[HN Gopher] The Kariko problem: Lessons for funding basic research ___________________________________________________________________ The Kariko problem: Lessons for funding basic research Author : hatmatrix Score : 119 points Date : 2022-02-03 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.statnews.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.statnews.com) | ISL wrote: | As an admittedly-biased basic-researcher (who is no longer doing | basic-research as a day-job in part due to constrained funding), | the big lesson here is that funding basic research can yield very | large returns. | | There will always be people at the margins of funding, no matter | where those margins are. Sometimes those people will hit it big | for reasons that span persistence, cleverness, collaboration, | serendipity, luck, and more. | | There are some arenas in which widespread funding of small actors | works well and others in which decades of focused investment can | yield huge breakthroughs. | | Overall, though, if you like the outcomes from basic research and | want more of them, fund it. | zozbot234 wrote: | > the big lesson here is that funding basic research can yield | very large returns. | | It can also be somewhat wasteful, depending on what gets | funded. Research that generates "very large returns" is | probably quite rare and special, in a way that makes the whole | notion of "basic research" somewhat less than meaningful as a | target for funding. | derbOac wrote: | But that's the rub. I think almost by definition big | discoveries will often be unpredictable, because if they were | predictable you'd not have trouble finding them and they | wouldn't be big. So if you just fund things that are popular, | you're kind of stuck because although sometimes things that | are popular are popular because they work, sometimes they're | just rehashing what's already known. | | Part of the problem I think is that there needs to be some | healthy acceptance of risk in research. I'm not sure how you | draw the line all the time between "things that are just bad | ideas" versus "things that are unusual" but if you're always | funding the sure bet you're not going to get anywhere. | zozbot234 wrote: | > So if you just fund things that are popular, you're kind | of stuck | | The principled approach is to correct for that by looking | for things that _ought_ to be popular by current standards, | but are nonetheless underfunded. Yes, this is hard - it 's | literally trying to beat all other grantors at their own | game. It's also _supposed_ to be hard. There was no reason | to expect that "funding good work in science" would have | an easy, painless solution. | WaitWaitWha wrote: | > non-tenure-track research assistant professor at the University | of Pennsylvania. But she was demoted in 1995 because, no matter | how many times she applied for NIH funding for her mRNA research, | she never got a grant for it. | | The author is misguided if this is consider to be 'discussed in | hushed tones as a cautionary tale for young scientists'. There | are a myriad of applications for NIH funding and vast majority | are rejected, repeatedly. It is unnecessary to embellish to make | the next point. | | > Yet she persisted. | | This is indeed, the minority of 'non-tenure-track research | assistant professor', most will get discouraged and drop out. | | (&, 712 out of 2,005) | jvanderbot wrote: | A 30% success rate is not bad. Actually, that's much better | than my field. Ostensibly "no matter how many times" means | "p<0.01 this was random chance" or something. | xchaotic wrote: | The way scientific papers are ranked - ie how many citations a | paper gets, means consensus is rewarded and dissent is punished. | sdenton4 wrote: | There can be more than one answer! | | The New York Marathon has a number of different selection | criteria to handle different kinds of priorities: getting the | world's fastest runners (qualifying marathon results), getting | local runners (provide proof of residency), and raising money | (let some people just buy their way in via auction). | | Here's a nice podcast on their system: | https://www.npr.org/2020/01/03/793488868/episode-962-advance... | | But we could certainly imagine similar for research funding; | different paths for rewarding known-good horses, innovative | project ideas, etc. | [deleted] | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | > A couple of years after her embarrassing demotion, she ran into | immunologist Drew Weissman at the office copy machine and struck | up a conversation about mRNA. Weissman was intrigued, and asked | Kariko to come work in his lab. | | The government funding doesn't necessarily have to identify the | Kariko's of the world, as long as it can identify the Weissman's | of the world who can identify The Kariko at the ad-hoc meeting. | | This is one of the areas where "fund people not objects" really | works. The people that are really productive are the first to | know that they are heavily dependent on having a good team, and | often those people are really good at finding hidden talent. | derbOac wrote: | The problem, though, is then often people like Weissman get the | credit, because they're the ones with the money, and the | Karikos are dismissed as "just implementing Weissman's ideas" | or something like that, even when a lot of the time the | Weissmans of the world aren't developing teams, they're | attaching themselves to them. It's this sort of self-fulfilling | prophesy: so-and-so has good connections -> goes somewhere with | lots of resources and good fit for them -> does well -> people | attribute success to them -> fund "the person" -> cycle | continues; meanwhile someone else has poor connections -> can't | get an "in" -> is dismissed -> struggles to do well -> isn't | funded -> etc. | | Kariko, for example, at her stage couldn't develop or attract a | team if she wanted to. | | I don't know Weissman so none of this is to comment on him. But | I personally know many examples of this phenomenon (and have | seen the Wizard behind the curtain when random events cause | these cycles to get disrupted). It's that I think part of the | problem the article is referring to is this kind of vicious | circle and self-perpetuating funding and career cycles in | certain areas of academic science. | | I'm all for funding people rather than projects; I just think | that it's only a fraction of the problem with research funding | today. | mrjangles wrote: | The solutions to this problem are completely obvious, and right | in front of everyone's faces. The problem is it doesn't fit | people's ideology so they simply refuse to see it. | | But anyway, the article states clearly that Kariko floundered for | years until Drew Weissman working at the _privately_ funded | University of Pennsylvania picked her up. You wouldn't have even | needed to look up if the University of Pennsylvania was privately | funded, because just about every important breakthrough in | science in the last 30 years occurred at a privately funded | American university. | | There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded American | universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 | publicly funded universities around the world put together. It's | right in front of everyone's faces, and no one is talking about | it. It is seriously and elephant in the room. | | Then the article comes up with a "solution" like this | | >My answer? Bend over backward to fund a more diverse range of | people and ideas, even deliberately including ideas that are | currently perceived as unpopular, unworkable, obscure, and the | like. After all, many scientific discoveries can be traced back | to origins that didn't seem promising | | Seriously, is this the best you can do? Regardless, this idea | would be impossible in the first place at a government funded | institution so why even bother mentioning it. | sdenton4 wrote: | "There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded | American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than | the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put | together." | | Messenger bias? | LeanderK wrote: | > There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded | American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than | the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put | together. It's right in front of everyone's faces, and no one | is talking about it. It is seriously and elephant in the room. | | this is just not true. They just hire the best of the best but | if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an | ocean full of universities producing valuable research. And | most of the time the basic breakthroughs came from universities | you didn't think of or you didn't even know. | mrjangles wrote: | >if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an | ocean full of universities producing valuable research | | This is simply untrue. When on deep-dives into any kind of | research on sees an ocean full of universities polluting the | sea with absolute crap. The more bureaucratic and government | funded, the worse. For example, I know researchers who simply | will not bother to read anything written by anyone working | for a Chinese university. | mattkrause wrote: | I think this section is calling for a more diversified | portfolio of ideas. | | There's certainly a lot of fad-chasing in biomedicine. There | are strong incentives to flock to the latest technique (RNAi, | optogenetics, single-cell-seq, organoids) or stick close to an | established hypothesis (beta-amyloids for Alzheimer). It might | better if there were some countervailing incentives to stick | with older techniques, or break away from established dogma. | For example, optogenetics has been a very powerful tool for | understanding the brain, but it also means that we've moved | away from many animal models in favor of mice, where the tools | are most tractable. As a result, we know more about brains that | are, in some ways, less relevant to human health. A-beta, on | the other hand, has been an absolute tire-fire and the field | should have shifted ages ago. | | The NIH tends not to 'steer' the field in particular | directions, but they could. DARPA programs, for example, | sometimes explicitly fund several competing ideas to see if a | clear winner emerges. | | On top of all that, we should _also_ be building a workforce of | diverse researchers. | mrjangles wrote: | I think my point is that private money already goes to | diverse ideas. A system where the government will only | provide money if there is already private money involved | would work well. | | e.g., the government will match any private money 2 to 1. | Then, for example, the government can take a cut of patents | that result (to prevent grants simply subsidizing research | that would have occurred anyway). | mattkrause wrote: | I don't think that's necessarily true. Industry is mostly | interested in things that are _almost_ ready to be | translated into a product. Foundations can be very | conservative (and the grant sizes are often much smaller). | | Anyway, mechanisms like what you're proposing do exist | (MITACS in Canada, for example). However, the problem is | the other end of the pipeline. How can you pitch investors | on something that might not be a product for decades, if at | all? Government R&D primes that pump. | sampo wrote: | > something like 10 privately funded American universities make | more scientific breakthroughs | | You are mistaking privately owned universities for privately | funded. Scientists in privately owned American universities | still mostly apply and receive funding from public (federally | owned) funding agencies. | bsmith89 wrote: | The outright falsehood of this statement: | | > just about every important breakthrough in science in the | last 30 years occurred at a privately funded American | university. | | Really makes it difficult to take the rest of this comment | seriously. | | In case the ways it is "not even wrong" need to be detailed: | | 1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority | funded by public money doled out by the NIH, NSF, and other | national organizations. The public/private status of the | university has little bearing on that, as most university | research funding comes through these agencies, with something | like 50% generally going directly to the universities | themselves. Research at "private" universities as it currently | exists would not survive without this mechanism. | | > something like 10 privately funded American universities make | more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded | universities around the world put together | | 2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or | the other. How do you define breakthroughs? Press releases from | university PR departments? Patents? Either way (or by some | third--hopefully measurable--way that I'll allow you to define | for us) I guarantee that you need to go much further down the | list of private universities before you match the output of | "all publicly funded universities around the world put | together". | | I imagine that you have in mind important (and/or well | publicized) advancements from MIT/Stanford/Harvard and are | forgetting about the enormous amount of research output from | public universities (which include but are not limited to | Berkeley, CalTech, U of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, | U of Texas, Ohio State, etc.) | | > Regardless, this idea would be impossible in the first place | at a government funded institution so why even bother | mentioning it. | | 3. As you hardly cite any evidence for this, I'll point out | that _private_ money can go to diverse people at diverse | institutions (including government funded universities). | | So my question to _you_ is whether this comment is motivated by | a knee-jerk anti-government reaction, or if I'm entirely | misunderstanding where you got these ideas? | mrjangles wrote: | >1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority | funded... | | At least where I live, many government grants are only | available to people who have also managed to get private | industry funding for their work too. These grants are usually | very successful. This does not disprove my point in any way, | in fact, it _is_ my point | | >2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way | or the other. | | You have to understand that it is in the interest of the tens | of thousands of people doing work doing non-sense research to | pretend their research is important. Just because you hear | about them telling you how important their worki is in the | media, doesn't mean it is. | | Anyone who has actually worked it research knows every field | is filled with 10's of thousands of garbage research papers | that are of no value, and that all the key work is produced | by just a hand full of people. I remember also reading some | researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs | and found the same thing. All the real work in any | breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most. so this | is incorrect, what I said is actually very provable. | | >I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people | at diverse institutions (including government funded | universities). | | Yes, that is my point...? You are calling my comment a knee | jerk reaction yet you have responded without seeming to | understand any of it. | derbOac wrote: | > Anyone who has actually worked it research knows every | field is filled with 10's of thousands of garbage research | papers that are of no value, and that all the key work is | produced by just a hand full of people. I remember also | reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields | and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real | work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at | most. so this is incorrect, what I said is actually very | provable. | | In my experiences, the current system has led to problems | with a small number of people "sucking up credit" that's | unwarranted, in the sense that they're very very good at | taking credit from others and building up a CV that makes | it look like they're at the center of things. | | In any event, I'm very skeptical of these things at this | point based on my personal experiences. Usually progress is | incremental and involves a lot of efforts from lots of | individuals. Even bigger advances usually involve a | confluence of things. | | Bibliometric studies are often flawed because they make a | lot of false assumptions and ignore realistic dynamics, | with corruption and gaming of metrics. | jltsiren wrote: | > At least where I live, many government grants are only | available to people who have also managed to get private | industry funding for their work too. | | Grants like that are rare, because there is very little | industry funding for basic research. Private funding | usually comes from various trusts and foundations that | operate in similar ways to government funding agencies. | | > I remember also reading some researchers that looked at | dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same | thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by | just 2 or 3 people at most. | | Alexander the Great didn't win battles on his own. He | needed a lot of soldiers for that. Similarly, scientific | breakthroughs are meaningless on their own. You need a | massive amount of grunt work by ordinary researchers to | connect them to the real world and make them useful. | mattkrause wrote: | "Privately-funded" is not a particularly meaningful distinction | when the NIH pays for the vast majority of academic biomedical | research--including most of the researchers' salaries. | | (UCSD, Berkely, UMich, and University of Utah, among others, | are research powerhouses too). | ummonk wrote: | One thing that pops out there though is the underrating of non- | Western universities. Hungary has a history of producing | scientific / intellectual talent, and it appears that Szeged is | ranked #3 in Hungary, yet it's 712th globally. It would seem that | the ranking list isn't very reflective of intellectual talent. | | For an even more glaring example, even the best of the incredibly | selective IITs don't make it into the top 500 in the US News | global ranking list. | epistasis wrote: | Before CRISPR came along, I remember talking to someone working | in archaebacteria who went on and on about these arrays of | sequences in archea that seemed really fascinating to him, but I | never quite got the implication of what this would eventually | develop into before it actually did become CRISPR (by other | people working in the field). | | I remember ~20 years ago hearing about nanopore DNA sequencing, | and wondering if it would ever work (it does!). | | I would have definitely funded both of these people, but I | wouldn't necessarily have funded the projects. I knew they were | brilliant, but I didn't know exactly where it would lead or if it | would work. | | The key really is to break out of the current "big famous lab" | approach, IMHO. Or at least have two tracks of funding. I'm not | sure about how to fund people not projects in a systematic way, | but we definitely need more random shots on goal and more | stochastic exploration of the space of possible research areas. | mattkrause wrote: | Why not both? | | It's astonishing that we have, essentially, a single "one-size- | fits-all"[0] mechanism for funding biomedical research. We | should have a bunch, ranging from "trust me, I'm a genius" to | "you've never heard of me, but the data suggest this will | work." There should be mechanisms where tons of preliminary | data are required, but also mechanisms to generate that prelim | data. There should be mechanisms for trainees, but also to keep | experienced people in the field. | | [0] Essentially, the NIH's R01. Even that needs work because | inflation has chipped away at what one modular budget can | support. | epistasis wrote: | Yes, I think I'm suggesting both! I also agree with how R01 | has changed as they become more and more competitive with | lower funding rates. | | There's also been a rise in "but science" projects in bio, | starting with the human genome project, that mirrors some of | the big science that happens in physics. So adding in that | track of funding there are kind of three funding tracks that | are necessary. | jvanderbot wrote: | Research funding should be wider-spread, perhaps, but it should | not be spread wider by finding show-horses that stand out for | appearances. The validity of ideas is only born after a decade or | more, so we should prioritize diversity and persistence of ideas | and funding streams. | throwawayarnty wrote: | It's difficult to systematically predict Karikos. Probably | impossible with very low success rates. | | A possible way forward is to simply give out grants randomly to | all those that pass some minimum score. After enough filtering, | all grants are essentially indistinguishable in quality. | tsumnia wrote: | > those that pass some minimum score | | The issue though becomes that the score gradually stops being | minimal as more and more requirements get added in over time | sxg wrote: | I think this is an underrated idea in many domains. So many | different things, including grant funding, university | admissions, etc. should use a minimum threshold criteria with | acceptances randomly granted to those meeting the criteria. The | problem right now is that there are too many qualified people, | leading to a rat race in which everyone's working for that | extra 1% to set them apart from everyone else. But in reality, | the standardized exams/scoring systems we use aren't sensitive | enough to reliably differentiate people precisely. This leads | to unneeded stress and wasted energy on trying to game the | system to get that extra 1%. | | Definitely a controversial idea and would pose huge challenges | to the system we have now. We'd have to confront the idea that | a Harvard pedigree or an R01 NIH grant aren't quite the strong | indicators of success that we think they are. We'd also have to | consider that brilliance can be found in places we haven't | looked more often than we think. | [deleted] | zozbot234 wrote: | If you _could_ systematically predict Kariko 's, they would not | be Kariko's. For all we know, any attempt to "solve" this | problem might just be a fool's errand. At least in the absence | of a meaningful argument to the contrary. | | > After enough filtering, all grants are essentially | indistinguishable in quality. | | I don't believe this. You can always soften incentives (and | thereby prevent wasteful gaming) by adding random | noise/dithering to your scoring function, but a threshold-only | approach seems quite blunt to me. | derbOac wrote: | Actually, this model has been suggested by former heads of | NIH and NSF, who have publicly expressed concern about the | current funding paradigm. | | The problem is that impact by reasonable metrics is | correlated about 0.30 with grant score, so it's difficult to | predict what will be successful. (Note that impact itself is | controversial, given self-fulfilling fad dynamics in research | -- FOMO popularity spikes and so forth). | | One of the biggest predictors of grant success is having | previously published with people on the review committees. | | The idea is that you randomly fund research because it's | difficult to know what will be important, but try to balance | that against grants that might be poorly conceived to begin | with. | xyzzyz wrote: | One serious problem with this sort of "Kariko argument" is that | it fails to consider a counter factual. | | Imagine that Kariko actually dropped out of academia after | unsuccessful postdoc, as most postdocs do. Does that mean we | would never have mRNA vaccines? I don't think so, I think that, | at best, one could argue that we would have them later. How much | later? The figure here most likely does not count in multiple | decades. It is very typical for discoveries to be independently | done by multiple researchers at roughly the same time. This is | because many discoveries and inventions are made when "the time | is ripe", so to speak -- when other discoveries and technologies | set up the stage for the final leap. I do not mean to diminish | the achievement of Kariko here in anyway -- she was, after all, | the first to actually do it in the real, non counter factual | world. But, had it not been her, it would probably be someone | else, somewhat later. | | Now, one can argue that getting discoveries earlier is of crucial | value. After all, we did hugely benefit from mRNA vaccine | technology being available just in time for 2020. I course, I | fully agree here, but again, it is necessary to consider counter | factual. With some alternative modes of funding, we might be able | to get Kariko to invent mRNA vaccines earlier, sure. However, in | this counterfactual, we would also probably get a bunch of other | discoveries later than we actually did. Which ones would those | be? Are these more or less important than mRNA vaccines? It is, | of course, impossible to know, and impossible to figure out | before you actually decide to change your funding processes, | because the process of discovery is fundamentally highly | unpredictable. | | Point here is that it really is not instructive to focus on a | single anecdote when discussing making fundamental changes to the | system, because the counterfactual world is way bigger and more | complex than a single anecdote. | mattmcknight wrote: | I am not sure funding Kariko would have worked out. She was using | all of her experience in synthesizing mRNA in pursuit of gene | therapy. Not being funded led her to run into Weissman, who was | interested in using RNA for vaccines and had run several | successful experiments (he co-authored several papers with Fauci | the 1990s). It was that serendipity which led to the innovation. | Funding her directly may have led to nothing. | | It seems more notable to me that two people working in the same | university were unaware of their mutual interest in RNA. However, | I have seen similar things in large companies. When I was | analyzing R&D for a 1000 person company, there were several | similar projects unaware of their mutual co-existence. | zozbot234 wrote: | > She was using all of her experience in synthesizing mRNA in | pursuit of gene therapy. Not being funded led her to run into | Weissman, who was interested in using RNA for vaccines | | If your work gets funded and published, it's _easier_ not | harder for people working on tangentially-related stuff to hear | about it and start cooperating with you. "Interdisciplinarity" | is a big draw. | mattmcknight wrote: | Or she could have been funded to pursue gene therapy and not | wanted to spend time on vaccines. If the objective wasn't | realistic, it still wouldn't have gotten published. | kragen wrote: | The things that would most help with the Kariko Problem are: | | 1. Open access to research. Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, PLoS, Library | Genesis, GitLab, MDPI, arXiv, PubMed, GitHub, BitTorrent, | medRxiv, bioRxiv, and Tor. It's unconscionable that today | professional societies like ACM and IEEE are using copyright to | impede access to knowledge as if they were for-profit | corporations. | | 2. Universal basic income, so today's Karikos don't have to | choose between research and food. Conceivably some kind of reform | is needed to prevent landlords from skimming off the UBI and | returning us to zero, as the Georgists claim. | | 3. Reducing the cost of apparatus through initiatives like | Foldscope and Paperfuge. We need not just one Manu Prakash but | ten thousand Manu Prakashes because Edmund Scientific is just | never going to fulfill the needs of shoestring labs in Ghana. | | 4. Freedom from persecution for researchers. For example, where I | live, buying acetone gets you Put On A List, and the hardware | stores now label their lye simply as "drain opener" to evade the | same regulations. California recently prohibited the sale of | basic supplies like xylene under an extremely far-fetched | interpretation of anti-air-pollution laws. Only recently did | Texas repeal its prohibition on sales of lab glassware to | unlicensed individuals. Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus by | isolating it from a massive amount of his own urine; in South | Carolina today you can get arrested for possessing a bottle of | urine: https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/a-friend-was-charged- | with.... Critical Art Ensemble founder Steve Kurtz was famously | arrested for "bioterrorism," then indicted for wire fraud and | mail fraud, because he and his wife were culturing non-pathogenic | bacteria in Petri dishes. This sort of thing should be | unthinkable. | | This will probably require ending drug prohibition; I don't see a | reasonable way to protect researchers' freedom to synthesize | arbitrary materials while prohibiting the possession of a large | and constantly growing list of materials. | | 5. Going beyond freedom from active persecution, it's important | to cultivate a social attitude that basic research is not only | not harmful, but an important and worthwhile activity. This is | the opposite of the attitude cultivated by Hollywood, which | considers anything scientific to be inherently scary and | antihuman. | ISL wrote: | On point 4: As a scientist who normally chafes at those | prohibitions, I'll point out that responsibility for the | consequences of ones' research is also important. | | For example, it is extremely easy, with both household and | scientific chemicals/tools, to create a hazardous waste problem | that is a problem for neighbors or a community. I imagine it | could be the same for some biological experiments. One of the | key advantages of garage experimentation is the freedom from | the strictures of a laboratory, but one cannot lose sight of | the impacts on others. | derbOac wrote: | The attitude isn't cultivated by Hollywood. It's the media and | business. And that attitude is that successful, worthwhile | ideas, and the persons generating them, are the ones who are | successful at climbing the grant career ladder under current | funding regimes. | | Not saying that what you're referring to isn't also a problem, | but the immediate problem with reference to the paper is the | meritocracy-funding-complex that underlies modern biomedical | academics (and by extension, other areas of academics that are | held up to it as a profit source by universities). | [deleted] | bglazer wrote: | Points 1-4 seem to be promoting a vision of individual | researchers working independently with low cost instruments. A | sort of yeoman farmer model of research? | | Why not aggregate those independent researchers into a single | place so that they can share ideas and the cost of high quality | instruments? Like a university. | | Also, I don't disagree with any of these ideas, I just don't | think they're relevant in a university setting, at least in the | US. Most universities have good libraries with access to all | the luxury journals. They have core facilities with high | quality equipment. There's some red-tape but you can study just | about any chemical in a university lab. | | Edit: I should note that the current journal publishing system | is a terrible fucking scam and should be immediately | dismantled. That said, it's not currently limiting my research | because everyone at my university shares in the extortion fees | charged by publishers. | kragen wrote: | Oh, universities are great! I'm not saying universities | should stop existing or that they aren't important. They're | very important! But we can't expect them to provide unlimited | resources for free to anyone who is curious about something. | They have to pick and choose who they fund, which means | excluding the majority of possible Karikos. Perhaps just as | bad, the mechanism consigns many of the most promising | researchers to administrative tasks like grantwriting and | personnel management instead of science. If you're a PI | supervising 30 RAs you aren't going to spend a lot of time at | the bench. And most women who get a Ph.D. sacrifice the | chance to have kids in their 20s in the process, which is a | big deal for many of them; life isn't easy for | "nontraditional" postdocs. And 95% of people don't live in | the US. | | Finally, universities aren't omnipotent. Gang Chen, Aaron | Swartz, Steve Kurtz, Star Simpson, and Majid Shahriari were | all affiliated with universities, and they were persecuted | for their research anyway, resulting in their deaths in two | cases. | | So, I think giving people more freedom to pursue research as | they see fit would substantially increase the amount of | research that gets done, and so would placing more social | value on it. | ok_dad wrote: | The literal problem in the article is that those who might | make the largest contributions are currently excluded from | university organized research due to politics (entrenched and | powerful researchers and inflexible policy), discrimination | (not just the standard forms of race or sex, but also based | on education), or other arbitrary reasons! You're just saying | "the current way is the most efficient" and discarding the | entirety of the GP comments 5 points above you. | zozbot234 wrote: | Citizen science can definitely be a thing, but it's going | to have very different comparative advantages than anything | based around established institutions, i.e. | universities/research labs. It might well be that _both_ of | these are worthwhile problems to solve - they need not be | exclusive. | keithalewis wrote: | 6. And a pony. A pretty one with fluffy hair you can comb. | kragen wrote: | You seem to be saying that it's unlikely that we'll achieve | all of this. And that's true: it's a lot of social change, | and social change is very difficult. But every incremental | step in the direction of these goals will improve the | situation for high-risk basic research like Kariko's. | | Except for ponies. Those are pleasant but they're too | resource-intensive to be much of a force for advancing basic | research. | BlueTemplar wrote: | The pony problem is a tough one. Though maybe we can find a | self-reinforcing loop by funding research into breeding | prettier and fluffier poneys ? | zozbot234 wrote: | Your average Kariko would not benefit directly from Universal | Basic Income. Not that solving extreme poverty/deprivation | while preserving economic freedom and efficiency isn't a _good_ | idea for plenty of other reasons, but it 's not a free lunch | either. The modal UBI recipient will probably be expending | their time and effort on training for productive work, not | long-term research with no immediate benefits for themselves. | kragen wrote: | The modal UBI recipient is not your average Kariko; the modal | UBI recipient will probably sit around beating their children | and watching music videos on whatever the equivalent of MTV | or YouTube is in 02039. No conceivable intervention will turn | the majority of the population into inventors and scientists, | so we shouldn't try unless it's a low-risk effort. | | But we can certainly aspire to liberate science from | bibliometrics, dollar-auction postdoc rat races, | grantwriting, mandatory reporting requirements, and | especially prosecution, so that the people who _do_ want to | spend their time on advancing human knowledge have the | opportunity to do so. And we can work to change the public | perception of innovation and research from Frankenstein and | Walter White to Edison, Tesla, and Einstein. | ok_dad wrote: | That's a very negative view of humanity. Everyone I know, | from phds to blue collar workers, have great things they | aspire to, if only they had the time. You must hang out | with real losers if that's what you think is reality, or | you must be listening to the media representations of the | worst of us. | kragen wrote: | I have great things I aspire to, too, that I'm not | actively working on. Instead I'm wasting my time getting | flamed on some toxic website. I guess I'm a real loser! | But I don't think I'm much worse than average. At least I | don't beat my kids. | | You can see what people do with total freedom by looking | at retirees and the rich. Some of them do the great | things they aspire to. Most of them don't. I still think | more freedom is a net good. | CamperBob2 wrote: | So frustrating when someone makes four good points yet throws | in a controversial outlier, seemingly at random, that makes me | feel awkward about upvoting the rest. I don't necessarily | disagree with the concept of UBI, but geez, WTF does that have | to do with this conversation? | | I guess 80% is good enough. Consider the advantages of focusing | on your core theses, though. | kragen wrote: | Amusingly, I put UBI near the top of the list in part because | I thought it was one of the less controversial points. | dekhn wrote: | i'd be really surprised if buying acetone gets you put on a | list, do you have more details? | kragen wrote: | Be surprised: | https://www.argentina.gob.ar/sites/default/files/renpre- | inst... https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primer | a/85089... https://www.ecofield.net/Legales/precur- | quim/res535-14_SEDRO... | | That said, the listings I'm finding on MercadoLibre right now | don't have the requirement that you send them your DNI or | your Sedronar authorization that I used to see, so maybe the | policy changed recently? | aeternum wrote: | Along with #1, a culture shift to promoting the publishing of | null-results would also help quite a bit. Journal acceptance | and funding is now incredibly biased towards finding a | significant result. Every researcher will find p<.05 on average | after 20 studies even if those studies are literally measuring | random noise. | | We need to have some incentive to at least share null-results | and replications. | kragen wrote: | Agreed! Aside from the spurious results produced by | publication bias, the amount of effort spent on trying things | that somebody already knows don't work is staggering. The | knowledge of what _doesn 't_ work is mostly passed on tacitly | through apprenticeship rather than published, which means it | can easily be lost. | | As a simple example, we've known how to make transparent | glass for 1900 years, but it took Ben Krasnow two months to | achieve it himself despite having money, libraries, and glass | experts at his disposal, and being generally competent at | making things, having built, for example, his own electron | microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcUy7SqdS0 | generationP wrote: | As the Surgisphere affair has showed, publishing null results | opens its own can of worms: No one will bother replicating | them. Surprising positives at least have a kind of target | drawn on them, but a negative result that matches people's | expectations is really not something anyone disinterested | would want to replicate -- there is no fame in that. | Fraudulent non-results will be blocking fruitful directions. | | I wish I had a panacea for these things... | zozbot234 wrote: | The Surgisphere papers were not "null" results. They found | significantly higher risk of death after HCQ treatment, | based on what turned out to be highly flawed data. The | problem was with the original dataset. (Not to be outdone, | the Surgisphere folks also contributed their data to a | preprint which purported to show horse | dewormer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ivermectin could be a | _successful_ SARS-CoV2 treatment). | sampo wrote: | > horse dewormer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ivermectin | | You are not being truthful, labeling ivermectin only a | "horse dewormer". Ivermectin is used as an antiparasitic | drug also for people. And not only as a dewormer, but | also against lice and mites. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin | dhosek wrote: | This is true in all fields. I was playing with an idea that | factors of Fermat non-primes (2^{2^n}+1 for n > 5) could be | expressed in terms of products of the complex factors of the | polynomial x^{2^n}+1 with x=1 with the idea that it might | lead to a proof that for all n > 5, F_n is composite. I spent | a bunch of time working out the exact expressions for these | roots and playing around with their products (which ended up | having a connection to Chebyshev polynomials), and then it | occurred to me to try exhaustively trying the possible | products of the complex roots of x^{64}+1 with x=1 to see if | it turned up the factors of F_6 and it turned out it was a | dead end. A compilation of false hypotheses in different | fields of mathematics could make for interesting reading (and | perhaps lead to eliminating multiple people getting stuck in | the same cul de sac). | noslenwerdna wrote: | Interestingly, this isn't true in particle physics! | Probably most papers published by ATLAS or CMS are a | negative result. | xiaodai wrote: | This women deserves a billion dollars | lucidrains wrote: | not even. like those MasterCard commercials, you could say it | is, priceless... | neonate wrote: | https://archive.is/oVyno | | http://web.archive.org/web/20220203202632/https://www.statne... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-03 23:00 UTC)