5 ms·

'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful dem

• failuser 5y ago
  Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of trying to keep or expand the funding. I know that keeping the grad students overworked and hungry keeps many grifters out of science, but at what cost?
  • User23 5y ago
    Cancer really isn’t one disease. It’s thousands if not millions or maybe even billions of diseases that share some similarities. The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero, but there’s plenty of opportunity to help sufferers die with rather than of. It’s a game of incremental improvement so it’s likely that greater investment would produce reasonable returns.
    • reader_mode 5y ago
      >The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero A way to kill a specific type of cells doesn't sound impossible (zero).
      • contravariant 5y ago
        Well it isn't, there's just many different types of cells that cause cancer.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • frankbreetz 5y ago
    I think there are so only so many possible solutions, the first researcher will choose to researcher the possible solution with the highest probability or working. As you add more researchers they will research less probabil solutions. It is the law of diminishing returns.
    • failuser 5y ago
      Scientific research is not a high school problem where the clear algorithm is known. A lot of approaches need to tries before valid ones are found. And for cancer a single approach is most likely not enough.
      • frankbreetz 5y ago
        The grandparent talks about going from 1,000 to to 10,000, not a single researcher. Are you implying the law of diminishing returns doesn't apply to research?
        • 988747 5y ago
          But how do the first researcher choose the approach "with the highest probability of working"? Since the research hasn't been conducted yet they can only use their own previous experience, also known as bias. Judging by the results the approaches to cure cancer that were pursued first haven't been very effective.
  • 3grdlurker 5y ago
    If you have a team of programmers who always miss their deadlines, will increasing the headcount necessarily make them a team that always meets the deadlines? No, because other than having more people means more distractions and need for communication, there might be other problems, such as technical debt, or miscommunicated requirements, or inexperience, or outright unreasonable demands. The only variable that increasing the headcount necessarily improves is the headcount itself.
    • cercatrova 5y ago
      No but increasing the number of teams who are all now competing with each other would probably allow us to see progress scaling with the number of teams, not necessarily putting everyone on the same team.
      • 3grdlurker 5y ago
        Science discoveries don't just happen because there are more people "competing" to solve a problem. The more likely outcome of what you're saying is that you'd only have more teams competing, sure, but to redo each other's work.
        • username90 5y ago
          They don't even compete to solve the problem, they compete for funding. People who are better at politics gets more funding, so adding more people could even be net negative with them draining up all the funding from those who do the actual research.
        • ALittleLight 5y ago
          The replication crisis suggests to me that we'd probably benefit from lots of repeated work.
          • forcry 5y ago
            As an outside observer, replication crisis appear to more a result of other things like "publish or perish" and other politics in academics
  • lostcolony 5y ago
    '10x researches can try out 10x approaches' Can they though, and is that helpful? Is there sufficient communication between everyone in the field to ensure no one is investigating the same things? Is that still 10x, given the communication overhead in ensuring what you're wanting to start doing isn't already being worked on by one of the 9999 others? Are their 10x as many approaches that can be investigated in parallel at all times? The lessons from the mythical man month still apply even with research.
    • failuser 5y ago
      Those are all general thoughts and results would be different for different problems. Some can be parallelized for millions of people, some can not be at all. Parallelization is as much about throughput as latency. Nine women can not gestate a child in one month, one can apparently gestate eight in nine months.
  • fhssn1 5y ago
    The numbers 1000 and 10,000 are just to make a point. It could be 10,000 vs 100,000. I just don't know. I've added "beyond a certain point" to 10x. So e.g., increasing from 10 to 100 helps. 100 to 1000 helps. 1000 to 10,000? maybe. 10,000 to 100,000? maybe not. And so on (like approaching diminishing returns). (again the numbers are for illustration, and would vary with the nature of work).
  • wpasc 5y ago
    IMO Joel Spolsky kind of covers a possible answer to your question in his blog post "Hitting the High Notes"[0]. While I'm sure there's plenty of counter examples, it's important to note a wide ranging variety of discoveries and breakthroughs that have come from individuals and small teams that have. In many of these cases, that person or small team is uniquely breaking against an otherwise agreed upon convention or state of the field. 1,000 people who agree on a paradigm which may be false is not helped by another 9,000 people who agree with that same paradigm. In the era of Einstein, how many physicists accepted the traditional view of space and time? throwing more physicists at the same problem probably doesn't mean getting more Einsteins. Potential example for today (though IANAD nor Biologists), how many scientists and researchers agree upon removing plaques as a treatment for alzheimers? how long has that theory been the dominant narrative in spite of failed treatments at removing plaques? how many individuals wanted to try/research something different but all the other grants went to people pursuing the held narrative because the grantors also held that same narrative? There's countless of companies where scaling up # of people just adds noise and bureaucracy and smaller companies with strong-minded individuals were able to break through. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
    • sprafa 5y ago
      another way to look at it is that cargo cult thinking is the default mode for human thinking. This is something I've noticed recently and increasingly believe to be true. The vast majority of people do NOT take the time to build an opinion from weighing multiple sources of information, looking for counter arguments etc. Cargo cult is the default mode for a civilization.
      • N00bN00b 5y ago
        That has to be true, right? There's just way too much to understand and it's impossible to come up with an absolute ordering of importance. At some point you have to delegate huge chunks of your understanding. And it works 9 out of 10 times. It's just that one time that's a problem, but it's still probably the most optimal strategy for nearly everyone.
  • forcry 5y ago
    "A man cannot want what he wants". You cannot really pay a man to "focus" (I mean, work passionately) on something, which is what exactly is required in these kind of things. And I think this might be blocking our progress right now. Because people cannot work on things they are passionate about, because they are told to focus on this other thing, some other idiot thought they better work on..
  • shpongled 5y ago
    I hate to tell you, but there is not, and never will be a cure for cancer. Every cancer is unique. The best we can hope for in a realistic time frame is a set of drugs that cover a significant portion of the lineage dependencies corresponding to a majority of the the most common cancers. Ideally, we will be able to drug/ligand every human protein, but we're still a long way off. Furthermore, science isn't necessarily a tractable problem that scales linearly with the amount of manpower thrown at it - many of our greatest discoveries have happened serendipitously.
    • Gatsky 5y ago
      I agree with you that there will never be a universal cure for cancer after the person is diagnosed with cancer. The problem is not that each cancer is unique (in fact there are many common patterns and stereotyped responses to treatments) the problem is that cancer is difficult to eradicate once established. Trying to cure advanced cancer is the wrong idea, most probably, despite colossal resources deployed towards that aim. Even curing an early stage cancer is a fraught process, and some apparently cured cancers can sit dormant for 20 or 30 years before returning to be incurable. However, I believe that there will eventually be a strategy which prevents almost all cancers. Cancer begins from one cell 100% of the time, and eliminating that cell or preventing the transformation in the first place will stop the cancer from ever developing. One way is to genetically modify the human organism to be cancer resistant. We know this is possible in theory, because there are organisms out there which seem quite resistant to cancers for their size (the naked mole rat, elephants, the bowhead whale). But rationally altering the genome of everyone on the planet is a long way off and possibly unpalatable to many. There are other more near term possibilities. I should probably add that cancer research is my day job.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Our processing speed is way up, but I believe our cost of energy has more or less not grown substantially. In fact, with proper economic cost accounting like externalities as we try to deal with global warming, costs are going up. Solar/wind are gradually starting to improve things in meaningful ways but they are a fundamentally different grid design. Perhaps a modular LFTR reactor design can beat what Solar/Wind will settle at on an EROEI measure once solar/wind are out of their main economies of scale and techonological development curves. But what we are entering for the next century is clearly one of resource limitations, and working much harder to more efficiently use them.