During the clinton administration, NIH funding doubled over ~5 years. This led to a glut of PhDs (far, far more than there are faculty slots or biotech jobs) who had limited job options and it didn't really translate to higher scientific productivity (in some sense, it just ended up selecting for professors who were more cutthroat and willing to publish lower quality stuff in higher h-index journals).
I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab and computational) will just waste more money rather than using it to scale up productivity.
The real question is ultimately "how do we scale scientific productivity in a way that benefits humanity directly and in the short term", and few people have any answer to that. It seems like the current state of the art, and hard to improve on, is to fund lots of people, give them time to be creative, and then send them to meetings to get tipsy with people who have money, while demonstrating their posters. I'm not kidding.
>I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab and computational) will just waste more money rather than using it to scale up productivity.
While I agree to an extent, it's not necessarily possible to 'scale up'. I helped run a project off around $40,000 of grant money. Our goals were research and education. About half went to pay my coworker and I about $15/h, another large chunk went to gas. The rest went to equipment and stuff. We couldn't charge for anything, we had no product to sell. We made brochures and buttons we gave out by donation, our work was in no way marketable. We had to justify everything we did by proving the value of the animals we were studying to agriculture.
There's a ton of scientific research that isn't directly valuable in the short term. Especially when it comes to biology. As it is, much of the work is just gathering data because we have painfully limited knowledge of our ecosystems. But the more we learn, the more we understand how important they are for the long term functioning of the planet.
It's exceedingly difficult convince a logging company or an oil company, the government they bribe, or the public in general that caring about the long term gains of researching these things should come before the short term gains of exploiting them. At least in my experience.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average institution or entity that Bill Gates chooses to fund is much more productive than the average NIH funded lab.
I think the answer lies in taking a good look at where the money is going. Particularly, I think I think we need to give more to the very productive people and institutions. I know it's the million dollar question, by what is Salk doing that others are not? Or CSHL which has something like 8 nobel laureates there.
One last observation is that a career in science just doesn't make sense anymore. Why slave away making $40 or $50k as a postdoc or an instructor after years of studious study when you can pull 6 figures in tech right out of school? This right here is one of the things that tells the bright ones to stay away from academia.
Ex-Scientist here: While I agree the gates foundation is likely doing a better job than the nih... The danger is this, how do you decide upon a metric for productivity? How do you then prevent 1) corruption, absent that, 2) inadvertent corruption via biases (I'm going to judge proposals in my field more favorably because they are less confusing or more comfortable, or the inverse, more harshly since I want to keep competition out or know the pitfalls better), and absent that, 3) goodhart's law?
Current scientist: I think the answer is easy. Take more risk. Science is by nature risky. We're trying to figure out things that we don't know. That results in a lot of failure (I definitely wouldn't use the Silicon Valley model of failure being a metric of success though).
One major change I would make from public money is publishing of results good or bad. There's this competition to get into top tier journals (which I don't think is bad or you can get rid of), but this is done at the cost of dumping good science just because it wasn't good enough for a top tier. Using impact as a metric is good but not great. The mark of a good scientist is their work and their passion, not where they publish. While there's a correlation, there's also Goodhart. If this is the only metric that we really concentrate on, then it will lead to slower science. We all know that we learn much more from failure than success. We all know that most of science is banging your head on the table for weeks out of frustration. But that's also not common knowledge.
So I'd say that those funding science need to be more risky and those in science need to be more open about their failures and be realistic in their discussion of science.
> One major change I would make from public money is publishing of results good or bad. There's this competition to get into top tier journals (which I don't think is bad or you can get rid of), but this is done at the cost of dumping good science just because it wasn't good enough for a top tier. Using impact as a metric is good but not great.
> The mark of a good scientist is their work and their passion, not where they publish.
You are overlooking an invisible but equally important mark of a good scientist: a scientist’s impression on peers aka reputation, which usually comes down to two types: prestigious publication (in a prestigious journal or with a prestigious co-author) or having a good number of citations. The first kind of reputation is bequeathed almost immediately, the second kind of reputation is deferred — it can only be gained after the passage of time (years).
If a scientist is known to have co-authored a paper that peers later on characterize as a seminal contribution to the field, peers are much more likely to pay attention to future papers from that scientist. The converse is true.
The number of published papers, whether in prestigious journals or otherwise, far exceeds the number of people with free time and relevant qualifications to assess them.
At the end of the day, human attention is a scarce resource, which is why it is the metric those aspiring to be regarded as “good scientists” in their field optimize for. Taken together, a scientist’s publication history is used as a proxy for authority in a field, which in turn is used to filter which papers to read or send to the trash can.
Science is accidental, boring, repetitive, focused, finicky, wasted, political, ... A beast not easily tamed. Think of Edison's 100 trials to develop the light bulb. I continually think of my own truncated scientific career. I couldn't, early on in my projects, see the woods for the trees. About the only thing, I recognised was that I was just one cog in a vast enterprise. Looking back, I wish I had had the energy and insight to see beyond my lab work to where it might lead.
Back in those days, you needed the term "business model" in your grant submission in order to attract funds. I walked away, thinking I had interests that could better generate a business.
The way to increase efficiency over time is to develop useful tools like CRISPR not simply look for the most beneficial research to solve a specific problem. Bill Gates has a focus on specific goals which are extremely valuable today, but arguably shortsighted. Further, the NIH is focused on solving problems for the UK not say Ethiopia. But, as poor countries develop they start using UK style solutions not cheaper though less effective alternatives.
So it’s really a question of which metric you’re using to evaluate each system not some universal efficiency metric. Global impact over the next 20 years vs global impact over 200 years etc.
> develop useful tools like CRISPR not simply look for the most beneficial research to solve a specific problem
You're describing a 40+ year body of research as if it were a project to develop CRISPR as an endpoint. But that's nothing like the process that actually produced CRISPR.
Take the Hsu et. al. paper describing CRISPR-Cas9 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4343198/), for example. That paper cites 100 other papers, with multiple citations in each decade going back to the 1980s. (The first paper cited was published based on research that likely happened 10 years before before the sequencing of the entire genome of an organism.) And those 100 papers lean on other papers, etc.
What I am describing is research without an immediate social or medical benefit.
Also, CRISPR‘s roots go way past 40 years. Watson and Crick for example helped pave the way well over 60 years ago. A decade after their research was published a doctor may have found it interesting, but it was still a long way from being directly useful.
The older I have gotten, the more I believe that short term gains are better than long term strategies because short-term gains build on each other.
I don’t know the history of crispr, but I doubt it was just a single check, single project completed from start to end. I’m sure it took a lot of iteration and success of many small short-term goals
It’s the nature of the goals not the time it takes to reach them that I am talking about.
A COVID-19 vaccine is extremely valuable today, but it becomes useless even 5 years from now. On the other hand our experience with COVID-19 is likely to spawn a great deal of research into developing vaccines faster which while useless for this epidemic could be extremely valuable for the next several.
Clearly a COVID-19 vaccine could save millions of lives and is worth investing in, but it’s a specific finite number. So called basic research can save more people’s lives than are alive today.
Correct me if I'm wrong: Gates projects are less productive than NIH, counterproductivey harming education policy, and focused on different, cheaper problems like non-US basic health and malaria.
Why not create more research labs and professorships?
There are many state universities without great programs right? Also glut of PhDs doesnt seem to be a problem for a lot of engineering fields.
The challenge with those is hiring. State unis without great programs have a hard time hiring the top folks needed to make great programs. Also, top universities will just hire away the best professors from state universities after the profs become successful.
I think the rich folks are more interested in making Institutes- the Allen Institute and CZI being two examples. Institutes which are not affiliated with a university have a lot of advantages to the folks they hire- tend to be in popular locations, with higher salaries, more resources for crazy ideas, less overhead on grants (just a guess, I don't really know for sure), and NO TEACHING REQUIREMENTS (many top research profs hate teaching because it eats so much time).
I worked at something a bit like the Allen Institute, but that is governed by a public university. It's not an issue if done right.
We collaborated with them quite a bit by the way, and they faced almost exactly the same issues. Salaries aren't that good really (maybe 10-20% higher than in US national labs), they struggle to hire people who usually can make twice the money at Amazon or Microsoft. And you still need some ties to academia.
From my point of view, as a developer who didn't understand anything about the science my platform was used for:
- I think you probably want to have a few PhD students, postdocs and professors. They are the ones who can be creative given the right environment: no pressure to publish, access to sufficient resources (material and human) that enable their work.
- You need more money, but more importantly to spend it wisely. Pay people enough (in my case 20-30% more) and you'll cut the turnover by 2-3x.
How do you know small labs are more productive? Are we trying to do science for society or trying to be a jobs program? These two objectives are not necessarily synergistic.
I think we should look at the environment of the sputnik, Manhattan, and Bell labs era. I suspect the incentives are misaligned. Currently, my success is basically citations, publications, speaking engagements, and grants won. Technology developed should serve those purposes. At the labs of old, this was not the case as real technological developments were the goal. I think.
Inefficiency is intrinsic to all human activities.
Double over 5 years is just shy of 20%, risks have grown by much more than that amount. Current budget is a paltry ~30B. Progress is better than perfection.
> how do we scale scientific productivity in a way that benefits humanity directly and in the short term
This is actually pretty straight forward and if you read my comment history, the clues are in there. If you have $500M+ you'd like to spend on curing cancer, feel free to reply with a means of contacting you and be prepared to provide proof you're good for the funding.
According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient.
To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health."
> He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.
What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to improve the research and funding processes to make them more relevant, more efficient, and more reliable.
1. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized.
2. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound conclusions.
3. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward.
Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech:
The thing about science is that it's quite unpredictable. While I'm sure we can increase the efficiency of the system I'm not sure where the efficiency ceiling lies, as even with great processes it's simply not possible to know beforehand which approaches will be successful (if you did it would not require research).
I mean, look at the proportion of software projects that fail, which I'd estimate to be 50 % at least. And software engineering operates with much fewer unknowns compared to research.
Physics research is similar: Much of the research does not yield world-changing technology, or anything useful at all. I wouldn't say it's useless though, as unsuccessful projects still can provide inspiration for new research avenues and even if the research fails, the researcher (hopefully) gets better at doing research in the process, so the chances of producing something good the next time he/she tries increase.
I think the most promising avenue of increasing research productivity is to make it possible for more people to do quality research. Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not, so let's create more opportunity.
Absence of a result is still a result, it's just not publishable. There are very few journals that will take a paper that boils down to "we tried some things to solve this problem, and they didn't work, and not even in an interesting way".
Sometimes scientific progress goes "boink". Consequentialism is dangerous. Researchers, like everyone, need to be able to fail.
It could be that there is too much money in science - there are too many under-qualified people jamming up the system. Requiring more administration and overhead to make them effective. Jamming the information channels with bad studies, reducing the signal to noise ratio.
Biotech companies are responding well because their incentive structures are well-aligned with discovering a solution (treatment or cure) to this problem. Academics and other government-funded researchers are simply responding to their incentives, which are not well-aligned in this case.
The Manhattan project and others like it succeeded because they gave resources to scientists and researchers who were not adapted to gaming a government-funded and bureaucratically-run grant system. Major government funded research projects (especially international ones like nuclear fusion) are not stalling because of lack of money, it is simply the system and incentive structure. Pouring more money in will not help us.
A prize system like what Tyler Cowen is advocating may work better, though I can't say I'm sure about that.
I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with any of my collaborators.
Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects to support, we only care about what would be important to our field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece of work and wanted to see the results.
On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground. My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad. student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I study, not because of citations.
Many non-academics seem to have this view that science is full of senior researchers with political motivations stifling good ideas and gaming the grant system for personal gain. I can't say that people don't game the system, but in my experience it was very much a symptom of an already broken system.
As I see it, there certainly isn't enough funding (in the US) but that's not actually the primary problem. The issue is the processes used to allocate the funding (IMO). The funding cutoffs are _extremely_ competitive (because there isn't enough to go around) and renewals are typically every 4 to 5 years, but the system doesn't seem to be designed with funding stability in mind. It creates an incredibly stressful and uncertain climate, so of course people group up and game the system to varying degrees.
(I almost want to describe the climate as feast and famine, but that's not right because there doesn't seem to be much in the way of feasts - just slightly less famine.)
Your view of the incentives argument is too narrow. In my experience, the people who actively try to game the system are rare. The majority of the problem is people and ideas being filtered out by the system. This comment by Daniel Lakeland on Andrew Gelman's blog says it better than I could: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think-rese...
> The way the incentives play out is that they create a survivorship bias. You can’t do science today without at least basically paying your own salary, either through grants (many biomed researchers have to pay a large component of their salary directly through their grants) or through making “having you in the university” make sense for the university so that it pays your salary. That again basically means either grants, or adding substantially to the university prestige and the ability to charge money for tuition and get high quality students etc.
> So, anyone with tenure in academia today has spent say 5 to 10 years minimum creating a “brand” that somehow enables them to pay their salaries, and/or funds for lab work etc. If the primary kind of “brand” that universities respond to is a “fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand” then the primary content of academia today is people who survived that cutoff…
> It’s not so much that individuals see the incentives and change their own behaviors to fit it (though this happens to some extent) it’s more just that lots of people go into the filter, and the ones that come out are enriched for that particular behavior.
> Also note that this mechanism doesn’t require the individual scientists to be primarily money-driven. It’s sufficient for the MBAs running the dean/provost/president offices to be primarily money driven, which they definitively are.
I would recommend reading chapter 4 of the book "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (a physics PhD). While I disagree with a large fraction of the book (in particular, I don't think the problem is inherently political), I think chapter 4 is mostly right and shows how a researcher can feel self-motivated while actually being under strong external influences.
Yes, yes, I understand your point. What I'm trying to say is that the PIs in my department (the ones who made it through the filter, that is) don't seem to have the “fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand” that you're talking about.
I might just be really lucky to be in a clean department, but Machiavellian researchers accumulating in academia by filtering or otherwise just isn't my experience, sorry.
I'm interested in hearing your experience though because it sounds like it's very different. I'm studying accelerator physics by the way, an extremely applied sub-field of physics. It may be that it's easier to weed out the people that don't pull their weight here.
To be clear, I'm not thinking specifically about hyped-up research that doesn't pan out. Low quality research in general is what I'm thinking about. And I see the vast majority of academics as well-intentioned and not manipulative. (And that includes my advisor, who, despite the disagreements we have as described below, has good intentions.)
Academics are incentivized to publish papers in recognized journals and bring in external funding. I'll focus specifically on publishing here for simplicity. I could write about funding if desired.
The source of many problems I have with the current system is that I want to do high quality research, but the current system doesn't make that easy. The most important research I've done so far has been to make a large data compilation and use this to test different models and hypotheses in my subfield. But my advisor never liked this, and mostly discouraged me from doing this research. He would have preferred instead that I stick to the more established path of skimming the literature for a problem some review article called open, doing a naive experiment about that, and then publishing the experiment. (Yes, I am being facetious, but unfortunately this characterization is accurate in my experience.) My experience is that review articles are far from comprehensive and frequently contain misinformation. It's important to actually assemble a large amount of data to see where the real gaps are, not just what a review article called a gap. This sort of data compilation is very rare in my experience.
It really was clearly about getting publications as quickly as possible. My advisor repeatedly pointed out to me what others recently published in my field and exclusively what he pointed out to me I'd call naive. His point was "This is good enough to get a publication" and my point is "So what? Just because other people do a bad job doesn't mean that I should." To him, other people are getting publications when he's getting nothing! He didn't seem concerned that I thought most of these papers weren't making a contribution. That's not to say that he doesn't care at all about quality, but in practice he's more concerned about getting publications than quality. (He might not see the two as in conflict.)
In the end, I think I am making several large contributions, even if the "gestation" time was longer than people would like. To get tenure, you need to publish often and regularly, but a lot of valuable research takes longer than people would like to get results. The data compilation took a long time. I started this data compilation in roughly Jan. 2017. I had a conference presentation on it in Nov. 2017. I published a conference paper based in part on it in May 2018, and it wasn't until December 2019 that I submitted two journal papers using the data. (I prefer to take my time to perfect an article rather than rush it.) This sort of delay isn't acceptable in the current system, regardless of the value of the work at the end. In terms of total publications, I think I'm actually coming out ahead of most PhD students in my department, but by now I'm seen as unproductive by my advisor so that doesn't matter.
At this point, I'm waiting for one of my papers to be accepted because my advisor won't allow me to graduate until I have a paper accepted at a peer-reviewed journal. My original plan was to publish a few years after my PhD. I've been told multiple times by professors that the basic purpose of a PhD is to learn how to publish in peer reviewed journals, and they'll let you graduate once you've demonstrated that you can do that. And this does actually seem to be the crux in my case. Doesn't seem to matter that nowhere in my department's rules does it say that peer-reviewed publication is required.
It would have been much easier to just pump out a naive paper every year. I would have been done my PhD years ago if that were the case, and science wouldn't have advanced much if at all.
Also, don't mistake my advisor's position as "the incentives say to publish papers so that's what we should do". No, his position is something along the lines of "publishing papers is part of the point of a PhD". He's not thinking about incentives. He genuinely believes that publishing tons of papers is a good thing. The incentives selected him; he is not responding to the incentives as far as I can tell.
I don't have a PhD, but I did run a large R&D program which funded a bunch (30+) of PhD students, and I worked closely with them and their supervisors.
I think you should consider listening more to your supervisor. I know nothing about your field, but I've seen a lot of PhDs go off the rails because they chased after something they thought was a great idea only to find it was a problem no one really cared about.
Young PhD students are really smart, but I've certainly seen that experience does seem to count in choosing good questions.
The incremental "find an open problem mentioned elsewhere and work on that for a while" isn't a bad way to start a PhD career. You learn a bunch about the field doing that.
At this point, I'm waiting for one of my papers to be accepted because my advisor won't allow me to graduate until I have a paper accepted at a peer-reviewed journal. My original plan was to publish a few years after my PhD. I've been told multiple times by professors that the basic purpose of a PhD is to learn how to publish in peer reviewed journals, and they'll let you graduate once you've demonstrated that you can do that. And this does actually seem to be the crux in my case. Doesn't seem to matter that nowhere in my department's rules does it say that peer-reviewed publication is required.
This seems an odd thing to complain about. Surely a PhD is all about peer review, and should be so. Peer review means people who know about the topic have reviewed it - how else should a PhD be done?
> I think you should consider listening more to your supervisor. I know nothing about your field, but I've seen a lot of PhDs go off the rails because they chased after something they thought was a great idea only to find it was a problem no one really cared about.
Unfortunately only so much can be communicated in an online comment. I tried going into detail, but I'll leave it at this: I do listen to my advisor, but I disagree with him about how science is best done.
> The incremental "find an open problem mentioned elsewhere and work on that for a while" isn't a bad way to start a PhD career. You learn a bunch about the field doing that.
Reading your paragraph makes me think my point wasn't communicated clearly. I'm not arguing against working on open problems. I'm saying to make sure that the problem is actually open, and don't start doing expensive things like experiments without having a good idea of what you're doing. Given the existence of a large amount of archival literature, your great idea is likely to have been done already. There is value in reproducing previous experiments, but people should do new research too.
> This seems an odd thing to complain about. Surely a PhD is all about peer review, and should be so. Peer review means people who know about the topic have reviewed it - how else should a PhD be done?
For what it's worth I don't believe peer review as currently practiced in journals provides much value. The reviews tend to be superficial at best, and are provided far too late in the research process to have a strong influence on it. In my experience the reviews mostly help to make the paper more clear, and not because the reviewers give good suggestions on writing themselves, rather, because the reviewers seem confused about things I thought were written clearly.
However, my advisor is definitely a strong believer in peer review as currently practiced. I mis-characterized him before. For him it's less "publishing in journals is the right thing to do" and more "publishing in journals provides a strong check on the work".
In my view, the most important thing someone can do to improve their research is to be deeply critical of it. Unfortunately few people are critical of their own work. Getting feedback from others is valuable, but I believe that the best way to do so at present is to actively solicit it yourself, which is what I've been doing. Peer review in a journal should be the last step, not the only step aside from one's supervisor looking over the work.
Also, I removed a paragraph about how I strongly dislike the current academic publishers. That's a major factor here as well. My field does not have good open access options at present. I'd really prefer to wait a few years as I think the landscape could change dramatically.
> In the end, I think I am making several large contributions, even if the "gestation" time was longer than people would like. To get tenure, you need to publish often and regularly, but a lot of valuable research takes longer than people would like to get results. The data compilation took a long time. I started this data compilation in roughly Jan. 2017. I had a conference presentation on it in Nov. 2017. I published a conference paper based in part on it in May 2018, and it wasn't until December 2019 that I submitted two journal papers using the data. (I prefer to take my time to perfect an article rather than rush it.) This sort of delay isn't acceptable in the current system, regardless of the value of the work at the end. In terms of total publications, I think I'm actually coming out ahead of most PhD students in my department, but by now I'm seen as unproductive by my advisor so that doesn't matter.
This is where I am in my PhD. Things are culminating near the end. It can be psychologically difficult to go long stretches without publication, while your peers are firing off publications. I've seen this with other graduate students who take on large projects.
Biotech companies are responding well because they have all the production lines built out to rapidly respond.
Academics and other government funded researchers are responding (personal communication) but they can't do so at the speed of companies who already have their ducks in line.
In addition, consider how hard it is for an academic to get regulatory approval. The biotech companies already have relationships with the regulators, while this is completely new ground for those academics, all while the regulators are completely swamped with requests from their preexisting network.
Most scientists aren't funded well, but I think a big problem is pouring money into the right holes. Some things will help a lot, some won't. I think getting more investors looking at the system can help with figuring out the right holes to put money into, and that will help just as much as the actual money.
Startup idea: make it easy for a company to pay for testing for their workforce. If every workplace had a 15 minute test required before an employee could begin work, we could get a lot of people back to work with relatively low risk.
Additionally, the same (or another) startup could make it easy for companies to pay to allow customers to be tested with a 15 minute test. I would not mind waiting outside a restauraunt or supermarket for 15 minutes while my test is run, if it means that I could enter knowing everyone else in the building is uninfected.
I imagine you would supply each business with one or more testing machines, test kits, and some number of technicians to operate the tests and test machines correctly.
The hard part is probably getting test machines/test kits while supplies are limited.
I know a guy who is trying to arrange serological testing for Union employees in the LA port area with this exact idea.
The problem is bulk ordering tests - you need a massive investment (about 750k for minimal order size of 100k tests), which he's been trying to find some philanthropic money for.
Those finger prick tests are convenient, but they only show results if your body is already producing antibodies. The really good test is an RT-PCR or RT-LAMP test, which uses a pretty invasive swab technique. It's pretty unpleasant.
Colormetric RT-LAMP is the right method for that startup (probably) because you can deploy it with pretty few resources and get rapid tests. However, it can be finicky, and isn't approved by the FDA AFAIK.
You would have to do this every day, too. Getting tested doesn't mean you are not exposed on the way home that day, or the way back to work. Also, what if you wanted to go to multiple places in the same day? You would have to be tested n-times, as you could have been infected going from one business to the other.
What I do not hear people talking about is this: Getting tested once is not enough. If you do not have COVID-19 today, it doesn't mean you are not going to have it tomorrow. The only test that can tell you that is an antibody test. Also, we don't even know yet (for sure, anyway) if people can be re-infected.
Honestly, I heard a comment on Slate Money to the effect of "Why aren't the billionaire class doing more to fund COVID research"
All the epidemiology, all the WHO plans for last decade, all the incredible co-ordinated response globally (#) has been publicly funded. Give over on the idea private companies are good for anything but taking existing research in the hands of hundreds and putting it into hands of millions and billions.
Pay tax. Vote for competence.
(#) yes I happen to think that shutting down most of the planet, in an attempt to save millions of lives, in a matter of weeks, is an amazing feat of global co-ordination. Yes there are lots of local differences and many many ways things could be better but humanity could have done so much worse.
It would make sense to pay tax, instead of contribute directly to research, if you only wanted 3% of the money to go to research.
What you’re really saying here is it’s wrong that some entities choose to direct more money to research than society does collectively, and they should defer to society’s decision to spend on other things instead.
The rest largely funds more fireworks at the Super Bowl through consumer targeted drug ads, and lunches to manipulate doctors into prescribing based on soft bribery.
I think that people like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. can truly contribute to funding more science.
For starters they can ask companies they fund to start paying taxes in some other place than Jersey, Cayman Islands, Luxembourg or any other tax heaven.
Even more, they can start paying taxes themselves without passing their income through bogus "foundations", "funds", etc.
One off donation that many companies are doing now "for the sake of the virus" is a nice PR stunt but does not change anything in the long run.
Funding of early fundamental and clinical research rarely comes from VC capital, since the probability for a positive ROI is quite low.
This is why early research is mostly funded by governments.
Sadly, a lot of conditions are not properly researched due to lack of funding.
Some governments are better at distributing funds than others.
The current US administration isn’t.
> Investors and donors—this is where we can help. Please consider shifting some of your focus and capital to scientific efforts addressing the pandemic. (And future pandemics too—I think this will be a before-and-after moment in the world, and until we can defend against new viruses quickly, things are going to be different.)
Although the sentiment resonates, the business logic does not.
Consider antibiotic drugs. Big Pharma and biotechs alike have been jettisoning programs. Why? It has nothing to do with science. These drugs simply aren't as profitable as others:
> Several major pharmaceutical companies recently shut down their antibiotic and antiviral research projects, backing away from the growing threat of superbugs, which may kill more than 10 million people a year by 2050.
How much do you think a cure for COVID-19 will make its creator? Be careful when you answer, because you'll need to include all of the R&D effort in the calculation, and also consider the opportunity cost of not pursuing something more profitable.
The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very short period of time and only once gets funded.
>The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very short period of time and only once gets funded.
Ok, so let's just socialize the pharma industry and treat it as a matter of national defense rather than consumer luxury. With respect to infectious and transmissible disease, the paradigm of treating health as a matter of personal comfort and subjective preference has very plainly failed.
I think R&D is going to be a lot cheaper when you have the FDA authorizing emergency compassionate use for promising drugs.
>The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots
Why not? We are basically in wartime conditions. Even if the government doesn't relax it's rules, there's a high likelihood that enough hospitals/doctors will to conduct high risk trials on critically ill patients. Now is the best time for moon shots.
The US has been politically antiscience for this entire administration. It's not a matter of funding more science. It's about voting out politicians that seek to benefit themselves instead of thinking about what science can do, and what science has already done for humanity.
I also would like to counter - science doesn't need any more money. Money distorts the progress of science (for example, look at the grants system - what a dumpster fire). What science needs is proper primary and secondary education and a healthy population. Start with fixing schools and healthcare, and you'll have so much science you wouldn't be able to stop it.
Not sure if necessary. You can get so much funding for anything covid related, it's almost like ".com" in 90s or adding blockchain to your name more recently. But this time it's so much more urgent, so I think people will forgive easily the incredible amount of misses in the area that we'll probably have.
I'd much rather see the governments fund coronavirus-related research after this is over. The primary reason why SARS (v1) still doesn't have a vaccine and research was abandoned was due to the incentive structure (SARS is gone, and so is funding). I wish we knew more about coronaviruses now, it's been over 10 years since SARS ...
On the other hand, if this comes back next winter, and we would have a mass-producible vaccine ready, then you could say science has saved us from a second pandemic.
In the future, I'm hoping some of the dreams of synthetic biology come true (basically, decentralization of biotech).
I work on that problem in close collaboration with a lot of community lab spaces, and it is surprising how many have the capacity and knowledge to implement rapid testing in their local communities and the inability to do so because of regulation. Biotech, if you run proper controls, isn't actually that hard. A lot of those spaces are now seriously struggling because of the shut down.
The main thing that is stupid about how the FDA is approving tests is that they approve protocols, even though they have lots of controls for input->output. Coming from a computer science side, I'd imagine they'd so something along the lines of unit tests, but they aren't - they're still regulating how the protocol is done itself.
That article mentions the cost of equipment. In academia, we used to semi-seriously discuss building our own stuff. We generally didn't because even basic engineering, fabrication, and firmware require a lot of time and effort. (We were occasionally forced to when we needed something extremely specialized that simply wasn't available off the shelf.)
It seems like open source equipment designs don't exist largely because they don't usually make sense for academia or industry to fund. I wonder if that approach might be viable for this type of endeavor, since it would allow designs to be shared between groups and would lower the cash barrier to that of the raw materials? I'm not sure how you'd navigate the patent minefield, but if successful I think it would benefit society at large.
Open source equipment has been tried a lot in the DIY bio space, but a lot of it falls short because the used market is too good in biotech IMO
Lots of medical and academic labs liquidate, and you'd think that the market would compensate and labs would pick up used equipment, but that typically doesn't happen - probably for regulatory reasons and because (I've found) academic labs aren't typically in the position to take risks on equipment.
For example, an eBay seller ain't going to be able to test a PCR machine, so they sell it FOR-PARTS, which makes it so academic labs won't touch it. Then, you can swing in and buy perfectly fine $2,000 equipment for $150. Best deal I ever got was $350 for a fully functioning lab robot.
The SoundBio people are great, and there's lots of labs locally! They're really suffering right now though, because a revenue stream is often education.
By injecting the coronavirus rna strand into a cell in culture, anyone could make it in their garage if synth bio dreams come true. You’d have to hope countermeasures advance faster but that’s hard to prove.
This calls to mind the ever-relevant “Science: The Endless Frontier” [1] by Vannevar Bush, who more or less oversaw the entire American federal research enterprise during and post-WWII. He famously said that the best thing you can do for scientific progress is give scientists money and then get out of the way (i.e. not even putting out requests for grant submissions in specific domains, like the NIH often does now).
It seems to me that it is way easier to get funding for medical research vs straight up biology. That might be wrong.
Biology is what all of medical research eventually hinges on and any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money.
It is super easy to contribute to the search for treatments for particular diseases but how do you contribute to the fundamental research that ultimately fixes problems?
I don't think anyone would mind some company "profiting from the pandemic" if it actually had something that works. Heck, the US government would probably sign you a hundred billion dollar check in 15 minutes at this point if you had a cure or a working therapeutic which can be deployed immediately.
It's not just funding. It's also focus. In recent years the CDC was tasked with fighting obesity and "gun violence" "epidemics" as well. Neither of those things is an epidemic. They are not contagious even. Why the fuck does the CDC waste their resources on this, instead of the real, actual epidemiological problems the eventual emergence of which is not only entirely plausible, but which have happened in practice several times already over the past couple of decades.
Like it's often the case this is not just a problem of money. You can research virtually anything and not everything will yield anything of value to the human race. We need to have some direction. Epidemiology for example, sounds like a good high level scope that is definitely more directed towards human gains. Biology is a huge field. Also private funding and humanity's benefit are often at odds. Private funding tends to aim at making investors a return. What we really need (and Sam alludes to it) is a government/public fund for research so that labs have the ressources to research things that may never yield commercial profitability.
If you leave it to big pharma and other private biotech companies to advance humanity, it's like leaving the food industry in charge of making humans healthier.... not happening :(
I'm a fan of increased federal funding, but there's also a massive problem with the pricing of scientific supplies and chemicals. We commonly see 2-3x and sometimes 10x differences in prices for the exact same item from the same manufacuturer. We're (https://labspend.com) tackling this problem but it's massive and not often mentioned or known by people outside of the lab. We've consulted with companies and help them identify millions in savings.
A couple of issues contribute which are the pricing isn't transparent like hospitals in the USA. Also there are only 2-3 major suppliers and for certain items it's essentially a monopoly.
This might be an unpopular opinion around here, but this is an obvious area for bold public investment. Countless startups sprung out of public investment into basic research during the 20th century. And places like Bell Labs spent more on R&D due to the tax situation of the time. Beginning in the 70s and 80s, investors began to push for lower and lower capital gains taxes. So, I guess I'm saying that if you're an investor and you want more research into basic science, we could release the vice grip on capital gains rates and let the public pour a ton of money into it.
I'm hoping for this to provoke a rational conversation and not a political flame-war – so, please respond fair-mindedly.
Does anyone have a list of all the COVID-19 research and response orgs that would be funded?
I've worked in international dev where normally government grants go to a handful of familiars who subcontract out. It's often a question of visibility for everyone else (smaller groups either win subcontracts or have a shot at getting their work accelerated directly).
I know science funding is different, but I wanted to map all the orgs & relationships for visibility. The best list I can find are previous grantees of https://wellcome.ac.uk/
Some would see a contradiction between that impulse and how companies from Y-Combinator might use a tax-reduction scheme.
Some could even see a connection between tax lawyers introduced by Y-Combinator to founders and that practice.
I’m not saying that _has_ to be the case but "tax-avoidance / tax-optimisation / complex international structure / negotiation with government keen to offer low tax deal" is a common point made against large tech companies. I’m surprised why Sam doesn’t connect that point to his point, or confront that issue directly.
The connection is extremely indirect. If companies voluntarily pay more tax than they are legally required to, the vast majority of that money will go to Medicare, Social Security, defense, and interest on the national debt, with only a tiny amount going to scientific research. Conversely, if companies use these "loopholes" to reduce their tax liability by $X, they can directly donate all of that money for scientific research.
Going beyond that for a moment, some corporations voluntarily foregoing these loopholes will not even be enough for the US federal government to be able to afford their existing obligations, let alone increase spending on research or anything else. Furthermore, in a competitive environment, any company that does forego these loopholes is likely to find itself losing out to a competitor that uses these loopholes to undercut their prices.
That leaves closing the loopholes altogether, which is something the government would have to do. But that's not even enough to address the deficit--the government would have to either cut spending or raise taxes elsewhere.
And it's entirely possible that closing corporate tax loopholes isn't even a good idea regardless. Corporations are legal straw men that, in most cases, ultimately pass on their earnings to their shareholders. A corporate tax effectively taxes all shareholders the same--in other words, the retired grandmother pays the same amount as the billionaire investor. In other words, corporate taxes can actually be far less progressive than individual taxes.
I would have loved Sam to make that argument explicitly: it’s not his style to talk about government money as if it grows on trees. I suspect he wouldn’t have looked at the overall distribution but where to assign marginal tax revenues.
Corporate taxes are only 4.4% of US tax revenue[1], there's no possible way that corporate tax avoidance would make a significant difference. Especially compared to what most successful startups end up doing, which is to employ people and pay them salaries that are within the upper tax brackets. Respectfully, you seem to be trying to draw a strong connection here where it's not obvious that one exists.
You are saying that what’s left after tax optimisation is small. Not that the potential revenue if corporate benefits were taxed effectively is small. Do you have an estimate of the revenue that is declared in low-tax jurisdiction?
My company, Repair Biotechnologies, is working on regrowth of the atrophied thymus via FOXN1 upregulation. We're at the preclinical stage of getting the vector and formulation into shape, and the start of tests in influenza exposure models in mice.
The atrophy of the thymus is a major reason why the adaptive immune system declines. The evidence from sex steroid ablation in prostate cancer patients strongly suggests it is possible to provoke the naive T cell component of the adaptive immune system into regenerating itself in a matter of months, provided that the thymus is restored to more youthful activity. Also evidence from the Intervene Immune trial with growth hormone (not advisable as a strategy, but congratulations to that team on getting interesting data) for the same proposition.
To be clear this is a years long process for Repair Biotechnologies that would see us into trials around 2022, but at some point fixing the aged immune system will and must become a practical concern. At that point, we'll all be a lot less concerned about pandemics of this nature, as the mortality and hospitalization rates will be much reduced.
There are other things that need to handled to restore all of the aged immune system: getting hematopoietic stem cells back into line and functioning properly, regenerative medicine for lymph nodes, some form of targeted destruction for malfunctioning immune cells. But each of these items will give incremental benefits on its own.
Is anybody thinking deeply about what it means to fight against natural selection as a modern species?
I know nobody wants to hear this nihilistic take but humans are the most destructive invasive species in existence.
I wish biomedical and health science research instead focused more on how we can lead rich lives with the little time we do have, knowing nature might take us back to dust for any reason, and leave the world a better place with more knowledge for the next generation. Instead we have old wealthy (mostly white) men driving the interests of science research for them to live longer and have more time to spend their money destroying the earth.
It is an ethical mess to know how to cure a disease or give one better health outcomes and intentionally not apply it but there has to be a balance. I worked in a hospice for a few years and I saw elderly folk often abandoned by their (alive and well) families and dieing alone. It sounds crazy to think but I feel like too much of anything, even longevity, is not good.
US should create 100 more universities. Each university campus lights up the economy of otherwise sleepy written off towns. The state operated universities can help lower the tuition and in turn reduce the student debt burden - one of the biggest issue. It creates more faculty positions for PhDs coming out. It attracts more international students bringing in money and talent. It lowers stress on outrageously competitive higher education space. It creates more research departments and opportunities. A creation of typical university campus is merely $1B. For $100B total, this generates so many benefits that it shouldn’t be even question. A lot of progress in US happened because of establishment of new universities. At some point we didn’t kept pace with growing demands and now education as well as research has become scars, expensive things available Only to elite.
Enrollment in higher education is down over the last 10 years. There are already too many universities/colleges in the U.S. There are too many Ph.D.'s being granted in a quite a few areas. The funding per student today is much less than it was 20 years ago which again was less than it was the 20 years before then. This is not going to change. Building more physical classroom space is not needed and is too expensive. Society is not willing to fund these places. Around 50% of higher education courses are taught with adjunct labor that typically pays little and without benefits. I don't see that building more universities would change this. Especially when demand is decreasing.
Demand is decreasing because prices have sky rocketed. This is very similar to private hospitals working in concert for price gauging. The only way to get this under control is state jumping in and introduce some real competition. Education doesn’t have to be expensive and everyone deserves education they want. From what I understand, demand for CS and general tech is as high as it has ever been but people can’t get in to quality providers with reasonable cost.
Your first sentence sounds plausible and could be true. Do you know that it is true? Do the demographics of the country support an increase in higher education capacity? Do the realities of what it means to become educated support a percent increase in the number of highly education people?
I currently teach at a community college and have taught at some major universities. What I consider passing today is far less than what I would have considered passing 25 years ago. My anecdotal experience is that too many people are going to college. Standards have decreased and we are passing people through the system who should not be graduating. Even so there is increasing pressure from administration and politicians to increase the passing rate.
At my college tuition is increasing because state funding is decreasing. We are advertising to a population who realistically aren't college material. But we need the enrollment and I need a job. So I pass people who shouldn't pass. I strongly disagree with the notion that we need more colleges.
EDIT: What I perceive as a degradation in undergraduate degree quality has led to the present state where a Master's degree today has the same intellectual signaling value that a Bachelor's degree had 40 years ago.
I'm very familier with these views and staunchly opposed to them. Here the idea is that only a small portion of the population is "college worthy" and only those elites should be going to college. This then implies we don't need "too many" educated people and economy perhaps can't even handle them. I don't subscribe to any of these.
I believe, education needs to be distangled from jobs. People should not be educated for the sole purpose of slaving away 8 hours a day somewhere. Education is about learning, deeper reflections, aquiring skills you enjoy, developing reasoning, identifying pitfalls, dealing with abstractions, practising scientific methods, becoming desciplined. Only as side effect of all these, you might be able to also do well at some job. This means everyone is entitled to the highest level of education. In an ideal world, all humans should obtain a PhD in something they are passionate about, something they believe in and something they are interested in.
Now here's the problem. We have mutilated our education philosophy to the extent that it is no longer recognizable from what it used to be. When you step in modern day institutes, the education is all about getting good grades and passing exames. I have met inenumerable humans, starting from Kindergarten to PhDs where they are forced to memorize things, instead of really understand things in order to pass exams. People who don't have great memory powers are forced out of the system. Other day I was looking at 1st grade history lesson on Columbus. What was the test exam questions? Name the ships! Why does name of ships matter at all? Why not teach kids instead reason he needed 3 ships?
My core hypothesis is that all humans are curious, we all want to learn something, we all have some interests. We destroy most of these attributes as we grow up by making it a massive memorization contest with prizes given as pass and fail. Then we make it all about jobs so folks are forced to learn things they were never interested in the first place.
Your goal is noble. I think it is believed by you because you don’t have extensive experience teaching in a classroom. Everyone talks about teaching concepts and whatnot. I used to think this way. But the reality of the classroom and the reality of what the average person is capable of understanding and what they are willing to try to understand is at odds with this noble view.
Pedantic correction: R0 actually refers to the contagiousness of a virus before any public health measures are taken (including vaccines). R is the contagiousness of a virus in the world as it currently is. So if an effective vaccine is produced, R will go below one, but R0 will be unaffected.
Is Sam putting his money where his mouth is on this? Is he putting his time and effort there as well? Genuine questions. Even just putting together an obvious and simple historical timeline correlating increased scientific funding with improved standards of living would help. How come something as simple as that is not being brought forward instead? Is it possible that putting effort into proving this assertion might end up disproving it instead? We cannot know until better and more legitimate proof is attempted to be found.
Currently, scientific research is not efficient enough to deserve more funding. The pyramidal scheme, currently collapsing, is just extracting as much money as possible with as little innovation as possible.
If there were thousands of small research labs taking tiny amounts of money, it would be worth it purely for the massive amount of trial and error, but currently, the system is just collapsing.
We do need to fund more science, but we also need to fund more PPE, more testing and contact tracing, more medical equipment and more nurses. Please support the Coronavirus Action Plan: https://www.change.org/p/coronavirus-action-plan
I'm not being snarky, I mean it. Bucky Fuller calculated that we could solve most of the world's problems for about $25B (this was in the 70's, so adjust for inflation and whatnot).
He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two. They had waterless toilets that captures BMs in little plastic bags, hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. )
> houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two.
I'm currently writing a series on designing my own home and contrasting it with some soul-crushing new construction around here. It's very obvious that the places cherished and loved in New Hampshire were the villages built slowly, and the places least loved are the ones flash formed overnight by contractors trying to max out $$. Building on site is not very expensive but I'm not sure that making it cheaper is fixing any of the major problems with housing. It would just give more life to planning for lifeless sprawl.
If anything, we need ways to build more beautiful houses better or cheaper, in smaller, odd and non-level lots. Not assembly line houses.
There's a happy medium. A lot of things like roof trusses are much more precisely and cheaply built in a shop and then transported to the site.
But, yes, most houses around me have so many flaws that it seems problematic to count them as assets. Christopher Alexander has a lengthy calculation on this in 'The Nature of Order.'
I live in a newish housing estate in a relatively affluent area of the UK, where every single house has the same cladding, the same colour of roof, the same colour of doors, the same colour and style of windows, the same small patch of grass out the front, and each house is separated by less than 2m.
Walking around the place feels... wrong, hollow, eerie somehow. And yet, many people seem to love this homogeneous kind of place.
Thing is, as you point out, it doesn't have to be this way - it's local planning regulations and NIMBY neighbours that are the problem. Why does every house need to look almost identical? Why do I need permission to paint my front door a different colour?
It's not prefabrication that prevents diversity - it's policy.
You'd think that! You'd think that about something very simple, too, like door hardware. Eastlake (mid 1800's) style hardware has all these beautiful engravings on knobs, plates, hinges, even little places like the mortise plates that are rarely seen. Surely today in the computer age the doorknobs on half-million dollar homes must be more beautiful than these. But they're not.
Indeed, I grew up in a neighborhood that was built during the 50s, and I first developed this sense that I could find my way around anybody's house. Then I realized that all of the houses had identical floor plans but different exterior finishing and were oriented differently. It took me years to figure this out, even though I lived in the middle of it.
TL;DR: Buildings and neighborhoods should be designed in situ by the people living there.
The PL volumes are earlier and seminal (both SimCity and the concept of "Patterns" in programming are two examples) while the more mature Nature of Order is nearly mystic.
I'm convinced that if we could combine the ideas of Pattern Language with applied ecology we could create a new form of civilization so beautiful our ancestors would consider it Heaven on Earth.
>He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two.
Eastern block panel building settlements were built from per-fabricated segments mass produced in a factory. Then assembled on site from these segments by cranes rolling on rails.
You can actually tell quite easily in many cases where the crane rails were & that their most efficient location was the factor, not stuff like ergonomy or aesthetics.
The end result was indeed a lot of housing capacity built at record time. On the other hand the quality of the flats was often disputable and the new high density neighborhoods often lacked basic public amenities, at least initially.
In a more modern context there are also issues with lack of parking space (no one expected so many cars back then) and lack of thermal isolation (usually fixed by replacing the windows by modern ones & isolating the sides).
>hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. )
Modern Japanese showers are pretty much like that. Japanese toilets are also much much more water efficient than what you can see here in Europe, not to mention mostly including bidets and other civilized living amenities still mostly considered extraodrinary around here.
I lived in a similar place and I somewhat miss it.
It isn't just parking spaces, the neighborhood was designed with walking in mind.
Many streets had shops at the bottom floor, and I could do all my errands on foot.
My elderly grandparents still live there. In a small radius around their building is a grocery store, medical clinic and a bus stop. They could live independently for a long time after they lost the ability to drive.
As bad as the 'Blocks' are they are to this date housing many millions of people and despite 30 years of capitalism there has been no equivalent to date. The money is there but it is far more concentrated now. The communist system was terrible in many ways, and economically a complete disaster. But: you had a (very small and cramped) place to live, petty crime was next to non existent (corruption though, was rampant) and your pension was guaranteed.
When the wall fell it became a free-for-all overnight, all that security went out the window and not much was done to replace it. A couple of people got obscenely rich and plenty of people dropped well below the poverty line. It is that which powers the rise of assholes like Orban: the people that yearn for the bad situation they were in before because at least they knew just how bad it was.
I do agree that it is tough to figure out what the right thing is but I disagree with the survival argument. A lot of organizations (e.g. companies, non-profits, and unions) end up spending a good chunk of their resources to try keep things as they are and keep the organization alive - despite the right thing being in another direction. This ends up keeping these organizations alive for far longer than they should. The systems of incentives can also become perverted by these organizations.
Personally, I want to see more organizations devoted to solving problems and boldly becoming obsolete. The predominant reward models do not really seem to reward that.
(Recent semi-related anecdote: see recent nytimes article about what happened to the project devoted towards designing and stockpiling inexpensive ventilators that came into existence after doing a risk analysis around SARS.)
Funny thing it would be right thing, right now. In 5 or 10 years that "right thing" could as easily become yet another problem.
Also most of the time right thing is not "right thing" for everyone because there will be always group of people who think totally opposite is the right thing to do.
Bucky was so far ahead of his time. I’ve been reading Critical Path again and it’s as enlightening now as it was 20 years ago when I first discovered it as I’m sure it was 40-some years ago when he wrote it.
Add his Ultra-High Voltage World Electric grid to your list.
I would love to see new neighborhoods being built have their plumbing not right under the road. It just seems so stupid to do that since it basically increases the costs. Instead it'd probably be better to put it under the sidewalk and have loops embedded in the sidewalks so that when work needs to be done you can tie it up to a fork truck and lift the sidewalk tiles up to perform your work. It's easily accessible, no digging, no excessive repair costs afterwards, and should make the actual work cheaper since repairs can be made faster.
I'm all for inventiveness and solving problems. It's great. We also need to look at the limits of our own knowledge and ability to design things, elegantly summarized as
> The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
We can invent those things, sure, but we can't necessarily anticipate all problems with them. For example, a city with 10 million sq. ft. (according to Google, about 0.36 sq. mile) of open space would be very cramped compared to New York, which has Central Park (1.3 sq miles). A virus like COVID-19 in a more dense location than NY could be far worse. Or to take another example, plastic bags are certainly one way to capture waste, but there was a movement to produce fewer plastic bags.
We really don't have all the answers - we have people who think they have all the answers, and we have some other people that understand that the questions are hard.
Technical fixes or market-driven fixes cannot help when the underlying philosophy used to set objectives for research and economic activity is wrong.
Some of the world's most severe and urgent problems are caused by (western?) society's emphasis on individualism -- or maybe that's a bit unfair, arguably it is fairly human for humans to be short-sighted and selfish much of the time. E.g. global warming is a huge problem, but global warming is just a symptom of the underlying problems of overpopulation and overconsumption. I don't really believe we can fix those two underlying problems by continuing to operate within the same individualist market-driven philosophy.
E.g. most people want a comfortable place to live, children, opportunities for their children, a way to make a living, cheap food, cheap luxuries, cheap travel, medical care when they are sick. Governments, researchers and business strive to provide these -- but arguably most of these activities are harmful where they encourage consumption or discourage population reduction.
With a market-driven individualist approach we (as the collective human endeavour) just keep doing what we are already doing a bit more efficiently or a bit faster, which doesn't address the problem of what we individually demand -- which the market & research moves to supply -- is bad for the collective in the long run.
I think there's a clearer version of an argument along these lines in one of Yuval Noah Harari's books (although he may not have the same outlook or conclusion that I do).
You do know that the west is continuing to grow while using less and less resources ever year? For a long time GDP followed resource use, now it has been decoupled.
Individualism has been the crux of human progress - Individuals voluntarily and radically change their behavior when convinced. The job is to convince them.
> You do know that the west is continuing to grow while using less and less resources ever year? For a long time GDP followed resource use, now it has been decoupled.
I know some people argue this, but I think this argument misses the point, particularly when it is made rhetorically and not spelled out in detail. I don't think if GDP is coupled to resource usage or not is relevant when we're talking about physical / ecological limits. GDP doesn't measure anything physical, so it isn't a particularly helpful thing to add into the discussion.
What precisely could we mean by GDP decoupling from resource usage?
Suppose the statement "GDP has now decoupled from resource usage" is defined like so: Let g(t) denote GDP and r(t) denote resource usage at some time t. Then by "GDP has decoupled from resource usage" perhaps we mean that the fraction g(t) / r(t) will becomes arbitrarily large (monotonically in t, say) as t increases.
That sounds superficially positive, but then consider, from an environmental perspective, the GDP g(t) quantity is irrelevant -- it measures economic activity in units of human accounting conventions, it doesn't measure any physical quantity about our world --- we need to be able to enforce upper bounds on r(t), resource usage, for key resources, where we express r(t) in terms of physical and environmental limits.
To cherry-pick a working definition of resource consumption, r(t), for a key environmental bottleneck resource, we could approximate r(t) as "consumption of remaining free storage capacity for CO_2-e in the atmosphere to have a 2/3rds chance of limiting global warming to at most +3 degrees C, in gigatons of CO_2-e". That's measurable, has real physical meaning, is a critical factor in the future of our environment, our society & our physical economy, and is still being consumed with no real sign of us all slowing down.
If you look at the trend of CO_2 emissions attributed to the US and Europe, I acknowledge there is a slight downward trend over the past few decades:
If we want to pick at the details I might argue that the graph attributes CO_2 emissions to countries like China for polluting economic activity required to produce cheap goods that are consumed in wealthy countries that industrialised earlier, so arguably this way of attributing CO_2 emissions against countries doesn't even fairly account for which countries are capturing the value associated with producing the pollution. You might argue that the manufacturers of exported goods captured a lot of the value, and imported a lot of stuff from other countries to help bootstrap their industry, so my argument that western countries likely are more responsible for CO_2 pollution in recent years than this graph suggests isn't entirely one-sided.
But, leaving that all those blame games aside, the slight declines observed in some countries CO_2 emissions is nowhere near fast enough compared to the remaining capacity left in the our shared global greenhouse-gas-atmospheric-sink definition of remaining resources r(t) . If you squint and look at the trends over a 50 year span for a country like the US, it doesn't look like greenhouse gas emissions have becoming arbitrary small, at a very crude approximation it looks more like that they're constant! US emissions now are similar to what they were in 1970. They need to go negative!
>We have pretty much all the answers, the problem is to align our power with our values.
And the alignment has to be deeper in our society. A good example would be all the money spent trying to find a cure for baldness. Imagine if the funds were directed elsewhere if there weren't so many people willing to spend money curing baldness.
But does changing our values mean the people who are caring about not going bald turn their resources elsewhere. Or should we look into why these people care so much. Is it that hair, and especially natural hair, plays such a large role in attractiveness that we need to change? Maybe what we need to change is not the desire of people to be more attractive, but what society deems as attractive.
This gets even harder and more outlandish when you consider people with what even more deviant values. How much would it cost to end slavery?
>A good example would be all the money spent trying to find a cure for baldness. Imagine if the funds were directed elsewhere if there weren't so many people willing to spend money curing baldness.
Both of the currently approved drugs for baldness -- finasteride and minoxidil -- were originally designed for other purposes: BPH and ulcers respectively. The actual research effort spent to find a "cure for baldness" is not that large. Plus, androgenetic alopecia is a likely symptom of prediabetes[1,2]; to that end, "high consumption of fresh vegetables" has been found to reduce the risk by more than half[3] and so research on baldness is not necessarily about hair loss per se.
I currently have hair and am not too concerned woth baldness. I just wanted to share and hear back on the idea that sometimes amazing discoveries come from previously long thought meaningless pursuts.
Does this seem valid? I paused for a moment but only recall the concept, lacking any example off hand.
Building houses in factories doesn't really solve a big problem. We're actually really, really good at building on-site. Just look at the experience of Factory_OS and their building that was "built in 10 days"[1]. While it may be the case under a narrow interpretation, it's also the case that the project spent a year in site prep, 5 years in planning and permitting, and six months after "building" it they are still detailing and finishing and are another 6 months away from occupancy.
The second sentence of your linked article says that it was pre-assembled and just needed to have the pieces fitted together on-site. It also says constructing it normally would've taken a year
My apologies, I thought you were making a point that building is fast even without pre-assembly in a factory. I see that you actually mean that the everything else takes several years, no matter how quickly the building goes up. Sorry for the misunderstanding!
> The Dymaxion House was completed in 1930 after two years of development, and redesigned in 1945. Buckminster Fuller wanted to mass-produce a bathroom and a house.
IIRC there was a collection service, or possibly automated conveyor belts..? The main idea was not to poop into a bowl of water and then use a bunch more water to transport the poop somewhere just to have to clean it out of the water later. Nowadays, of course, we could even use biodegradable cellulose bags.
A composting toilet is probably overall a much better solution. (And a bidet.)
I encourage everyone here to read the book Science-mart by Mirowski. It reveals a lot of limitations of adding markets and the search for "efficiency" in science.
Lets spend 1% of what we spend on wars and smartphones - on science. We wont have flu, cancers, fever and pandemics after 5 years.
Its shameful our high level civilization is threatened by a primitive virus.
We will now spend 100 times more on survival than we would need to spend to prevent a lots of deseases and pandemics in the first place.
Whole science power and money of our civilization is wasted on smartphones and wars. And health scientists work almost for free.begging for years for our attention. And we are where we are.
Oddly enough, "the war machine" in particular has driven R&D and science for thousands of years. I encourage you to look into the technologies that DARPA and others have had a hand in creating. Not to mention they fund things like cancer research already.
Smartphones have given millions of people access to information they would never have. Smartphones are the sum of 30 years of computer R&D, making them cheap enough that Kenya has more then 80% of there population online [1]
The issues you listed would take significantly more time then “five years” to cure.
I think there is room to argue how defense money is distributed and used.
That is a falicy. Because we got something you notice it, but you have no idea what we missed because we were focused on what we got instead of something else. Maybe we would get smart phones sooner in some other alternative universe, we don't know.
If the money spent on space and military was spent on genetic engineering we might not have smart phones, but we would have fire breathing dragons!
Yes - Army had impact on development. War - didnt. Even if we discuss research caused by wars i am 100% sure these would be made a lots faster without an actual war.
And also - its natural army attracts some bright minds because sometimes only army has resources and money to fund research. So as long as it is used for good cause it makes sense as a symbiosis
The article only mentiones in passing - ARPA, as it was called back then - that DARPA was once ARPA, and doesn't explore how DARPA's rate of invention tanked after the passage of the Mansfield Amendment.
This is a longer story that's relevant to the war is great for research! claim.
Wishful thinking in a world where human resources(!) are expendable and replaceable whereas wealth and power are not.
Also, throwing money at a problem doesn't automatically solve it. Progress often depends on few individuals with crucial ideas, but you'll have to get those interested in your problem first.
Money does get smart people interested. Of course they have their own ideas, but money directs things.
I'm a great C++ programmer (or so I like to think) because I have been paid to write C++. I could write any other language if I had been paid (and I have but the rest were unique to the client)
Good point. But also currently research requires expensive equipment, interdisciplinary cooperation. It all takes money. So its true. Throwing money at a problem does not solve it. But its not possible even for a brightest people do the research if they dont have money for research tools and financial safety.
I'd argue that exceptionally smart people and capable people usually have financial safety early in their lives - and this kind of research has plenty of funding available. It's probably just that other problems or goals seem more interesting until you are personally affected.
We have vaccines for flu. Every year, a probabilistic determination is made of which strains will be a problem and those are put into the vaccine. That people still get it is down to incorrect guesses and inadequate herd immunity. The vaccine is super cheap (as low as $20 out-of-pocket and free via most US health insurance).
Cancer isn’t “one thing” that can have one cure, and it’s silly to think otherwise.
Of course cancer is not one thing. But the truth is research with the little money we spend on it, is very advanced if you take almost any cancer into account. What is missing is money to push these efforts into final results.
Cancer’s not one thing but there’s some things you can do to generally improve your odds.
A doctor and an oncologist won’t tell you these things because they’re not even thinking about them. They likely don’t even know how to answer the question “can vitamins help some cancers?” Instead, mine repeated word for word responses about how we get most of our vitamins from a healthy diet. Then said he’d have to look it up.
Ask them about IGF1 levels, fasting, ketogenic diets they mostly won’t know. They simply say there is NOTHING you can do to prevent getting cancer.
It’s the system’s fault, the doctors and surgeons are just human beings who have no incentive to be practical.
I know we’re not supposed to refer to downvotes, but I had cancer and I worked in medicine. My points are valid and downvoting them is analogous is to the collectivist groupthink in medicine.
it's really rich to read a blog post from someone at YC wishing "the federal government was doing much more". YC and the extended universe of VCs have spent years providing an intellectual facade to undermine confidence in a centralized government, public funding of critical services, and promoting the profit motive in places like healthcare.
The past decade in America has seen the dominance of the capitalist tech utopians like Paul Graham, and we are seeing the results. For god's sake Peter Thiel was working with YC barely two years ago and now Sam wants to complain that the federal government isn't prepared to respond to crises?? what a joke.
Science has enough money, but is it not efficiently used. Actual researchers are post docs on minimal salary. Most money gets redirected to HR, administrators, ISO compliance etc...
This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and government contractors.
When you have so many layers between the money source and sink, each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer fights for its survival like a parasite.
It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required billions of dollars and thousands of people.
What makes healthcare.gov so complicated that 4 people can't handle it?
Less is more in software. Some of the best software ever written was written by one person (or a very small team). The more people you add to a project the less cohesive the code base becomes and the fewer people there are that can see the big picture.
There are tons of regulations for the whole country and each state. Then you have to deal with all insurers. I bet it took hundreds of man years just to get a handle on all the requirements. This is not some photo sharing site where you can make the rules. The rules are already set and you have to figure them out. Basically the tech is the easy part but understanding the requirements is very hard. This applies to a lot of big systems. It’s hard to create a coherent system around convoluted rules.
And yet, the complaints about the website were not about the lack of regulatory compliance, dealing with insurers, etc., but of basic technical issues - logging in, navigating the site, "glitches".
Well, I still think 4 guys in a basement could have come up with a better framework to build off of even without the regulatory compliance part.
It's like the company Simplifile - small company in Utah. They have only a handful of developers that build actual website front/backend infrastructure, and then they have a team of specialists whose job it is to become expert in all of the county laws across the USA and create requirements out of them.
All that now looks very cheap with a large percentage of the economy shut down, no good solution in sight, and a bunch of PhDs in relevant fields working as data scientists for advertising companies or pricing derivatives on Wall Street after they couldn't find a sustainable job in research.
Existing vaccine efforts will probably succeed, but the possibility that they fail is real and quite scary (to me, anyway). So I'm glad we have a bunch of longer-term speculative projects as backup.
Even if you focus on pure tech problems, startups seems to be failing us in the US.
Other countries have scaled out thermal imaging for fever detection, face tracking for contact tracing, and have mobile apps that can warn people where a previous infected patient have visited before. I have yet to see any of that here.
But take a look at the Patriot Act. Much of it expired, but has been reauthorized time and time again -- with support from both parties, both Obama and Trump.
Yeah, that's tricky; people tend to adjust to things and they become the 'status quo'. I guess it's partially a matter of electing better politicians down the line.
attempting to do face tracking for contact tracing in the US would likely lead to an uproar from privacy advocates. there are likely many companies (amazon, facebook, google) that have the tech to accomplish it (several years ago).
It's definitely not an unpopular opinion, especially on HN. Pre-corona I was probably a crazier privacy nut than most so I completely understand where you're coming from.
But right now our privacy is not worth more than our parents' and grandparents' lives. You ought to re-run your moral calculations with the current state of the world in mind. There are literally millions of lives at stake.
Actually let me expand upon that. First with an annecdote....
I Was at RSA conf in SF a few years ago - ran into an old friend who was contracting to the NSA - and then met the head of cybercrimes for the state dept (I cant recall his title sadly - I kept a pic of his business card for years, but have since lost it)
They invite me to dinner that night. There is about ~12 of us - and they are trading war stories of shit they have done in cybercrime blah blah (I was working at Lockheed at the time)
There was this super you, SUPER brilliant eng that was with them and he was talking about hacking this, that and the other - being on redteam and they had to physically infiltrate, pick locks and steal this and that from blueteam...
but there was a subtext which was fucking disturbing.
They were all bragging about these OPs...
And while I understand the national necessity of having such skills in your bet - the problem was that I realized I was sitting at a table with 100% psychopaths that didnt have a single moral fiber in their soul.... and it was about the thrill and ego of being "look at how fucking smart and technical and cool I am"
I literally excused myself from the table and acted as though I was going to use the restroom.
I simply walked out of the restaurant.
The point is, that these orgs use very young smart people and enable and empower them with autonomy, authority, and praise and you wind up with digital psychos.
I am looking at you [lots of surveillance companies all over HN]
So, FUCK authoritarian supporting, bullshit businesses.
The word "spy" isn't specific enough. It's enough to say that you don't want your Fourth Amendment rights violated.
It should be possible to do mass surveillance of Covid-19 without violating people's rights. It's just an additional constraint that other countries don't have. It will require some alternative approaches.
I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab and computational) will just waste more money rather than using it to scale up productivity.
The real question is ultimately "how do we scale scientific productivity in a way that benefits humanity directly and in the short term", and few people have any answer to that. It seems like the current state of the art, and hard to improve on, is to fund lots of people, give them time to be creative, and then send them to meetings to get tipsy with people who have money, while demonstrating their posters. I'm not kidding.