, appears to be mostly correlation studies and not much causative research. Usually, the results are passed on as fact to the gullible public. Some examples are the cholesterol model of heart disease, fat consumption vs carbs and protein, vaccination, and various causes and treatments for sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, etc. Given time, many of these nostrums are found false. An example is stomach ulcers, whereby the prescribed treatment made the problem worse, since they didn't realize (until a few decades ago) that the cause of many ulcers was bacterial.
I can understand the reasoning behind the correlation approach to research to human health. A complex system of internal and external variables (factors) interacting with each other, would make the finding of the cause of any condition very difficult. We all have biochemistry that can vary in a unique way to changes in general body parameters, such as pH, temperature, fitness, weight, etc.
Personally, as a chemist, I don't consider most medical doctors as scientists (although some are). Rather, they are practitioners, who over time develop a body of knowledge (heuristically, for the most part) of their patients - knowing what illnesses they are prone to, what works or doesn't work in healing them, and how they might live a more healthier life. I think this has mostly disappeared now, largely because it isn't feasible with patient loads and it just doesn't pay for most. Now-a -days, many GP's don't know how to diagnose anymore, relying on imaging, prescriptions, and referrals to specialists.
You can't have free ski trips to Colorado if you don't push the newest drug, which is a bit worse than the one that's already been around for 100 years and is a tenth of the price.
I would posit Andrew Huberman as an example. I know he has many critics, as well as fans. What is interesting about him is how he wades through the literature to provide material people actually want. Dopamine loops, how to get jacked at the gym, why I sleep so poorly etc.
I know this is more in the realms of the popularization of science, more commonly seen in writing like the Selfish Gene etc. But I think it shows a relatively modest number of people are needed to fund things, and many people have genuine interest in science, research and technology if it is well presented, which much of it is not.
They also have the intelligence and patience to watch 2+ hour broadcasts on subjects that interest them. Huberman does a better job of explaining complex subjects like neurotransmitters than many experts in the field.
Perhaps he is a poor example, but an energetic audience willing to fund good research is almost certainly obscured by today's bureaucratic monsters. This is of course an old argument made by libertarians in almost every field. As they say, if the state made all the shoes those calling for private shoe firms and cobblers would be lambasted; who will pay for shoes for the poor etc? It would be inconceivable to most the market could support something as crucial as footwear.
I am at a point now where I believe we need to get the government out of almost everything. It is simply too dangerous to allow them to interfere in human affairs.
The first and last Huberman podcast I heard was both boring and wrong.
I'll try again if he has the balls to cut off his academic association and rely on crowdfunding.
Many find him non-boring and correct. He is popular, which is the point. More importantly, he is popularizing challenging subjects. If we used him as a crude barometer of public opinion he provides some insights into what people might be prepared to fund. Research into sleeping well, improving performance, mental enhancements etc.
I think some popularizers of science show us that JC's nominal idea of crowdfunding could work. Its critics by comparison would insist the public lack the sophistication to fund the right things. So I think the Hubermans form part of a counter argument.
Popularity has its limits. Someone buying into a popular paradigm is just herd behavior.
For example, sleep "research" doesn't investigate what pre-industrial society humans did and still do. Norming sleep to what 9-to-5 society requires and presenting it as research basic to humans rather than parameters of humans conforming to a paradigm is inexcusable.
Then you would perhaps be prepared to fund someone who did explore these issues?
Popularity is about reach. Some are good communicators of complex ideas. That is where it starts, and it is a crucial first step.
You yourself have given some thought to sleep research, more than I have although the subject interests me. Which is one of the strengths of market systems; individuals are ignorant, but out there someone knows.
So while popularity alone is not enough, it could be enough to break the bonds of the current system, which is what the author argued.
I mentioned crowdfunded research that's worthwhile in these comments, as found in comments to https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2025/02/01/proposal-for-enhancing-experimental-anti-aging-treatment-with-young-plasma/
The Brazilian researchers were willing to do part of the boring replication of a 2020 rodent study that used porcine plasma fraction, i.e. exosomes, to rejuvenate rats. The original researchers got greedily caught up in IP and so haven't made progress, although the world's best known epigenetics researcher Steve Horvath was a coauthor who validated their results.
I should have mentioned Mitteldorf, actually. Fascinating guy.
I'm sure we'd all chip in to some of that.
Personally, I want a mission to see if there is life on Europa.
Thanks, John. Another great read.
I think academia is a microcosm of the larger problem of fiat currency and government debt. If we eliminate these problems, we can begin to have real conversations about what’s important to us.
Most of what’s happening in academic research won’t even be discussed in a world without sovereign debt and inflationary monetary policies.
It would also allow us to get a handle on the DoD, which is way more wasteful and destructive than the academy.
I believe you are almost certainly correct about that.
No reason private labs can't do that. A lot of money in it.
Science and Academia has become a shadow of its former self. It is mind-boggling, with DEI having killed these fields.
The real thinkers are hereon Substack.