8 ms·

As a scientist, this is such a dumb take. The incentive structures in science encourage novelty, and there's no shortage of scientists who would love to see the

by epgui 3y ago

As a scientist, this is such a dumb take. The incentive structures in science encourage novelty, and there's no shortage of scientists who would love to see their career take off. Unfortunately, reality does not make the greatest dissident.

trhr 3y ago
Like everyone else, scientists are so convinced of what they know that they won't listen to other opinions. The problem is that scientists think their knowledge is truth because it comes from "the scientific method." They fail to internalize that the whole point of that method is that no knowledge is sacred and everything should be doubted to the degree at which evidence exists to the contrary. A crackpot conspiracy theory with a single anecdotal source of data is sufficient to create doubt in the soundest of theories. Just not much.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  When someone who refers to their monitor as "the CPU", and can't tell the difference between a programming language and an operating system, starts telling you how you should be doing your job because you've got it all wrong... How much do you listen to their opinion? (Unless of course that matches your manager to a T).
  - trhr 3y ago
    You smile and say, "I appreciate your input. I value it and consider it a good starting point. I am not certain it alone provides the level of support necessary for me to consider a different path, but I would consider both additional data and reducing the amount of evidence I require with a good reason."
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      I appreciate your input. I value it and consider it a good starting point. I am not certain it alone provides the level of support necessary for me to consider a different path, but I would consider both additional data and reducing the amount of evidence I require with a good reason. Edit: oops, wait! I forgot to smile.
      - trhr 3y ago
        Good, keep doing what I do - that's what I want to hear.
        olddustytrail 3y ago
        Now that, at least, is probably true. Pathetic, but true.
eirikbakke 3y ago
Exactly. In the words of Mike Stonebraker, "stake out a controversial claim and prove it true" is pretty standard career advice for junior faculty who are trying to get tenure. (At least in Computer Science.)
- izzydata 3y ago
  Isn't the whole idea of the scientific method is that you don't prove things true? You just test things enough until you are not able to prove it false?
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    The specific example (computer science) coincidentally does allow for proofs, because it is mostly math, but I think they actually are just using the word prove informally here.
  - fwungy 3y ago
    The incentives of science are often orthogonal to making a career in science.
- leereeves 3y ago
  > At least in Computer Science Computer Science rarely intersects with politics. If a scientist's novel claim (however well proven) offends a powerful group, their career is over.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    Not if it's got strong evidence - there is still no strongevidence for the lab leak so it's a moot point. Do you have something with strong evidence that ruined someones career in the last 50 years?
    - leereeves 3y ago
      Larry Summers was forced out of Harvard in part for mentioning the greater male variability hypothesis. James Damore was forced out of Google for similar reasons. This despite fairly strong evidence for that hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Modern_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Modern_... Both made the mistake of citing research that contradicts diversity initiatives.
robomartin 3y ago
> The incentive structures in science encourage novelty I would modify this statement somewhat. The incentive structure in science today encourages following the money. Very little research these days is done just for the sake of research or discovery. Science is expensive, and scientists who want to have a job, like it or not, have to fish to where the fish are swimming (where the money is being spent), which typically means delivering the narrative sought by those who control the money. The most salient examples of this today are saving the planet and electric everything (cars, trucks, planes, water heaters, stoves, etc.) --which are usually connected. The first of which is ridiculous beyond description and the latter is so unimaginably far from being attainable it might as well be labelled a fantasy. Yet, these narratives are pushed because they have political power through emotion that results in votes (you can divide people) and the only money being spent in research is in support of these narratives --not research, confirmation propaganda.
- beowa 3y ago
  > The first of which is ridiculous beyond description What about working to save the planet from the very much real, devastating effects of climate change do you find “ridiculous beyond description”?
  - robomartin 3y ago
    > What about working to save the planet from the very much real, devastating effects of climate change do you find “ridiculous beyond description”? A few things. First, the planet will be just fine. It has endured much worse than any of the imaginary scenarios being tossed about these days. Second. It is nothing less than hubris to think we can actually control something at a planetary scale. We are far more likely to kill everything in sight than to save the planet. The whole thing is laughable. And, BTW, this isn't my opinion, this is a scientific fact that a 15 year old with basic math skills can confirm inside five minutes. Since there's no financial or political power in saying "we are sorry, this is all nonsense" the money keeps flowing in that direction. Find just a single non-trivial funded program trying to refute the current narratives. You can't. Nobody wants to fund that research. No scientist wants to talk about it that angle because, in todays context, it would end their career instantly. People are making way too much money in an "Emperor has no clothes" utopia relentlessly promoted by industry, government and the media. Here's a reality check: Anyone who thinks we can control matters of planetary scale, kindly show how we immediately controlled and stopped the effects of the massive fires in Canada, the fires in Maui, etc. I mean, seriously, can we have some intellectual honesty around this topic? Just looking at the Canadian fires [0]. Just this year, over 132,000 square kilometers burned. These fires have already released the equivalent of a full year or Indonesia [1] burning fossil fuels (a country with nearly 300 million people). And how about these fires [2][3][4]? Let's show how we can control these events and then, maybe then, we can speak of regional control. Global control is a fantasy. I mean, they are doing things like throwing billions of dollars at giant air sucking filtering machines. We have gone completely insane. More? OK. Look out this chart: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/styles/original/public/2023-07/2020-annual-Eng-v3.png?itok=BX-thBiN https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/styles/original/p... Now, let's magically erase China and USA from the planet. We have Star Trek beam everything on these lands into space, never to be seen on earth again. That removes 44% of CO2 emissions. That isn't even close to being enough. That isn't enough to STOP CO2 accumulation, much less REVERSE it. If CO2 emissions went to absolute ZERO tomorrow, it would take somewhere between 50K and 100K years for atmospheric CO2 accumulation to come down by 100 ppm (this is a scientifically known fact). That's how ridiculous the "save the planet" narrative has become. It is so far away from attainable reality that anyone pushing it should be laughed off the stage. I mean, removing all of humanity from the planet means 100K years for a 100ppm drop. And we are talking about fixing it in 50, 100 or 200 years...with electric cars and water heaters? Have we gone mad? [0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/here-s-a-look-at-what-s-happened-in-canada-s-record-breaking-wildfire-season-so-far-1.6512161 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/here-s-a-look-at-what-s-happen... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/03/johnny-haglund-the-earth-is-on-fire/ https://www.wired.com/2015/03/johnny-haglund-the-earth-is-on... [3] https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years... [4] https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/places-that-are-always-on-fire https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/places-that-are-always-on...
TheRealPomax 3y ago
The incentive structures in science encourage publishing, not novelty, and the ones who are best at bringing fame to their institution (and thus grant money) are not the scientists early in their career.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 3y ago
Yes, science's incentives encourage novelty. That's actually part of the problem. It's how we got climate change denialism funded by Exxon, decades of bunk nutritional advice funded by competing food companies, Koreans faking human cloning, and Andrew Wakefield falsifying evidence of vaccines causing autism by giving small children colonoscopies. The problem is that science is actually not that great at sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Better than chance, and better than science denialism, but not anywhere close to perfect. Many of the participants in the scientific process are malicious and they have sybils to obscure their identity and ballot-stuff meta-analyses. And scientists are not always willing to call out malicious evidence right away, because this is a community that runs on trust and understanding. So if anything, we have too many fake dissidents perfectly willing to make the entire scientific community chase their own tails. Furthermore, the entire scientific establishment has an incentive to refute COVID-19 explanations that imply their research is socially harmful[0]. If COVID-19 is a lab leak then the explanation is simple and the preventative fix is a permanent ban on certain kinds of virology research. Nobody in the scientific community wants a repeat of George Bush's stem cell research ban. But, if COVID-19 came from wet markets, then there's loads of research you can do there. You can sample viruses from sick animals to find precursor mutations for the original COVID-19 strain. You can hypothesize about mutation rates and evolutionary pressures. Wet markets are novel. Lab leaks are boring - and a threat. And as always, more research is needed. [0] I don't quite buy the idea that some have that China is deliberately trying to cover up the lab leak hypothesis because it makes China look bad. China looks bad regardless of where the virus came from. If it came from the wet markets, then China needs to shut them down. If it came from the WIV, then China needs to ban gain-of-function research. Either way it's China's fault.
photochemsyn 3y ago
This is a very simplistic statement that doesn't acknowledge the realities of how research funds are distributed in both government-funded and privately-funded research programs, or the other kinds of pressures that can be brought to bear by interested parties with deep pockets and political influence. For example, research into novel uses of out-of-patent drugs is not incentivized in American academics because universities are eager to license new, patentable drugs to pharmaceutical corporations and thus earn a percentage of the profits from their sale, and this is reflected in NIH grant disbursements. Similarly, DOE funds for renewable energy research have been miniscule for decades, resulting in few American universities having anything like a robust well-funded renewable energy R & D program - and that is due to pressures applied by politicians in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby. Scientists have to follow the funding, and only if such funding is available is novelty - in that specific area - rewarded by the incentive structure. Additionally, as the article notes (emphasis added): > "Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view." The most notable 20th century example is probably the plant breeding program controlled by Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, and while it may be normal to suppose 'that could never happen in the open American academic system', there have been some examples of this kind of thing, although people will also make false accusations of this happening as part of their effort to discredit reliable science. For example, the basic science of CO2 and climate was established by 1980, and since then it's just been a question of fine-tuning estimates of the magnitude of the CO2 effect, but there was a multi-million dollar effort funded by fossil fuel interests for decades to overturn that concensus. In contrast, while there was an effort in the 1980s to claim that HIV (the virus) was not the cause of AIDS (the disease), that never got much traction against the broad consensus that the cause had been discovered. The Covid origin case is a bit murkier; at first it was natural to assume that the virus had a zoonotic origin, based on previous events, but it does look like leading academics in the US in the virology field came to a deliberately false and misleading consensus on the zoonotic origin story early on for what are pretty clearly political reasons - even though they knew there was at least as much evidence in favor of the engineered lab origin theory. Now, if things were as bad in American academics as they were in Soviet Russia, proponents of the lab leak origin would all be sitting in a Siberian gulag, so I guess it's not as bad as all that. Science does remain the only real tool we have to coming to a factual understanding of our physical world, but it's also subject to manipulation by government and private entities. Informed skepticism is required when it comes to interpreting and understanding scientific claims - faith and trust are not that advisable.
waihtis 3y ago
Some notable scientists like Freeman Dyson stand in contrast to your statement. He wrote an entire book around the concept -- which is by the way an excellent read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scientist_as_Rebel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scientist_as_Rebel
tim333 3y ago
I've followed the covid lab leak origins saga a bit and the incentive structures definitely do not encourage most scientists to speak out there. They'd probably be shunned and lose funding. One of the only scientist who is outspoken is Richard Ebright and he can get away with it because he has tenure and is high up in his hierarchy but most would have problems.
PheonixPharts 3y ago
> The incentive structures in science encourage novelty Former academic here. This may be superficially true, but it's always been "novelty within the established orthodoxy". Kuhn documents this quite well, but it's become even more true since the funding motivated push for peer review that started in the 1970s. Academic publishing today strongly demands conformity for survival. Geoffrey Hinton has a great quote, that I can't seem to dig up, about having any truly ground breaking work dismissed by juniors who have no idea what you're talking about being a major problem in moving science forward. The bigger issue is that we have very little space for actual dissidenters. For example there is lots to legitimately question about mainstream medicine, but it's hard to walk too far down that path without immediately getting thrown in with "vaccines cause autism!!!".
toomim 3y ago
You're completely ignoring Thomas Kuhn's points. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... Science today rewards novelty within the mainstream paradigm, but does not reward dissent. Novelty != dissent!
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  Yes, incremental novelty of the sort where you go somewhat further down an apriori promising path and show some somewhat stronger results than the previous paper. But I don't think any community ever has truly rewarded dissent. It's just that sometimes a truly valuable idea will push through in spite of the resistance to it. Case in point - around 2014 I knew CS/AI/ML profs who were very dismissive regarding deep learning and thought it to be a dead end and basically missed the boat and took them very long to get up to speed again. A few years before that, and it was difficult to get papers published that used neural nets. Everyone knew that the modern way was the theoretically well-founded kernel methods and similar techniques. ---- There's no overarching one thing called science. There have been over the last 150 years a few towering results that propelled our understanding of the universe and our technological capabilities forward immensely, on whose wind we are coasting today -- but many of them came before the current professionalized, job-ified massive system we know as "academia" today. Without peer review, in informal letters between gentlemen scientists persistently pursuing topics for their leisure, often with extreme concepts of "work-life-balance". We have no idea what exactly brought about those successes, and so we are building a cargo cult, somehow imitating it, LARPing it. Thousands of papers, salami-slice publishing, citation metric-chasing, quantification and metrification, incentives to hop from place to place, endless grant writing and documentation/administration. This is a very specific system that was mostly created and solidified over the last 50 years. It should not be equated with science itself, which was already a very productive endeavor hundreds of years ago, while being intimately intertwined with mysicism, alchemy, esoteria and theology. This particular utilitarian paper factory of today isn't equal to "science", even if it has taken over the buildings.
lincon127 3y ago
Do you mean ideally? Because obviously modern science and academia is mostly steered by external interests and public opinion. I know many scientists who entertain research projects from companies only because they're fully paid for, meanwhile they struggle with funding and publishing projects they want to do because there's so few opportunities available for funding. To then conclude that companies or government entities may want to do certain research according to what best serves them is not too hard of a stretch to make. It's happened numerous times before, especially within climate science, medicine, and tobacco. I'm not saying one should distrust science, especially papers published by reputable sources, done by reputable labs, or otherwise have good methods and sensible conclusions. But that's the problem, right? One has to contend with what's "sensible". If someone published a paper tomorrow actually showing a strong causal effect between consuming fluoridated water and the calcification of the pineal gland, not only would it be seen by no one except weird fringe communities, but the scientists involved would be ridiculed. The area has been politicized, and in that case it's hard to see how it couldn't be, it's a ridiculous idea, but it does make a clear example of this politicization if you understand the context. Something similar happened with the origins of SARS-CoV-2, where the assumption is (from my personal experience) that only certain political machinations could convince someone to come to conclusions that SARS-CoV-2 origin could be a lab leak. Now maybe this isn't the case anymore. I haven't thought about this in like... a year, nor looked at public discourse for about that long either. But regardless I feel like public opinion is still largely the same, and judging by the article, the politicization of the topic is still in full swing. Thus, we're not only dealing with reality, but a manufactured reality as well.
peterfirefly 3y ago
Please explain the historic research priorities in Alzheimer's research and how they square with "encouraging novelty". For extra credit, provide a brief synopsis of the history of stomach ulcer research and treatment.
dundarious 3y ago
It seems quite obvious that this novelty maximizing can be strongly curtailed by political and profit-seeking power, through various incentives and punishments that are then deeply internalized by scientists. Look at how fossil fuel industry scientists long knew about climate change and lead poisoning, or pick a range of examples from pharmaceutical or nutrition sciences. This is by no means unique to science (the influence is arguably much stronger in other domains like journalism) but there is no sense in arguing science operates on an orthogonal plane to power. My critique of the piece is that half its length is devoted to dissent that turned out to be significantly incorrect or explicitly political or of very weak rigor, that seemingly had no censorship. The other half details some meaningful and concerning censorship and conspiracy to preemptively absolve players like Daszak, etc., and I think that's where the focus should lie, as we have not learned the appropriate lessons.

by epgui 3y ago

trhr 3y ago

Like everyone else, scientists are so convinced of what they know that they won't listen to other opinions. The problem is that scientists think their knowledge is truth because it comes from "the scientific method." They fail to internalize that the whole point of that method is that no knowledge is sacred and everything should be doubted to the degree at which evidence exists to the contrary. A crackpot conspiracy theory with a single anecdotal source of data is sufficient to create doubt in the soundest of theories. Just not much.

olddustytrail 3y ago
When someone who refers to their monitor as "the CPU", and can't tell the difference between a programming language and an operating system, starts telling you how you should be doing your job because you've got it all wrong... How much do you listen to their opinion? (Unless of course that matches your manager to a T).
- trhr 3y ago
  You smile and say, "I appreciate your input. I value it and consider it a good starting point. I am not certain it alone provides the level of support necessary for me to consider a different path, but I would consider both additional data and reducing the amount of evidence I require with a good reason."
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    I appreciate your input. I value it and consider it a good starting point. I am not certain it alone provides the level of support necessary for me to consider a different path, but I would consider both additional data and reducing the amount of evidence I require with a good reason. Edit: oops, wait! I forgot to smile.
    - trhr 3y ago
      Good, keep doing what I do - that's what I want to hear.
      - olddustytrail 3y ago
        Now that, at least, is probably true. Pathetic, but true.

eirikbakke 3y ago

Exactly. In the words of Mike Stonebraker, "stake out a controversial claim and prove it true" is pretty standard career advice for junior faculty who are trying to get tenure. (At least in Computer Science.)

izzydata 3y ago
Isn't the whole idea of the scientific method is that you don't prove things true? You just test things enough until you are not able to prove it false?
- bee_rider 3y ago
  The specific example (computer science) coincidentally does allow for proofs, because it is mostly math, but I think they actually are just using the word prove informally here.
- fwungy 3y ago
  The incentives of science are often orthogonal to making a career in science.
leereeves 3y ago
> At least in Computer Science Computer Science rarely intersects with politics. If a scientist's novel claim (however well proven) offends a powerful group, their career is over.
- dmbche 3y ago
  Not if it's got strong evidence - there is still no strongevidence for the lab leak so it's a moot point. Do you have something with strong evidence that ruined someones career in the last 50 years?
  - leereeves 3y ago
    Larry Summers was forced out of Harvard in part for mentioning the greater male variability hypothesis. James Damore was forced out of Google for similar reasons. This despite fairly strong evidence for that hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Modern_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Modern_... Both made the mistake of citing research that contradicts diversity initiatives.

robomartin 3y ago

> The incentive structures in science encourage novelty I would modify this statement somewhat. The incentive structure in science today encourages following the money. Very little research these days is done just for the sake of research or discovery. Science is expensive, and scientists who want to have a job, like it or not, have to fish to where the fish are swimming (where the money is being spent), which typically means delivering the narrative sought by those who control the money. The most salient examples of this today are saving the planet and electric everything (cars, trucks, planes, water heaters, stoves, etc.) --which are usually connected. The first of which is ridiculous beyond description and the latter is so unimaginably far from being attainable it might as well be labelled a fantasy. Yet, these narratives are pushed because they have political power through emotion that results in votes (you can divide people) and the only money being spent in research is in support of these narratives --not research, confirmation propaganda.

beowa 3y ago
> The first of which is ridiculous beyond description What about working to save the planet from the very much real, devastating effects of climate change do you find “ridiculous beyond description”?
- robomartin 3y ago
  > What about working to save the planet from the very much real, devastating effects of climate change do you find “ridiculous beyond description”? A few things. First, the planet will be just fine. It has endured much worse than any of the imaginary scenarios being tossed about these days. Second. It is nothing less than hubris to think we can actually control something at a planetary scale. We are far more likely to kill everything in sight than to save the planet. The whole thing is laughable. And, BTW, this isn't my opinion, this is a scientific fact that a 15 year old with basic math skills can confirm inside five minutes. Since there's no financial or political power in saying "we are sorry, this is all nonsense" the money keeps flowing in that direction. Find just a single non-trivial funded program trying to refute the current narratives. You can't. Nobody wants to fund that research. No scientist wants to talk about it that angle because, in todays context, it would end their career instantly. People are making way too much money in an "Emperor has no clothes" utopia relentlessly promoted by industry, government and the media. Here's a reality check: Anyone who thinks we can control matters of planetary scale, kindly show how we immediately controlled and stopped the effects of the massive fires in Canada, the fires in Maui, etc. I mean, seriously, can we have some intellectual honesty around this topic? Just looking at the Canadian fires [0]. Just this year, over 132,000 square kilometers burned. These fires have already released the equivalent of a full year or Indonesia [1] burning fossil fuels (a country with nearly 300 million people). And how about these fires [2][3][4]? Let's show how we can control these events and then, maybe then, we can speak of regional control. Global control is a fantasy. I mean, they are doing things like throwing billions of dollars at giant air sucking filtering machines. We have gone completely insane. More? OK. Look out this chart: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/styles/original/public/2023-07/2020-annual-Eng-v3.png?itok=BX-thBiN https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/styles/original/p... Now, let's magically erase China and USA from the planet. We have Star Trek beam everything on these lands into space, never to be seen on earth again. That removes 44% of CO2 emissions. That isn't even close to being enough. That isn't enough to STOP CO2 accumulation, much less REVERSE it. If CO2 emissions went to absolute ZERO tomorrow, it would take somewhere between 50K and 100K years for atmospheric CO2 accumulation to come down by 100 ppm (this is a scientifically known fact). That's how ridiculous the "save the planet" narrative has become. It is so far away from attainable reality that anyone pushing it should be laughed off the stage. I mean, removing all of humanity from the planet means 100K years for a 100ppm drop. And we are talking about fixing it in 50, 100 or 200 years...with electric cars and water heaters? Have we gone mad? [0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/here-s-a-look-at-what-s-happened-in-canada-s-record-breaking-wildfire-season-so-far-1.6512161 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/here-s-a-look-at-what-s-happen... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/03/johnny-haglund-the-earth-is-on-fire/ https://www.wired.com/2015/03/johnny-haglund-the-earth-is-on... [3] https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years... [4] https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/places-that-are-always-on-fire https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/places-that-are-always-on...

TheRealPomax 3y ago

The incentive structures in science encourage publishing, not novelty, and the ones who are best at bringing fame to their institution (and thus grant money) are not the scientists early in their career.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kmeisthax 3y ago

Yes, science's incentives encourage novelty. That's actually part of the problem. It's how we got climate change denialism funded by Exxon, decades of bunk nutritional advice funded by competing food companies, Koreans faking human cloning, and Andrew Wakefield falsifying evidence of vaccines causing autism by giving small children colonoscopies. The problem is that science is actually not that great at sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Better than chance, and better than science denialism, but not anywhere close to perfect. Many of the participants in the scientific process are malicious and they have sybils to obscure their identity and ballot-stuff meta-analyses. And scientists are not always willing to call out malicious evidence right away, because this is a community that runs on trust and understanding. So if anything, we have too many fake dissidents perfectly willing to make the entire scientific community chase their own tails. Furthermore, the entire scientific establishment has an incentive to refute COVID-19 explanations that imply their research is socially harmful[0]. If COVID-19 is a lab leak then the explanation is simple and the preventative fix is a permanent ban on certain kinds of virology research. Nobody in the scientific community wants a repeat of George Bush's stem cell research ban. But, if COVID-19 came from wet markets, then there's loads of research you can do there. You can sample viruses from sick animals to find precursor mutations for the original COVID-19 strain. You can hypothesize about mutation rates and evolutionary pressures. Wet markets are novel. Lab leaks are boring - and a threat. And as always, more research is needed. [0] I don't quite buy the idea that some have that China is deliberately trying to cover up the lab leak hypothesis because it makes China look bad. China looks bad regardless of where the virus came from. If it came from the wet markets, then China needs to shut them down. If it came from the WIV, then China needs to ban gain-of-function research. Either way it's China's fault.

photochemsyn 3y ago

This is a very simplistic statement that doesn't acknowledge the realities of how research funds are distributed in both government-funded and privately-funded research programs, or the other kinds of pressures that can be brought to bear by interested parties with deep pockets and political influence. For example, research into novel uses of out-of-patent drugs is not incentivized in American academics because universities are eager to license new, patentable drugs to pharmaceutical corporations and thus earn a percentage of the profits from their sale, and this is reflected in NIH grant disbursements. Similarly, DOE funds for renewable energy research have been miniscule for decades, resulting in few American universities having anything like a robust well-funded renewable energy R & D program - and that is due to pressures applied by politicians in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby. Scientists have to follow the funding, and only if such funding is available is novelty - in that specific area - rewarded by the incentive structure. Additionally, as the article notes (emphasis added): > "Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view." The most notable 20th century example is probably the plant breeding program controlled by Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, and while it may be normal to suppose 'that could never happen in the open American academic system', there have been some examples of this kind of thing, although people will also make false accusations of this happening as part of their effort to discredit reliable science. For example, the basic science of CO2 and climate was established by 1980, and since then it's just been a question of fine-tuning estimates of the magnitude of the CO2 effect, but there was a multi-million dollar effort funded by fossil fuel interests for decades to overturn that concensus. In contrast, while there was an effort in the 1980s to claim that HIV (the virus) was not the cause of AIDS (the disease), that never got much traction against the broad consensus that the cause had been discovered. The Covid origin case is a bit murkier; at first it was natural to assume that the virus had a zoonotic origin, based on previous events, but it does look like leading academics in the US in the virology field came to a deliberately false and misleading consensus on the zoonotic origin story early on for what are pretty clearly political reasons - even though they knew there was at least as much evidence in favor of the engineered lab origin theory. Now, if things were as bad in American academics as they were in Soviet Russia, proponents of the lab leak origin would all be sitting in a Siberian gulag, so I guess it's not as bad as all that. Science does remain the only real tool we have to coming to a factual understanding of our physical world, but it's also subject to manipulation by government and private entities. Informed skepticism is required when it comes to interpreting and understanding scientific claims - faith and trust are not that advisable.

waihtis 3y ago

Some notable scientists like Freeman Dyson stand in contrast to your statement. He wrote an entire book around the concept -- which is by the way an excellent read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scientist_as_Rebel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scientist_as_Rebel

tim333 3y ago

I've followed the covid lab leak origins saga a bit and the incentive structures definitely do not encourage most scientists to speak out there. They'd probably be shunned and lose funding. One of the only scientist who is outspoken is Richard Ebright and he can get away with it because he has tenure and is high up in his hierarchy but most would have problems.

PheonixPharts 3y ago

> The incentive structures in science encourage novelty Former academic here. This may be superficially true, but it's always been "novelty within the established orthodoxy". Kuhn documents this quite well, but it's become even more true since the funding motivated push for peer review that started in the 1970s. Academic publishing today strongly demands conformity for survival. Geoffrey Hinton has a great quote, that I can't seem to dig up, about having any truly ground breaking work dismissed by juniors who have no idea what you're talking about being a major problem in moving science forward. The bigger issue is that we have very little space for actual dissidenters. For example there is lots to legitimately question about mainstream medicine, but it's hard to walk too far down that path without immediately getting thrown in with "vaccines cause autism!!!".

toomim 3y ago

You're completely ignoring Thomas Kuhn's points. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... Science today rewards novelty within the mainstream paradigm, but does not reward dissent. Novelty != dissent!

bonoboTP 3y ago
Yes, incremental novelty of the sort where you go somewhat further down an apriori promising path and show some somewhat stronger results than the previous paper. But I don't think any community ever has truly rewarded dissent. It's just that sometimes a truly valuable idea will push through in spite of the resistance to it. Case in point - around 2014 I knew CS/AI/ML profs who were very dismissive regarding deep learning and thought it to be a dead end and basically missed the boat and took them very long to get up to speed again. A few years before that, and it was difficult to get papers published that used neural nets. Everyone knew that the modern way was the theoretically well-founded kernel methods and similar techniques. ---- There's no overarching one thing called science. There have been over the last 150 years a few towering results that propelled our understanding of the universe and our technological capabilities forward immensely, on whose wind we are coasting today -- but many of them came before the current professionalized, job-ified massive system we know as "academia" today. Without peer review, in informal letters between gentlemen scientists persistently pursuing topics for their leisure, often with extreme concepts of "work-life-balance". We have no idea what exactly brought about those successes, and so we are building a cargo cult, somehow imitating it, LARPing it. Thousands of papers, salami-slice publishing, citation metric-chasing, quantification and metrification, incentives to hop from place to place, endless grant writing and documentation/administration. This is a very specific system that was mostly created and solidified over the last 50 years. It should not be equated with science itself, which was already a very productive endeavor hundreds of years ago, while being intimately intertwined with mysicism, alchemy, esoteria and theology. This particular utilitarian paper factory of today isn't equal to "science", even if it has taken over the buildings.

lincon127 3y ago

Do you mean ideally? Because obviously modern science and academia is mostly steered by external interests and public opinion. I know many scientists who entertain research projects from companies only because they're fully paid for, meanwhile they struggle with funding and publishing projects they want to do because there's so few opportunities available for funding. To then conclude that companies or government entities may want to do certain research according to what best serves them is not too hard of a stretch to make. It's happened numerous times before, especially within climate science, medicine, and tobacco. I'm not saying one should distrust science, especially papers published by reputable sources, done by reputable labs, or otherwise have good methods and sensible conclusions. But that's the problem, right? One has to contend with what's "sensible". If someone published a paper tomorrow actually showing a strong causal effect between consuming fluoridated water and the calcification of the pineal gland, not only would it be seen by no one except weird fringe communities, but the scientists involved would be ridiculed. The area has been politicized, and in that case it's hard to see how it couldn't be, it's a ridiculous idea, but it does make a clear example of this politicization if you understand the context. Something similar happened with the origins of SARS-CoV-2, where the assumption is (from my personal experience) that only certain political machinations could convince someone to come to conclusions that SARS-CoV-2 origin could be a lab leak. Now maybe this isn't the case anymore. I haven't thought about this in like... a year, nor looked at public discourse for about that long either. But regardless I feel like public opinion is still largely the same, and judging by the article, the politicization of the topic is still in full swing. Thus, we're not only dealing with reality, but a manufactured reality as well.

peterfirefly 3y ago

Please explain the historic research priorities in Alzheimer's research and how they square with "encouraging novelty". For extra credit, provide a brief synopsis of the history of stomach ulcer research and treatment.

dundarious 3y ago

It seems quite obvious that this novelty maximizing can be strongly curtailed by political and profit-seeking power, through various incentives and punishments that are then deeply internalized by scientists. Look at how fossil fuel industry scientists long knew about climate change and lead poisoning, or pick a range of examples from pharmaceutical or nutrition sciences. This is by no means unique to science (the influence is arguably much stronger in other domains like journalism) but there is no sense in arguing science operates on an orthogonal plane to power. My critique of the piece is that half its length is devoted to dissent that turned out to be significantly incorrect or explicitly political or of very weak rigor, that seemingly had no censorship. The other half details some meaningful and concerning censorship and conspiracy to preemptively absolve players like Daszak, etc., and I think that's where the focus should lie, as we have not learned the appropriate lessons.