Most recently, two leading drug firms, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, announced that they were scaling back research into the brain. The organ is simply too complicated, too full of networks we don’t comprehend.
Of course, pharmaceutical research to the brain isn't the same as cognitive science research to the brain, but still, I'm updating to have a somewhat lower estimate of "P(the brain will be reverse engineered during the next 50 years)" as a result of reading this. (Though there are still partial algorithmic replications of the hippocampus and the cerebellum which do make it seem relatively probable that the reverse engineering will succeed nevertheless.)
Jonah Lehrer has up another of his contrarian science articles: "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us".
Main topics: the failure of drugs in clinical trials, diminishing returns to pharmaceutical research, doctors over-treating, and Humean causality-correlation distinction, with some Ioannidis mixed through-out.
See also "Why epidemiology will not correct itself"
In completely unrelated news, Nick Bostrom is stepping down from IEET's Chairman of the Board.