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Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline

180 points by apsec112 6y ago

hhs 6y ago
> The replication crisis has cast into doubt important research findings, such as the Stanford prison experiment. What other socially important findings have been undermined? How should we interpret scientific literature post-crisis? This should start early in middle school and high school, too. Surprised this idea of replication crisis fails to get more attention.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  I’m not surprised. Science is subject to political control like anything else. Why does a study use this or that data? What flaws or assumptions do we explain away as permitted trade-offs rather than rejecting as lacking enough basic fidelity to even proceed. There are Overton Windows in science (when’s the last time a scientific paper suggested that a bloody revolution should be used to address climate change?) and ultimately what gets published is a media channel that only exists to suit purposes of those funding it or permitting it - wealthy think tanks with a particular agenda, political parties or specific administrations or legislators who need reelection or need to foment support for their favored plan or outrage for their opponent’s plan. A replication crisis is by design - the system doesn’t exist to publish the best available science, it exists to create credential and status hierarchy in which to control scientific authority and shape it as a political tool. To address this issue you’d have to first address general plutocracy which even 80000 Hours itself is enmeshed in.
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Yes, academia is no better suited to handling a major internal crisis then any other institution. The intensives are just too skewed towards publishing. Every major player out there almost certainly has an un-reproducible paper they published under duress.
  - hhs 6y ago
    Indeed, there should also be better data and research literacy. On the hopeful side: looking at how the field of medicine evolved over the centuries from outright quackery to better data and ethical disclosures from those who do the research. It’s still not perfect but it’s getting better.
- rmah 6y ago
  99.9% of teens do not have the knowledge, skills or capability to critically examine academic research. Hell, most secondary and high school teachers don't have those skills. Thus, all you can say is "be skeptical". But that is next to useless if the student has no basis to make an assessment -- all it will do is erode confidence in the process of science. Instead, IMO, students should be 1) given a firm foundation of well accepted knowledge and 2) taught how the process of science works. As an aside, I'd ask those who promote the idea that children should be taught "how to think" instead of "facts they can just look up" to think a bit more deeply about what they are saying. IMO, you cannot reach valid conclusions without facts. Facts are the foundation of knowledge, synthesis and analysis. Without facts, one cannot understand a topic or even know what questions to ask about it. Note, I'm not saying that children should be force fed facts via rote learning. But consider, what happens when someone believes they can think for themselves but is ignorant of topic they're thinking about?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'd expect them to iteratively learn the facts of the topic, just as the people who first discovered those facts would have had to. Many areas of knowledge are traditionally introduced that way. Of course it can't be the only teaching strategy, since many things couldn't be learned within a human lifespan without explicit instruction on the facts, but it plays an important pedagogical role. The replication crisis indicates, frankly, that confidence in the process of science should be eroded a bit. Many people I know treat scientific studies as true until proven otherwise, and the replication crisis demonstrates this isn't an accurate assessment.
    - scarmig 6y ago
      There's two different kinds of confidence in science. There's the type that uncritically accepts an article at face value (oranges cause/cure cancer! Time to ban/require orange consumption!), and there's the type that says "the scientific community thinks evolution is true, so even if individual articles can be criticized, on the whole I shouldn't discount it as a theory based on a single critique or mistake." The former is good to undermine; the latter bad. But the boundary between them can be murky.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  The prison experiment is a terrible example here because it is exactly the sort of thing that experts have discounted for ages but held sway in popular discourse. It isn't an example of the replication crisis, since experts correctly diagnosed its flaws. It is an example of failing to listen to current academics in social science, which is the opposite of what most people who complain about the replication crisis would tell us to do.
roenxi 6y ago
Ha, such a list is a great thing to argue about. But nevertheless, I am disappointed by the politics section. The Big Question in politics is, as it has been for 2 centuries now, how do we deploy the brightest minds on the biggest problems. Our biggest problem in politics is that decisions have to make sense to the median voter. If someone comes up with a process that can transcend that without the well understood failings of dictatorship, that would be game changing beyond game changing. The world has too many problems with well known solutions. People keep reinventing square wheels instead of being honest about what worked and didn't in the past.
- Sawamara 6y ago
  "The Big Question in politics is, as it has been for 2 centuries now, how do we deploy the brightest minds on the biggest problems." I am sorry to have to inform you, but this is a meritocratic, very naive view of modern societies that every single datapoint points against. That is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is: what to do when there is an ongoing state capture of your country by oligopolic pan-continental corporate structures? Stop assuming that we just have to find out a solution. Solutions exist. We can have co-owned drone farms sustaining entire villages. We COULD have that. We already have tens of thousands of bright scientists who work on drugs where the patents go to the corporations, not for those who actually did the research anyway. Profits, however, are more important to those who make decisions about our ways of living.
  - uHuge 6y ago
    I'd agree with what you describe, which I'd call policy-baked corruption for short. I strongly disagree on the notion that deciding the way each of us lives is on the shoulders of the profit-driven directors.
  - jl2718 6y ago
    This seems to me as a fundamental inability to coordinate without hierarchy, which probably has something to do with a limit on the number of trust relationships each human can maintain. The rest may be a consequence of that. For instance, no matter how much you hate the President, you have no idea who you would appoint to be deputy secretary of interior farm management, so you’re not really offering an alternative solution.
Kednicma 6y ago
We've got eugenics, corporatism, sci-fi bait, and worse. I do like the idea of a field of "China studies" through the very specific lens that they've sketched, which focuses on the experience of Hong Kong throughout the past century, but otherwise, ugh, what a series of shallow tropes. Their "climate studies" list is papering over the fact that those studies were done decades ago and the conclusions were well-understood. Here's one question in each field which is better than any of theirs: Genetics: To what extent does the RNA world (leadzyme, ribozyme, RNA bases) influence our DNA's actions; is there more beyond genome and epigenome? Business Development: Enumerate all models of cooperation. Climatology: Classify the climates of Venus and Mars under anthropogenic climate change; what will terraforming do to their climates? Earth Science: Classify the minerals and rocks of Venus and Mars. Neuroscience: Is demyelination preventable or treatable? Economics: Are markets efficient? Prove that either P<NP (no) or FP=PPAD (yes). Medicine: Can phage therapy prevent an antibiotic-resistant bacterial doom scenario? History: Just let historians critique history books for a few hours live on stage, and broadcast the results. This will more socially impactful than any specific question or research agenda. Law: I do have a soft spot for "What rights might digital minds have under current law?" It's a good question. However, a better one, in terms of social impact today, might be: How can the law establish effective oversight over its executors and legislators? Statistics: Are there tighter bounds on neural net performance than PAC/VC theory? Alternatively, are neural nets essentially polynomial regression? Philosophy: The Hard Problem. Physics: Scale quantum computing to today's classical computational regimes. Astronomy: Finish building planned telescopes; do the planned experiments have results which agree with current theories? Political Science: How can two-party democracies be converted by the will of the people to multi-party democracies; can Duverger's Law be bent? Psychology: The Hard Problem. Philosophy of Science: The Demarcation Problem. Sociology: How do societies collapse; how are technologies lost? Case studies won't cut it; we need models. Mathematics: The Riemann Zeta Hypothesis. If metamathematics is allowed, then whether P<NP, P=NP, etc. Research on these lines of thought does have a big social impact today just by consideration and exploration, and will have big social impacts if they ever actually answer the questions.
- pkphilip 6y ago
  Wonder why this post is being downvoted
seppel 6y ago
There are a lot of question where I would have problems to asses whether an answer is a correct/valid one. I'd even argue that different people would accept different answers as answers. Which in turn make them bad questions to begin with.
zwieback 6y ago
Needs a section on engineering research, specifically energy. Cleaner energy and energy distribution is the #1 global concern, in my opinion, and has been for a long time.
- w1 6y ago
  yes! i know this is a hyperbolic example, but infinite clean energy would clear up a lot of problems on this list.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  I always thought it was worth dedicating an hour or 200,000 to the subject myself.
noetic_techy 6y ago
Some that caught my eye: "Improve our modelling of impact winter scenarios, especially for 1–10 km asteroids. Work with experts in climate modelling and nuclear winter modelling to see what modern models say. " I think impact scenarios is a definite, but nuclear winter is actually an extremely questionable "theory". Many people are not aware, but the the Russian KGB boasted that they literally made this up in order to divert public opinion in the west against nuclear weapons as NATO rolled out medium range missiles in Europe back in 1982: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-winter/ http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-winter/ The mushrooms clouds from nuclear detonations do indeed dissipate over a few days. I believe subsequent modeling has come up empty even in the worst case scenarios. "Develop more reliable and tamper-proof measures for so-called ‘dark tetrad’ traits — psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and narcissism." I actually like this question and have been thinking the same thing recently. These traits are very dangerous especially when exhibited by those at the top of the food chain in both politics and business and need to be identified early and treated, and not allowed to flourish among those in power (Some good reads on this is The Sociapath Next Door and the Sociopath Test). Bad actors have incredibly out-sized influence globally. "Why have certain aspects of Chinese civilization been so long-lasting? Are there any lessons we can draw from this about what makes for highly resilient institutions, cultures, or schools of thought?" I'd be curious to know what they are referring to here in modern China. Is this question even relevant post cultural revolution? I think its a more relevant question for Taiwan that preserved the "old" culture as best it could.
- jl2718 6y ago
  The personal benefits of power may not be great enough for anybody but full dark triads to pursue competitively. You can see this easily in first-line managers. And of course we are programmed to filter for this, so imagine how deep the deception must go for politicians.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Maybe a system where authority is a duty and is not competed for may be a solution?
friendlybus 6y ago
The list seems pretty off. It lists the creatine makes vegetarians smarter in cog sci and psychology. The article that question links to kills the idea in the headline. Sentience of animals and non-humans comes up a lot. Which looks less important than a lot of other areas of research, fusion, physics, ect.
kinghtown 6y ago
Extreme life extension looms large in my mind and I don’t have much trouble imagining that many people hope for this as well. My gut tells me that it’s possible but my mind says we aren’t the ones to get it. I feel like the barrier here is more of a political one than being a matter of research or feasibility. I never quite understood why we are not throwing money at this issue. I mean I get that we collectively have doubt it could happen but the alternative is the big sleep anyway so why the hell not try? Every day we feel tantalizingly closer to solving each of these problems but each decade seems to pass by quicker than the last. Perhaps we are a terminal species. Maybe the real big problem lies in social science or psychology. Better stewardship or collective modeling. Maybe we should start force-feeding lsd into people who actively vote against and stand opposed to scientific progress. There’s got to be more in life than just withdrawing a paycheque or not and dying eventually. Sinking into the past and eventually erased from living memory. I once saw a picture of a guy in the 1920s who bred horses in the Greek mountains. This vague memory is all that’s left of my great grandfather. I don’t even know his name.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > There’s got to be more in life than just withdrawing a paycheque or not and dying eventually. Prolonging life, working for eternity while continuously having children, the planet rotting away because we refuse to die? That may be more (at least in terms of years), but is it much better?
  - kinghtown 6y ago
    Experience brings wisdom. I get it, this notion of death as a release but release from what? I think we can fix many of those what’s with time and enjoy living longer and healthier. Would you really say no to 200 years because of labour? I’m not convinced people wouldn’t change with time. Watching reality tv well into their 400s. Really though, I don’t believe we’d ever get extreme life extension without getting many other ducks in a row such as sustainable living in massive numbers.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
koeng 6y ago
As a biologist, the Biology and genetics section was really disappointing. > What’s the minimum viable human population? Depends on your technology. If you have frozen sperm and an effective means of genetic engineering (to fix mutations), the answer is 1. How about the long term implications of being able to fundamentally engineer life?
- hyperbovine 6y ago
  Agreed. The questions specific to my field do not seem interesting to me at all as a researcher. They are either way too vague and ill-defined to qualify as serious research, or way too niche to have a "big social impact". Also, IANAB (I am not a biologist), but it surprises me that unravelling the genetic architecture of complex phenotypes is not represented on this list in any way, shape or form.
  - trenchgun 6y ago
    Make a pull request.
- ABCLAW 6y ago
  I agree entirely. Most of them sound like "how to I justify my AI driven technocracy by pointing to studies of lemurs"
- leetcrew 6y ago
  it doesn't really seem like an important question anyway. suppose 150 is a large enough population to allow for humans to reproduce naturally without introducing too many genetic defects. it's a cool fact, but 150 is not nearly enough to have people that specialize in all the skills needed to support modern life. a more interesting question might be how many humans are necessary for some target rate of quality of life improvements (and how does that rate respond to increasing/decreasing the population). this is probably more of a political/economic question though.
SolarNet 6y ago
It's frustrating that "Computer Science" is prefixed with "Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and". Ignoring many of the notable research questions that have nothing to do with intelligence. Ditto the "Statistics and" prefix to mathematics. Both of which ignore the 90% of the field that isn't the prefix.
- TheRealNGenius 6y ago
  This is just nitpicking
ma2rten 6y ago
All the computer science questions are about ML. Are there no impactful computer science problems left outside of ML? I also get the impression that the author did not really understand the ML/AI research questions. Otherwise, they would have probably chose more general/high-level questions.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > Are there no impactful computer science problems left outside of ML? Well, do Arden Koehler or Howie Lempel have 80,000 hours of CS Research experience? It looks like they have 80K hours of experience thinking about the best way to spend 80K hours. Woops. On the contrary, the massive influx of applied research driven by deep learning hype means there's probably a lot more high-impact stuff outside of ML than inside of ML. Quantum computing, bullet-proof crypto implementations, safety engineering for robots, and even hardening the electric grid/key compute infra against solar flares all seem much more important. Also much less "sexy". ...and even most of the AI/ML problems are scraped from a few papers from corporate AI labs with the best PR skills, with an eye toward AGI risk. But 1) AGI risk is massively overblown and 2) trying to solve those problems in general has a "silver bullet" vibe. All of the solutions to "AI Safety" questions are going to boil down to "do good software engineering", which is often more about processes and org incentives than technology or science. A really good automated HiL testing setup is going to be a lot more important than "preventing reward hacking". If you don't believe me, go ask anyone who's actually built a robot. So, I think maybe "AI Safety/Robustness broadly construed" could be one or two entries in a list of important problems in CS. But certainly not half the list as they are here. TBH, one of the highest impact problems in CS is convincing young PhDs to not waste their time applying deep learning to every god damn thing regardless of whether it's the right tool for the job.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- schuetze 6y ago
  As a psychologist/cognitive scientist (my identity depends on my mood/day), I was equally disappointed with the sections on psychology and neuroscience. Some of the questions have been answered (at least partially, such as the importance of domain knowledge versus "processing power"). Overall, it was a very odd look into a discipline that I am familiar with, which leads me to think that the ideas are not very promising for any of the fields I don't have expertise in.
iskander 6y ago
Can someone tell me more about the ideological (theological?) assumptions underpinning these questions? They seem to come from a very peculiar understanding of "social impact".
- jessriedel 6y ago
  80,000 Hours would associate themselves with "Effective Altruism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://80000hours.org/about/#how-are-you-funded https://80000hours.org/about/#how-are-you-funded The principles of effective altruism are largely consequentialist, utilitarian, cosmopolitan, and humanist, although none of those fit exactly right.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    But in practice, this list of questions reflects less the principles of Effective Altruism and more the overlap between people calling themselves Effective Altruists and other personal and career preoccupations. That's how you get four of the six "most impactful" questions in politics and international relations being about AI and one of the others involving representation for 'sentient nonhumans'. (Suffice to say this is not a list a political scientist, or even your average consequentialist utilitarian cosmopolitan humanist who read more newspapers than AI papers would propose as research priorities in politics and IR. Probably great research questions to get you a popular blog and a job in a Silicon Valley research institute though)
    - jessriedel 6y ago
      Although all organizations are influenced by their particular constituency, the guys at 80k have been led to these causes by particular philosophical and empirical arguments, which they explain in the website at great length, not (say) because they all used to be ML researchers. (They do not have technical backgrounds.) You can certainly disagree with the arguments, and they would be first to agree that their conclusions (although not premises) are radical. But more importantly, I think if you just went and talked to random political scientists, you would find they actually had not thought very hard about what the most important causes are. If you ask them, they would come up with something on the spot. Indeed, political scientists don't at all seem to be the correct experts for this question.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Biology and genetics, only one focused on genetic engineering and it's for "crops that could thrive in the tropics during a nuclear winter scenario". This seems to reflect someone's biases more than anything.
hiidrew 6y ago
Love these posts, here's a couple more that are similar: Patrick Collinson- https://patrickcollison.com/questions https://patrickcollison.com/questions Gwern- https://www.gwern.net/Questions https://www.gwern.net/Questions Alexey Guzey- https://guzey.com/personal/research-ideas/ https://guzey.com/personal/research-ideas/ Anybody have more?
Gravityloss 6y ago
How about chemistry and materials science? Think how 40 years ago lithium batteries didn't exist, and they only started becoming commercially available in this millennium. Are equivalent improvements happening soon?
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  >How about chemistry and materials science? There are more problems than there are scientists. And more scientists than there are labs that can solve problems.
adamsea 6y ago
Does anyone know if these folks got help from various experts in each of these fields in order to assemble the list?
Balgair 6y ago
In the Bio and Genetics section there are some good ones and some answers already (kinda). I'll try to be brief: > What’s the minimum viable human population (from the perspective of genetic diversity)? ~500 people. It's not a 'firm' answer, as the research is still ongoing (aka, its complicated) but it looks like the number is ~500 but likely a bit more : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population > What future possibilities are there for brain-computer interfacing and how does this interact with issues in AI safety? It all come down to scarring. Current attempts typically end in scarring, at least in the Central Nervous System. We've not got a good way around it yet, at least for little tetrode like probes you have to insert. The most exciting (to me) is to use Clarity and Optogenetics. Clarity to make the brain, well, clear-er. And Optogenetics to stimulate cells with light. Shine light, nerves fire. Trouble is the Clarity makes the brain swell ~3x, and nerves are smaller than the diffraction limit of light, mostly. Maybe attach some iron atoms in the optogenetic pore and then pull on them in a magnetic gradient, thereby separating out the frequencies needed. Still it's a long ways off. > What do we know from animals about how cognitive abilities scale with brain size, learning time, environmental complexity, etc.? There's been some good work out of the Hercule lab (U. Chile I think?) about this. The trouble is in getting a reliable brain marker for 'learning ability'. You can use markers for the number of layers of the cortex, and their cross connectivity, but it's still tough to understand. Turns out, the 'wrinklage' of a mammalian brain is correlated with increasing 'learning-ness', but atmospheric/hydodynamic pressure plays a huge role in the 'wrinklage'. Sorry, my google-fu is not good today and I don't have the paper citation > Why has Mohism almost died out in China, relative to other schools of thought? Damn! Now that is a good question. For those just seeing Mozi for the first time, he was a defensive siege engineer during the early Warring states period (~470BC). Guy's ethos would really fit well in Silicon Valley, he was a kinda engineery-hippy dude, kinda Kevin Kelly-esque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi
sgustard 6y ago
The year 2020 is providing all the Big Questions we can handle. How do we stop a pandemic? Climate change driven fires the size of a continent? Reforming the police to stop racial violence? Fighting bots and trolls that threaten democracy?
- glial 6y ago
  That last one is easy, at least: ban ad-driven social media as a business model.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Being ad-driven is a red herring. Trolls were known to exist on totally non-commercial mailing lists. Being pseudonymous is key, but it's also the valuable part.
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      > Being pseudonymous is key, but it's also the valuable part. That does not seem to be they key on Facebook.
    - cameldrv 6y ago
      Being ad-driven is an important component because a big part of the incentive to maximize engagement is to drive ad impressions. If social media companies were compensated in some other way, the content might be different.
    - glial 6y ago
      There will always be trolls. What the ads fund are armies of cognitive scientists making you addicted in the name of “engagement” aka ad revenue, consequences be damned.
  - j4nt4b 6y ago
    How about banning advertisements altogether?
glitchc 6y ago
Sorry, these are actually terrible. Some of the biggest questions off the top of my head: 1) How do we build machines that repair themselves? 2) How can we get human bodies to automatically repair and regrow damaged limbs and organs? 3) How do we build an energy source that is the same volume and mass as a litre of petroleum, is as stable and portable as petroleum but possesses 10x the energy density? 4) How can we get the human immune system to automatically develop suitable antiviral antibodies to combat a viral infection? 5) When will heated toilet seats become standard in North American homes (or at least north of Virginia)?
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Solution to everything: put human (consciousness) into silicon. Now all problems becomes one dimensional. (2), (4), (5) becomes moot, (3) is quite unnecessary because time is now more or less expendable, and we can just work on (1).
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  The problem with your questions, they're pragmatic with clear goals and ends. The questions in... question... are vague, have no clear defined endpoints and serve as a form of mental masturbation. Which I say in all seriousness. It's similar to English lit "analysis" of blue curtains. No "real" answer. It's all strictly to make the one posing the questions feel smart by stopping people and hoping theres no real answer because a follow up is too difficult for the pretentious ass that formed the questions. The business, econ, AI and philosophy ones are especially terrible. I've never used a fancy Japanese toilet, but it does make me wonder why there hasn't been a real push to import them into the states. We buy plenty of stupid crap already... haha... fancy toilets seem right up our alley. For 3, I believe physics says atomic energy is the only other route. I wish I could remember where I read a long and a bit over my head section to a book about this.... and nuke powered cars/planes is a recipe for disaster.
contingencies 6y ago
I would say that the absence of any overarching anthropological, epistemological or philosophical basis for these questions is the fundamental observation that needs to be made. "Big social impact" is hardly a defined category, let alone necessarily representative of desirable outcome. As we move from a multiplicity of disparate cultures to a single common denominating quagmire of internet-unified global capitalism, how do we ensure that alternative perspectives on nature, society and purpose continue to exist and are granted reasonable space and resources to self-sustain? Alternatively stated: how can homo sapiens as a group reliably value things such as the commons (nature, intellectual heritage, freedom of choice, individual dignity, etc.) that exist outside of conventional private ownership and economic rationalism without politically centralizing objective value thereby capitulating the great strengths known to be associated with heterogeneity?
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
What if every scientist stops what he is currently doing and starts working on General AI? After they complete that task, all the other problems on the list will take 0.1sec to solve.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  This isn't true. NP-completeness and Turing-completeness both limit what an AI can reason about, and there's no reason to expect that AGI will spontaneously break those barriers. To use the meme, an AI won't be smarter than us; it'll be faster at being stupid.
  - BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
    I don't see how being smarter than us, or solving any of the problems on the list is an NP hard problem. For example, computers beat humans in chess by a wide margin - nothing NP hard about it.
    - Kednicma 6y ago
      Bounded proof search is NP-complete, and you can see this if you imagine transforming a bounded proof search into a satisfiability problem; go from "what, if any, proof starts at these assumptions and reaches these conclusions in less than N steps?" into "what, if any, assignment of Boolean values will encode a proof in O(N) values?" This is precisely what got both Gödel and Nash interested in what would become P vs NP. Computers beating humans at chess is a great example of not being smarter, but being stupid faster. Both humans and computers approach PSPACE-complete problems like chess by approximating their searches and looking at trees of possible moves. We have no special insights into how to consider or evaluate moves; we have psychological profiles on which moves might be connected during practical play but no reason to require people to make such moves, and those profiles are largely limited to "openings", classifying the relatively few initial trees. How do computers beat humans in chess? They do exactly what we do, but faster. This isn't smart, but fast stupid.

180 points by apsec112 6y ago

hhs 6y ago

> The replication crisis has cast into doubt important research findings, such as the Stanford prison experiment. What other socially important findings have been undermined? How should we interpret scientific literature post-crisis? This should start early in middle school and high school, too. Surprised this idea of replication crisis fails to get more attention.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I’m not surprised. Science is subject to political control like anything else. Why does a study use this or that data? What flaws or assumptions do we explain away as permitted trade-offs rather than rejecting as lacking enough basic fidelity to even proceed. There are Overton Windows in science (when’s the last time a scientific paper suggested that a bloody revolution should be used to address climate change?) and ultimately what gets published is a media channel that only exists to suit purposes of those funding it or permitting it - wealthy think tanks with a particular agenda, political parties or specific administrations or legislators who need reelection or need to foment support for their favored plan or outrage for their opponent’s plan. A replication crisis is by design - the system doesn’t exist to publish the best available science, it exists to create credential and status hierarchy in which to control scientific authority and shape it as a political tool. To address this issue you’d have to first address general plutocracy which even 80000 Hours itself is enmeshed in.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  Yes, academia is no better suited to handling a major internal crisis then any other institution. The intensives are just too skewed towards publishing. Every major player out there almost certainly has an un-reproducible paper they published under duress.
- hhs 6y ago
  Indeed, there should also be better data and research literacy. On the hopeful side: looking at how the field of medicine evolved over the centuries from outright quackery to better data and ethical disclosures from those who do the research. It’s still not perfect but it’s getting better.
rmah 6y ago
99.9% of teens do not have the knowledge, skills or capability to critically examine academic research. Hell, most secondary and high school teachers don't have those skills. Thus, all you can say is "be skeptical". But that is next to useless if the student has no basis to make an assessment -- all it will do is erode confidence in the process of science. Instead, IMO, students should be 1) given a firm foundation of well accepted knowledge and 2) taught how the process of science works. As an aside, I'd ask those who promote the idea that children should be taught "how to think" instead of "facts they can just look up" to think a bit more deeply about what they are saying. IMO, you cannot reach valid conclusions without facts. Facts are the foundation of knowledge, synthesis and analysis. Without facts, one cannot understand a topic or even know what questions to ask about it. Note, I'm not saying that children should be force fed facts via rote learning. But consider, what happens when someone believes they can think for themselves but is ignorant of topic they're thinking about?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I'd expect them to iteratively learn the facts of the topic, just as the people who first discovered those facts would have had to. Many areas of knowledge are traditionally introduced that way. Of course it can't be the only teaching strategy, since many things couldn't be learned within a human lifespan without explicit instruction on the facts, but it plays an important pedagogical role. The replication crisis indicates, frankly, that confidence in the process of science should be eroded a bit. Many people I know treat scientific studies as true until proven otherwise, and the replication crisis demonstrates this isn't an accurate assessment.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    There's two different kinds of confidence in science. There's the type that uncritically accepts an article at face value (oranges cause/cure cancer! Time to ban/require orange consumption!), and there's the type that says "the scientific community thinks evolution is true, so even if individual articles can be criticized, on the whole I shouldn't discount it as a theory based on a single critique or mistake." The former is good to undermine; the latter bad. But the boundary between them can be murky.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
UncleMeat 6y ago
The prison experiment is a terrible example here because it is exactly the sort of thing that experts have discounted for ages but held sway in popular discourse. It isn't an example of the replication crisis, since experts correctly diagnosed its flaws. It is an example of failing to listen to current academics in social science, which is the opposite of what most people who complain about the replication crisis would tell us to do.

roenxi 6y ago

Ha, such a list is a great thing to argue about. But nevertheless, I am disappointed by the politics section. The Big Question in politics is, as it has been for 2 centuries now, how do we deploy the brightest minds on the biggest problems. Our biggest problem in politics is that decisions have to make sense to the median voter. If someone comes up with a process that can transcend that without the well understood failings of dictatorship, that would be game changing beyond game changing. The world has too many problems with well known solutions. People keep reinventing square wheels instead of being honest about what worked and didn't in the past.

Sawamara 6y ago
"The Big Question in politics is, as it has been for 2 centuries now, how do we deploy the brightest minds on the biggest problems." I am sorry to have to inform you, but this is a meritocratic, very naive view of modern societies that every single datapoint points against. That is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is: what to do when there is an ongoing state capture of your country by oligopolic pan-continental corporate structures? Stop assuming that we just have to find out a solution. Solutions exist. We can have co-owned drone farms sustaining entire villages. We COULD have that. We already have tens of thousands of bright scientists who work on drugs where the patents go to the corporations, not for those who actually did the research anyway. Profits, however, are more important to those who make decisions about our ways of living.
- uHuge 6y ago
  I'd agree with what you describe, which I'd call policy-baked corruption for short. I strongly disagree on the notion that deciding the way each of us lives is on the shoulders of the profit-driven directors.
- jl2718 6y ago
  This seems to me as a fundamental inability to coordinate without hierarchy, which probably has something to do with a limit on the number of trust relationships each human can maintain. The rest may be a consequence of that. For instance, no matter how much you hate the President, you have no idea who you would appoint to be deputy secretary of interior farm management, so you’re not really offering an alternative solution.

Kednicma 6y ago

We've got eugenics, corporatism, sci-fi bait, and worse. I do like the idea of a field of "China studies" through the very specific lens that they've sketched, which focuses on the experience of Hong Kong throughout the past century, but otherwise, ugh, what a series of shallow tropes. Their "climate studies" list is papering over the fact that those studies were done decades ago and the conclusions were well-understood. Here's one question in each field which is better than any of theirs: Genetics: To what extent does the RNA world (leadzyme, ribozyme, RNA bases) influence our DNA's actions; is there more beyond genome and epigenome? Business Development: Enumerate all models of cooperation. Climatology: Classify the climates of Venus and Mars under anthropogenic climate change; what will terraforming do to their climates? Earth Science: Classify the minerals and rocks of Venus and Mars. Neuroscience: Is demyelination preventable or treatable? Economics: Are markets efficient? Prove that either P<NP (no) or FP=PPAD (yes). Medicine: Can phage therapy prevent an antibiotic-resistant bacterial doom scenario? History: Just let historians critique history books for a few hours live on stage, and broadcast the results. This will more socially impactful than any specific question or research agenda. Law: I do have a soft spot for "What rights might digital minds have under current law?" It's a good question. However, a better one, in terms of social impact today, might be: How can the law establish effective oversight over its executors and legislators? Statistics: Are there tighter bounds on neural net performance than PAC/VC theory? Alternatively, are neural nets essentially polynomial regression? Philosophy: The Hard Problem. Physics: Scale quantum computing to today's classical computational regimes. Astronomy: Finish building planned telescopes; do the planned experiments have results which agree with current theories? Political Science: How can two-party democracies be converted by the will of the people to multi-party democracies; can Duverger's Law be bent? Psychology: The Hard Problem. Philosophy of Science: The Demarcation Problem. Sociology: How do societies collapse; how are technologies lost? Case studies won't cut it; we need models. Mathematics: The Riemann Zeta Hypothesis. If metamathematics is allowed, then whether P<NP, P=NP, etc. Research on these lines of thought does have a big social impact today just by consideration and exploration, and will have big social impacts if they ever actually answer the questions.

pkphilip 6y ago
Wonder why this post is being downvoted

seppel 6y ago

There are a lot of question where I would have problems to asses whether an answer is a correct/valid one. I'd even argue that different people would accept different answers as answers. Which in turn make them bad questions to begin with.

zwieback 6y ago

Needs a section on engineering research, specifically energy. Cleaner energy and energy distribution is the #1 global concern, in my opinion, and has been for a long time.

w1 6y ago
yes! i know this is a hyperbolic example, but infinite clean energy would clear up a lot of problems on this list.
fuzzfactor 6y ago
I always thought it was worth dedicating an hour or 200,000 to the subject myself.

noetic_techy 6y ago

Some that caught my eye: "Improve our modelling of impact winter scenarios, especially for 1–10 km asteroids. Work with experts in climate modelling and nuclear winter modelling to see what modern models say. " I think impact scenarios is a definite, but nuclear winter is actually an extremely questionable "theory". Many people are not aware, but the the Russian KGB boasted that they literally made this up in order to divert public opinion in the west against nuclear weapons as NATO rolled out medium range missiles in Europe back in 1982: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-winter/ http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-winter/ The mushrooms clouds from nuclear detonations do indeed dissipate over a few days. I believe subsequent modeling has come up empty even in the worst case scenarios. "Develop more reliable and tamper-proof measures for so-called ‘dark tetrad’ traits — psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and narcissism." I actually like this question and have been thinking the same thing recently. These traits are very dangerous especially when exhibited by those at the top of the food chain in both politics and business and need to be identified early and treated, and not allowed to flourish among those in power (Some good reads on this is The Sociapath Next Door and the Sociopath Test). Bad actors have incredibly out-sized influence globally. "Why have certain aspects of Chinese civilization been so long-lasting? Are there any lessons we can draw from this about what makes for highly resilient institutions, cultures, or schools of thought?" I'd be curious to know what they are referring to here in modern China. Is this question even relevant post cultural revolution? I think its a more relevant question for Taiwan that preserved the "old" culture as best it could.

jl2718 6y ago
The personal benefits of power may not be great enough for anybody but full dark triads to pursue competitively. You can see this easily in first-line managers. And of course we are programmed to filter for this, so imagine how deep the deception must go for politicians.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Maybe a system where authority is a duty and is not competed for may be a solution?

friendlybus 6y ago

The list seems pretty off. It lists the creatine makes vegetarians smarter in cog sci and psychology. The article that question links to kills the idea in the headline. Sentience of animals and non-humans comes up a lot. Which looks less important than a lot of other areas of research, fusion, physics, ect.

kinghtown 6y ago

Extreme life extension looms large in my mind and I don’t have much trouble imagining that many people hope for this as well. My gut tells me that it’s possible but my mind says we aren’t the ones to get it. I feel like the barrier here is more of a political one than being a matter of research or feasibility. I never quite understood why we are not throwing money at this issue. I mean I get that we collectively have doubt it could happen but the alternative is the big sleep anyway so why the hell not try? Every day we feel tantalizingly closer to solving each of these problems but each decade seems to pass by quicker than the last. Perhaps we are a terminal species. Maybe the real big problem lies in social science or psychology. Better stewardship or collective modeling. Maybe we should start force-feeding lsd into people who actively vote against and stand opposed to scientific progress. There’s got to be more in life than just withdrawing a paycheque or not and dying eventually. Sinking into the past and eventually erased from living memory. I once saw a picture of a guy in the 1920s who bred horses in the Greek mountains. This vague memory is all that’s left of my great grandfather. I don’t even know his name.

luckylion 6y ago
> There’s got to be more in life than just withdrawing a paycheque or not and dying eventually. Prolonging life, working for eternity while continuously having children, the planet rotting away because we refuse to die? That may be more (at least in terms of years), but is it much better?
- kinghtown 6y ago
  Experience brings wisdom. I get it, this notion of death as a release but release from what? I think we can fix many of those what’s with time and enjoy living longer and healthier. Would you really say no to 200 years because of labour? I’m not convinced people wouldn’t change with time. Watching reality tv well into their 400s. Really though, I don’t believe we’d ever get extreme life extension without getting many other ducks in a row such as sustainable living in massive numbers.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago

koeng 6y ago

As a biologist, the Biology and genetics section was really disappointing. > What’s the minimum viable human population? Depends on your technology. If you have frozen sperm and an effective means of genetic engineering (to fix mutations), the answer is 1. How about the long term implications of being able to fundamentally engineer life?

hyperbovine 6y ago
Agreed. The questions specific to my field do not seem interesting to me at all as a researcher. They are either way too vague and ill-defined to qualify as serious research, or way too niche to have a "big social impact". Also, IANAB (I am not a biologist), but it surprises me that unravelling the genetic architecture of complex phenotypes is not represented on this list in any way, shape or form.
- trenchgun 6y ago
  Make a pull request.
ABCLAW 6y ago
I agree entirely. Most of them sound like "how to I justify my AI driven technocracy by pointing to studies of lemurs"
leetcrew 6y ago
it doesn't really seem like an important question anyway. suppose 150 is a large enough population to allow for humans to reproduce naturally without introducing too many genetic defects. it's a cool fact, but 150 is not nearly enough to have people that specialize in all the skills needed to support modern life. a more interesting question might be how many humans are necessary for some target rate of quality of life improvements (and how does that rate respond to increasing/decreasing the population). this is probably more of a political/economic question though.

SolarNet 6y ago

It's frustrating that "Computer Science" is prefixed with "Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and". Ignoring many of the notable research questions that have nothing to do with intelligence. Ditto the "Statistics and" prefix to mathematics. Both of which ignore the 90% of the field that isn't the prefix.

TheRealNGenius 6y ago
This is just nitpicking

ma2rten 6y ago

All the computer science questions are about ML. Are there no impactful computer science problems left outside of ML? I also get the impression that the author did not really understand the ML/AI research questions. Otherwise, they would have probably chose more general/high-level questions.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> Are there no impactful computer science problems left outside of ML? Well, do Arden Koehler or Howie Lempel have 80,000 hours of CS Research experience? It looks like they have 80K hours of experience thinking about the best way to spend 80K hours. Woops. On the contrary, the massive influx of applied research driven by deep learning hype means there's probably a lot more high-impact stuff outside of ML than inside of ML. Quantum computing, bullet-proof crypto implementations, safety engineering for robots, and even hardening the electric grid/key compute infra against solar flares all seem much more important. Also much less "sexy". ...and even most of the AI/ML problems are scraped from a few papers from corporate AI labs with the best PR skills, with an eye toward AGI risk. But 1) AGI risk is massively overblown and 2) trying to solve those problems in general has a "silver bullet" vibe. All of the solutions to "AI Safety" questions are going to boil down to "do good software engineering", which is often more about processes and org incentives than technology or science. A really good automated HiL testing setup is going to be a lot more important than "preventing reward hacking". If you don't believe me, go ask anyone who's actually built a robot. So, I think maybe "AI Safety/Robustness broadly construed" could be one or two entries in a list of important problems in CS. But certainly not half the list as they are here. TBH, one of the highest impact problems in CS is convincing young PhDs to not waste their time applying deep learning to every god damn thing regardless of whether it's the right tool for the job.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
schuetze 6y ago
As a psychologist/cognitive scientist (my identity depends on my mood/day), I was equally disappointed with the sections on psychology and neuroscience. Some of the questions have been answered (at least partially, such as the importance of domain knowledge versus "processing power"). Overall, it was a very odd look into a discipline that I am familiar with, which leads me to think that the ideas are not very promising for any of the fields I don't have expertise in.

iskander 6y ago

Can someone tell me more about the ideological (theological?) assumptions underpinning these questions? They seem to come from a very peculiar understanding of "social impact".

jessriedel 6y ago
80,000 Hours would associate themselves with "Effective Altruism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism https://80000hours.org/about/#how-are-you-funded https://80000hours.org/about/#how-are-you-funded The principles of effective altruism are largely consequentialist, utilitarian, cosmopolitan, and humanist, although none of those fit exactly right.
- notahacker 6y ago
  But in practice, this list of questions reflects less the principles of Effective Altruism and more the overlap between people calling themselves Effective Altruists and other personal and career preoccupations. That's how you get four of the six "most impactful" questions in politics and international relations being about AI and one of the others involving representation for 'sentient nonhumans'. (Suffice to say this is not a list a political scientist, or even your average consequentialist utilitarian cosmopolitan humanist who read more newspapers than AI papers would propose as research priorities in politics and IR. Probably great research questions to get you a popular blog and a job in a Silicon Valley research institute though)
  - jessriedel 6y ago
    Although all organizations are influenced by their particular constituency, the guys at 80k have been led to these causes by particular philosophical and empirical arguments, which they explain in the website at great length, not (say) because they all used to be ML researchers. (They do not have technical backgrounds.) You can certainly disagree with the arguments, and they would be first to agree that their conclusions (although not premises) are radical. But more importantly, I think if you just went and talked to random political scientists, you would find they actually had not thought very hard about what the most important causes are. If you ask them, they would come up with something on the spot. Indeed, political scientists don't at all seem to be the correct experts for this question.

ryanmarsh 6y ago

Biology and genetics, only one focused on genetic engineering and it's for "crops that could thrive in the tropics during a nuclear winter scenario". This seems to reflect someone's biases more than anything.

hiidrew 6y ago

Love these posts, here's a couple more that are similar: Patrick Collinson- https://patrickcollison.com/questions https://patrickcollison.com/questions Gwern- https://www.gwern.net/Questions https://www.gwern.net/Questions Alexey Guzey- https://guzey.com/personal/research-ideas/ https://guzey.com/personal/research-ideas/ Anybody have more?

Gravityloss 6y ago

How about chemistry and materials science? Think how 40 years ago lithium batteries didn't exist, and they only started becoming commercially available in this millennium. Are equivalent improvements happening soon?

fuzzfactor 6y ago
>How about chemistry and materials science? There are more problems than there are scientists. And more scientists than there are labs that can solve problems.

adamsea 6y ago

Does anyone know if these folks got help from various experts in each of these fields in order to assemble the list?

Balgair 6y ago

In the Bio and Genetics section there are some good ones and some answers already (kinda). I'll try to be brief: > What’s the minimum viable human population (from the perspective of genetic diversity)? ~500 people. It's not a 'firm' answer, as the research is still ongoing (aka, its complicated) but it looks like the number is ~500 but likely a bit more : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population > What future possibilities are there for brain-computer interfacing and how does this interact with issues in AI safety? It all come down to scarring. Current attempts typically end in scarring, at least in the Central Nervous System. We've not got a good way around it yet, at least for little tetrode like probes you have to insert. The most exciting (to me) is to use Clarity and Optogenetics. Clarity to make the brain, well, clear-er. And Optogenetics to stimulate cells with light. Shine light, nerves fire. Trouble is the Clarity makes the brain swell ~3x, and nerves are smaller than the diffraction limit of light, mostly. Maybe attach some iron atoms in the optogenetic pore and then pull on them in a magnetic gradient, thereby separating out the frequencies needed. Still it's a long ways off. > What do we know from animals about how cognitive abilities scale with brain size, learning time, environmental complexity, etc.? There's been some good work out of the Hercule lab (U. Chile I think?) about this. The trouble is in getting a reliable brain marker for 'learning ability'. You can use markers for the number of layers of the cortex, and their cross connectivity, but it's still tough to understand. Turns out, the 'wrinklage' of a mammalian brain is correlated with increasing 'learning-ness', but atmospheric/hydodynamic pressure plays a huge role in the 'wrinklage'. Sorry, my google-fu is not good today and I don't have the paper citation > Why has Mohism almost died out in China, relative to other schools of thought? Damn! Now that is a good question. For those just seeing Mozi for the first time, he was a defensive siege engineer during the early Warring states period (~470BC). Guy's ethos would really fit well in Silicon Valley, he was a kinda engineery-hippy dude, kinda Kevin Kelly-esque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi

sgustard 6y ago

The year 2020 is providing all the Big Questions we can handle. How do we stop a pandemic? Climate change driven fires the size of a continent? Reforming the police to stop racial violence? Fighting bots and trolls that threaten democracy?

glial 6y ago
That last one is easy, at least: ban ad-driven social media as a business model.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Being ad-driven is a red herring. Trolls were known to exist on totally non-commercial mailing lists. Being pseudonymous is key, but it's also the valuable part.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    > Being pseudonymous is key, but it's also the valuable part. That does not seem to be they key on Facebook.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    Being ad-driven is an important component because a big part of the incentive to maximize engagement is to drive ad impressions. If social media companies were compensated in some other way, the content might be different.
  - glial 6y ago
    There will always be trolls. What the ads fund are armies of cognitive scientists making you addicted in the name of “engagement” aka ad revenue, consequences be damned.
- j4nt4b 6y ago
  How about banning advertisements altogether?

glitchc 6y ago

Sorry, these are actually terrible. Some of the biggest questions off the top of my head: 1) How do we build machines that repair themselves? 2) How can we get human bodies to automatically repair and regrow damaged limbs and organs? 3) How do we build an energy source that is the same volume and mass as a litre of petroleum, is as stable and portable as petroleum but possesses 10x the energy density? 4) How can we get the human immune system to automatically develop suitable antiviral antibodies to combat a viral infection? 5) When will heated toilet seats become standard in North American homes (or at least north of Virginia)?

Aperocky 6y ago
Solution to everything: put human (consciousness) into silicon. Now all problems becomes one dimensional. (2), (4), (5) becomes moot, (3) is quite unnecessary because time is now more or less expendable, and we can just work on (1).
NoOneNew 6y ago
The problem with your questions, they're pragmatic with clear goals and ends. The questions in... question... are vague, have no clear defined endpoints and serve as a form of mental masturbation. Which I say in all seriousness. It's similar to English lit "analysis" of blue curtains. No "real" answer. It's all strictly to make the one posing the questions feel smart by stopping people and hoping theres no real answer because a follow up is too difficult for the pretentious ass that formed the questions. The business, econ, AI and philosophy ones are especially terrible. I've never used a fancy Japanese toilet, but it does make me wonder why there hasn't been a real push to import them into the states. We buy plenty of stupid crap already... haha... fancy toilets seem right up our alley. For 3, I believe physics says atomic energy is the only other route. I wish I could remember where I read a long and a bit over my head section to a book about this.... and nuke powered cars/planes is a recipe for disaster.

contingencies 6y ago

I would say that the absence of any overarching anthropological, epistemological or philosophical basis for these questions is the fundamental observation that needs to be made. "Big social impact" is hardly a defined category, let alone necessarily representative of desirable outcome. As we move from a multiplicity of disparate cultures to a single common denominating quagmire of internet-unified global capitalism, how do we ensure that alternative perspectives on nature, society and purpose continue to exist and are granted reasonable space and resources to self-sustain? Alternatively stated: how can homo sapiens as a group reliably value things such as the commons (nature, intellectual heritage, freedom of choice, individual dignity, etc.) that exist outside of conventional private ownership and economic rationalism without politically centralizing objective value thereby capitulating the great strengths known to be associated with heterogeneity?

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago

What if every scientist stops what he is currently doing and starts working on General AI? After they complete that task, all the other problems on the list will take 0.1sec to solve.

Kednicma 6y ago
This isn't true. NP-completeness and Turing-completeness both limit what an AI can reason about, and there's no reason to expect that AGI will spontaneously break those barriers. To use the meme, an AI won't be smarter than us; it'll be faster at being stupid.
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
  I don't see how being smarter than us, or solving any of the problems on the list is an NP hard problem. For example, computers beat humans in chess by a wide margin - nothing NP hard about it.
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    Bounded proof search is NP-complete, and you can see this if you imagine transforming a bounded proof search into a satisfiability problem; go from "what, if any, proof starts at these assumptions and reaches these conclusions in less than N steps?" into "what, if any, assignment of Boolean values will encode a proof in O(N) values?" This is precisely what got both Gödel and Nash interested in what would become P vs NP. Computers beating humans at chess is a great example of not being smarter, but being stupid faster. Both humans and computers approach PSPACE-complete problems like chess by approximating their searches and looking at trees of possible moves. We have no special insights into how to consider or evaluate moves; we have psychological profiles on which moves might be connected during practical play but no reason to require people to make such moves, and those profiles are largely limited to "openings", classifying the relatively few initial trees. How do computers beat humans in chess? They do exactly what we do, but faster. This isn't smart, but fast stupid.