[Link] The real end of science

From Gene Expression by Razib Khan who some of you may also know from the old gnxp site or perhaps from his BHTV debate with Eliezer.

Fifteen years ago John Horgan wrote The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. I remain skeptical as to the specific details of this book, but Carl’s write-up in The New York Times of a new paper in PNAS on the relative commonness of scientific misconduct in cases of retraction makes me mull over the genuine possibility of the end of science as we know it. This sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but you have to understand my model of and framework for what science is. In short: science is people. I accept the reality that science existed in some form among strands of pre-Socratic thought, or among late antique and medieval Muslims and Christians (not to mention among some Chinese as well). Additionally, I can accept the cognitive model whereby science and scientific curiosity is rooted in our psychology in a very deep sense, so that even small children engage in theory-building.

That is all well and good. The basic building blocks for many inventions and institutions existed long before their instantiation. But nevertheless the creation of institutions and inventions at a given moment is deeply contingent. Between 1600 and 1800 the culture of science as we know it emerged in the West. In the 19th and 20th centuries this culture became professionalized, but despite the explicit institutions and formal titles it is bound together by a common set of norms, an ethos if you will. Scientists work long hours for modest remuneration for the vain hope that they will grasp onto one fragment of reality, and pull it out of the darkness and declare to all, “behold!” That’s a rather flowery way of putting the reality that the game is about fun & fame. Most will not gain fame, but hopefully the fun will continue. Even if others may find one’s interests abstruse or esoteric, it is a special thing to be paid to reflect upon and explore what one is interested in.

Obviously this is an idealization. Science is a highly social and political enterprise, and injustice does occur. Merit and effort are not always rewarded, and on occasion machination truly pays. But overall the culture and enterprise muddle along, and are better in terms of yielding a better sense of reality as it is than its competitors. And yet all great things can end, and free-riders can destroy a system. If your rivals and competitors and cheat and getting ahead, what’s to stop you but your own conscience? People will flinch from violating norms initially, even if those actions are in their own self-interest, but eventually they will break. And once they break the norms have shifted, and once a few break, the rest will follow. This is the logic which drives a vicious positive feedback loop, and individuals in their rational self-interest begin to cannibalize the components of the institutions which ideally would allow all to flourish. No one wants to be the last one in a collapsing building, the sucker who asserts that the structure will hold despite all evidence to the contrary.

Deluded as most graduate students are, they by and large are driven by an ideal. Once the ideal, the illusion, is ripped apart, and eaten away from within, one can’t rebuild it in a day. Trust evolves and accumulates it organically. One can not will it into existence. Centuries of capital are at stake, and it would be best to learn the lessons of history. We may declare that history has ended, but we can’t unilaterally abolish eternal laws.

Update:

Link to original post.

From Gene Expression by Razib Khan who some of you may also know from the old gnxp site or perhaps from his BHTV debate with Eliezer.

Fifteen years ago John Horgan wrote The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. I remain skeptical as to the specific details of this book, but Carl’s write-up in The New York Times of a new paper in PNAS on the relative commonness of scientific misconduct in cases of retraction makes me mull over the genuine possibility of the end of science as we know it. This sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but you have to understand my model of and framework for what science is. In short: science is people. I accept the reality that science existed in some form among strands of pre-Socratic thought, or among late antique and medieval Muslims and Christians (not to mention among some Chinese as well). Additionally, I can accept the cognitive model whereby science and scientific curiosity is rooted in our psychology in a very deep sense, so that even small children engage in theory-building.

That is all well and good. The basic building blocks for many inventions and institutions existed long before their instantiation. But nevertheless the creation of institutions and inventions at a given moment is deeply contingent. Between 1600 and 1800 the culture of science as we know it emerged in the West. In the 19th and 20th centuries this culture became professionalized, but despite the explicit institutions and formal titles it is bound together by a common set of norms, an ethos if you will. Scientists work long hours for modest remuneration for the vain hope that they will grasp onto one fragment of reality, and pull it out of the darkness and declare to all, “behold!” That’s a rather flowery way of putting the reality that the game is about fun & fame. Most will not gain fame, but hopefully the fun will continue. Even if others may find one’s interests abstruse or esoteric, it is a special thing to be paid to reflect upon and explore what one is interested in.

Obviously this is an idealization. Science is a highly social and political enterprise, and injustice does occur. Merit and effort are not always rewarded, and on occasion machination truly pays. But overall the culture and enterprise muddle along, and are better in terms of yielding a better sense of reality as it is than its competitors. And yet all great things can end, and free-riders can destroy a system. If your rivals and competitors and cheat and getting ahead, what’s to stop you but your own conscience? People will flinch from violating norms initially, even if those actions are in their own self-interest, but eventually they will break. And once they break the norms have shifted, and once a few break, the rest will follow. This is the logic which drives a vicious positive feedback loop, and individuals in their rational self-interest begin to cannibalize the components of the institutions which ideally would allow all to flourish. No one wants to be the last one in a collapsing building, the sucker who asserts that the structure will hold despite all evidence to the contrary.

Deluded as most graduate students are, they by and large are driven by an ideal. Once the ideal, the illusion, is ripped apart, and eaten away from within, one can’t rebuild it in a day. Trust evolves and accumulates it organically. One can not will it into existence. Centuries of capital are at stake, and it would be best to learn the lessons of history. We may declare that history has ended, but we can’t unilaterally abolish eternal laws.

Update:

Link to original post.

It's easy to point fingers at a very sick subset of scientific endeavors - biomedical research. The reasons it is messed up and not very productive are myriad. Fake and non-reproducible results that waste everyone's time are one facet of the problem. The big one I observed was that trying to make a useful tool to solve a real problem with the human body is NOT something that the traditional model can handle very well. The human body is so immensely complex. This means that "easy" solutions are not going to work. You can't repair a jet engine by putting sawdust in the engine oil or some other cheap trick, can you? Why would you think a very small molecule that can interact with any one of tens of thousands of proteins in an unpredictable manner could fix anything either? (or a beam of radiation, or chopping out an entire sub-system and replacing it with a shoddy substitute made by cannibalizing something else, or delivering crude electric shocks to a huge region. I've just named nearly every trick in the arsenal)

Most biomedical research is slanted towards this "cheap trick" solution, however. The reason is because the model encourages it. University research teams usually consist of a principle investigator and a small cadre of graduate students, and a relatively small budget. They are under a deadline to come up with something-anything useful within a few years, and the failures don't receive tenure and are fired. Pharmaceutical research teams also want a quick and cheap solution, generally, for a similar reason. Most of the low hanging fruit - small molecule drugs that are safe and effective - has already been plucked, and in any case there is a limit to the problems in biological systems that can actually be fixed with small molecules. If a complex machine is broken, you usually need to shut it off and replace major components. You are not going to be able to spray some magic oil and fix the fault.

For example, how might you plausible cure cancer? Well, what do cancer cells share in common? Markers on the outside of the cells? Nope, if there were, the immune system would usually detect them. Are the cells always making some foreign protein? Nope, same problem. All tumors share mutated genes, and thus have mRNAs present in the cells that you can detect.

So how might you exploit this? Somehow you have to build a tool that can get into cells near the tumor and detect the ones with these faulty mRNAs(and kills them). Also, this tool needs to not affect healthy cells.

If you break down the components of the tool, you realize it would have to be quite complex, with many sub-elements that have to be developed. You cannot solve this problem with 10 people and a few million dollars. You probably need many interrelated teams, all of whom are tasked with developing separate components of the tool. (with prizes if they succeed, and multiple teams working on each component using a different method to minimize risks)

No one is going to magically publish a working paper in Nature tomorrow where they have succeeded in such an effort overnight. Yet, this is basically what the current system expects. Somehow someone is going to cure cancer tomorrow without there being an actual integrated plan, with the billions of dollars in resources needed, and a sound game plan that minimizes risk and rewards individual successes.

Professors I have pointed this out to say that no central agency can possibly "know" what a successful cancer cure might look like. The current system just funds anyone who wants to try anything, assuming they pass review and have the right credentials. Thus a large variety of things are tried. I don't see it. I don't think there is a valid solution to cancer that can be found with a small team just trying things with a million or 2 of equipment, supplies, and personnel.

Growing replacement organs is a similar endeavor. Small teams have managed to show that it is viable - but they cannot actually solve the serious problems because they lack the resources to go about it in a systematic and likely to succeed way. While Wake Forest has demonstrated years ago that they can make a small heart that beats, there isn't a huge team of thousands systematically attacking each element of the problem that has to be solved to make full scale replacement hearts.

One final note : this ultimately points to gross misapplication of resources. Our society spends billions to kill a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently. It spends billions to incarcerate millions of people for life who individually MIGHT commit some murders. It spends billions on nursing homes and end of life care to statistically extend the lives of millions by a matter of months.

Yet real solutions to problems that kill nearly everyone, for certain, are not worth the money to solve them in a systematic way.

The reason for this is lack of rationality. Human beings fear emotionally extremely rare causes of death much more than extremely likely, "natural" causes. They fear the idea of a few disgruntled Muslims or a criminal who was let out of prison murdering them far more than they fear their heart suddenly failing or their tissues developing a tumor when they are old.

Most biomedical research is slanted towards this "cheap trick" solution, however. The reason is because the model encourages it.

I'm pretty sure this also applies to machine learning research. See this.

1ChristianKl14y

For better or worse, being useful isn't something that's important for academic biology research. If you discover a new biochemical pathway, you get published whether or not the knowledge helps anybody to do something useful. [...] That's I don't see why someone who would develop something that would work as one of the components of the tool wouldn't get published in Nature. [...] That's a very naive way to look at things. Killing a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently isn't the only goal of the various wars. As long as you pretend it is things are hard to understand.

4HeatDeath14y

The institution of medicine, defined as "understanding the human body well enough to, from basic principles, directly and intentionally repair diagnosed faults", only barely exists, and it is called surgery. The historic division between medicine (as descended from folk remedies and alchemy) and surgery (as descended from the unsubtle craft of closing wounds and amputating limbs) is illustrative here. Medicine, by definition, is holistic. It descends from folk remedies, alchemy, and enchanted unguents. It has only recently and intermittently shown the slightest interest in drug mechanisms, and even that only to the extent that the analysis of drug mechanisms facilitates the development of new and profitable drugs. Medicine has never been about anything /but/ "adding small molecules to the oil", though it has been far more prestigious then surgery for about a century, since the late 19th century discoveries of narcotics, antibiotics, and vaccines. [Prior to this surgeons were considered far more reliable within their area of expertise, although neither had the degree of professionalization and societal status that they enjoy today.] You make the argument, and I'm inclined to agree, that medicine may very well be playing itself out - that the model that grabbed all the low hanging fruit there is more or less obsolete. The future of medicine isn't medicine at all. It's nano-surgery. Though I suspect there will be a big turf war between medical professionals and surgical professionals as the medical professionals seek to redefine themselves as the ones implementing the procedures that actually work.

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[Link] The real end of science

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