The fact that Big Pharma has to lay of a lot of scientists is a real world indication that the output of model of finding a drug target, screening thousands of components against it, runs those components through clinical trials to find whether they are any good and then coming out with drugs that cure important illnesses at the other end stops producing results.
This seems like extremely weak evidence. Diminishing marginal returns is a common thing in many areas. For example, engineering better trains happened a lot in the second half 19th century and the early 20th century. That slowed down, not because of some lack of theoretical background, but because the technology reached maturity. Now, improvements in train technology do occur, but slowly.
Saying that there's a file drawer problem is quite easy. That however not a solution. I think your problem is that you can't imaging a theory that would solve the problem. That's typical. If it would be easy to imagine a theoretical breakthrough beforehand it wouldn't be much of a breakthrough.
On the contrary. We have ways of handling the file drawer problem, and they aren't theory based issues. Pre-registration of studies works. It isn't even clear to me what it would mean to have a theoretical solution of the file drawer problem given that it is a problem about how culture, and a type of problem exists in any field. It makes about as much sense to talk about how having better theory could somehow solve type I errors.
Look at a theoretical breakthrough of moving from the model of numbers as IV+II=VI to 4+2=6. If you would have talked with a Pythagoras he probably couldn't imaging a theoretical breakthrough like that.
The ancient Greeks used the Babylonian number system and the Greek system. They did not use Roman numerals.
It isn't even clear to me what it would mean to have a theoretical solution of the file drawer problem given that it is a problem about how culture, and a type of problem exists in any field.
The file drawer problem is about an effect. If you can estimate exactly how large the effect is when you look at the question of whether to take a certain drug you solve the problem because you can just run the numbers.
On the contrary. We have ways of handling the file drawer problem, and they aren't theory based issues. Pre-registration of studies works.
The con...
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)