“A mixed economy is not an economic abomination or even a regrettably unavoidable political necessity but a natural absorbing state,” and other notes on “Whither Science?” by Danko Antolovic

So. I got this email one day, promoting a book that came with the following blurb:

Whither Science?, by Danko Antolovic, is a series of essays that explore some of the questions facing modern science.

A short read at only 41 pages, Whither Science? looks into the fundamental questions about the purposes, practices and future of science. As a global endeavor, which influences all of contemporary life, science is still a human creation with historical origins and intellectual foundations. And like all things human, it has its faults, which must be accounted for.

It sounded like this guy might be a crank, but they sent me a free copy so I took a look. I read the book, and I liked it. It’s written in an unusual style, kinda like what you might expect from someone with a physics/chemistry background writing about social science and philosophy. But that’s ok.

Antolovic deserves to be recognized as the next Nassim Taleb—by which, I mean a plain-speaking yet deep revealer of true structures, a philosophical autodidact with a unique combination of views.

The book is worth reading.

p.6, “Today, the practitioner of science is almost without exception an employee of a larger corporate entity (a university or a company) or of a national government. He is hemmed in by the tangible constraints of his terms of employment and funding, and by the less tangible ones of departmental, institutional and funding politics. He labors in a crowded field, in which there are increasingly fewer stones left unturned, and he climbs the ladder of corporate seniority until he retires.”

p.7, “After the Second World War, science went from being the province of the few to becoming the career path of many.”

“Since scientific development is fundamentally important to the well-being of modern societies, it is easy to see the benefits of exalting this decidedly un-adventurous walk of life with the help of a heroic foundation story. In the eyes of the supporting public, and in those of prospective practitioners, present-day science is the heir and descendant of the heroic achievements that dispelled the darkness of superstition, changed our image of the universe, and wonder-worked what we today know as the industrial world. And so it is, but we should examine the heir on his own merits.”

Well put. I have nothing to add.

“Market economy is usually held up as the paragon of a robust and efficient mechanism by which to produce and distribute wealth. For it to function, it must have a sufficiently large number of economic “players” (individuals and companies), and a pool of as of yet unowned resources – energy or raw materials – that are available for the taking. Players invest their labor, and their already owned wealth, to appropriate the resources; they work the raw resources into things that they and others consider valuable, and they trade with each other in the quest for greater wealth.”

“We must point out that the pool of unowned resources is an essential factor for the competitive market to exist: that is what the market players compete for, either directly, by extracting the resources themselves, or indirectly, by trading with others in the wealth derived from these resources.”

Compare to the hypothetical desert island whose inhabitants survive economically by taking in each others’ laundry. Or various poor countries, or poor regions of countries, that just don’t have enough unowned resources to go around. What economist Tyler Cowen calls Zero Marginal Product zones.

Just as fishing technology has allowed humans to grab all the fish, and oil drilling and coal mining technology threaten to remove that pool of unowned fossil fuel resources, so does economic development threaten to kill the golden goose etc.

I’ll have to think about this one. If it’s really true that economic exchange relies on that pool of unowned resources, then the market economy is self-defeating. Cultural contradictions of capitalism but in a different way. This is interesting because economists often recommend solving problems of unowned resources by giving them owners. Rhinos, fish, the disaster that was post-communist Russia. But to put it in Antolovic’s terms, “If the resources are intentionally distributed among the players, again by political means, we have a form of planned economy.”

So in that way a mixed economy is not an economic abomination or even a regrettably unavoidable political necessity but a natural absorbing state.

I wonder what Jeff Sachs would think of this.

p.8, “The wealth of the participants is not tokenized by money, but by a less rigidly defined currency, which we will refer to as prestige. . . . Participants use their existing prestige to appropriate the funding resources, which they convert into further prestige via the process of performing scientific research. Direct trading in research results is proscribed as unethical, since the results must nominally be original and attributable to a researcher. However, scientific results are merely ancillary to the accumulation of prestige, and prestige is freely traded for labor and further prestige: this is the politics of who collaborates with whom, who is hired in which department or research laboratory etc. Typically, those with less prestige offer their labor to those with more, with the objective of increasing their own prestige and share of resources by association.”

Yup. That has the “anthropologist on Mars” ring of truth. It describes what goes on, what I and others do.

It’s important to be clear-eyed without being cynical. Prestige is the currency of science, but that does not mean that prestige is the reason we do things, nor does it mean that science is all about prestige. We have many goals in doing science, including discovery, serving societal goals, teamwork, and the joys of the scientific endeavor itself. Given that people will do crossword puzzles for diversion, it’s not such a stretch to think that science can be fun too.

One can draw an analogy to acting, where one could say the currency is fame or reputation; or professional team sports, where players are motivated both to win and to improve their personal statistics. To recognize certain goals should not be taken as to deny the existence of others.

To get back to science and its coins of prestige, I take Antolovic’s point to be, not that scientists are hypocrites to claim to seek discovery when they are nothing but careerists, or that scientists think themselves rational but are actually ruled by the same instincts, urges, and motivations that drive a society of bonobos, but rather that the accumulation and trading in of prestige is at this point a necessity for most scientists; it is baked into the scientific economy.

Consider my own case. I know myself well enough to recognize that I have an innate desire for prestige and acclaim. As a child I enjoyed being praised, and for decades now I’ve been thrilled when people come up to me and say they loved my talk, or that they’ve learned so much from my books. OK, fine. But that’s not why I do what I do. It’s more of an pleasant byproduct. I don’t choose to work on based on what will give me more praise or happy feedback, except to the extent that I want my work to be useful to others—I am a statistician, after all!—in which case the beneficiaries of my labors might well choose to thank me, which is fine.

But—and here’s where Antolovic’s argument comes in—I do seek prestige, not so much for its own sake but because of what it can buy. Again, the prestige-as-money argument. I know some people for whom accumulation of money is a major goal in itself, but most of us want money for what it can buy, and for the security it can provide. Similarly, I seek the prestige and publications which will allow me to attract top collaborators and do the best work I can, and to get the funding to hire the programmers that can allow Stan to realize its destiny, thus advancing science and technology in ways that I would like.

Prestige is the coin. It is true that my collaborators and I accumulate prestige, which we convert into grant funding and then into research results. We play the game because we want to do science. Prestige is not, by and large, the goal in itself. Antolovic writes, “Infantile gratification of personal vanity cannot remain the primary motivation for doing science.” But I think he’s missing the point here. Prestige buys us money, and money amplifies our research efforts, so we go for prestige for sensible instrumental reasons. Maybe also infantile gratification, but that’s not the primary motivation. Any more than the primary motivation of businessmen is the infantile desire to hold shiny coins and green pieces of paper.

One striking feature of the current crisis in science is the panic of people such as that embodied-cognition guy who’d built up great stores of the stuff—thousands and thousands of citations!—only to see science moving away from the germanium standard, as it were. (I don’t enjoy the dilution of my own prestige, of course—my list of journals I’ve published in, is looking more and more like a collection of vinyl records—but there’s nothing much I can do about it.)

The economic analogy works well. The realization that one can easily print more money leads to inflation, then a need for more money, then hyperinflation. Just look at the C.V.’s of recent computer science Ph.D.’s: there’s a pressure to publish dozens of conference papers a year. The field of statistics is more bimetallic, or multimetallic, with publications in various different sorts of journals. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, economics itself has, relatively speaking, remained a bastion of hard money, with the top five or so journals keeping much of their gold-standard status. (Which leads to troubles of its own, as in the career of Bruno Frey, and the recent brouhaha involving alleged insider favors in the American Economic Review.)

But I digress. What I want to say here is that I appreciate Antolovic’s insightful application of economic ideas to scientific research, and I hope that readers can get the point without getting lost in cynicism. Moving Stan forward costs a lot of money. Programmers need to be paid, and that means that I end up spending a lot of my time asking people for money.

To draw yet another analogy, the currency of baking is not flour or yeast but, by and large, money. A successful baker can raise the funds to buy higher-quality ingredients, to expand the bakery, to try out new recipes, and so forth, allowing more money to be raised, etc. Or he or she can run a small shop with no grander goals but will still need to make enough money to live on. But the goal of just about everyone involved (setting aside the pure hacks) is to make bread. The system must ultimately be evaluated based on the quality and quantity of bread produced (along with related concerns such as variety and sustainability).

p.12, “It is our thesis that the past half century or so has proven the bazaar-like approach to science a failure. This period has filled libraries with scientific publications to the point of bursting, while offering disappointingly little toward what has always been the underlying premise of the techno-scientific endeavor: betterment of the human condition. The great killing diseases of our time, cardiovascular disease and cancer, have remained with us through this period, and no fundamental approach to curing them is in sight. As the average population age creeps up, degenerative diseases of body and mind are becoming an ever greater economic drain, yet progress in that area moves at glacial pace. Even new infectious pathogens, such as HIV and the Ebola virus, seem to be more than what contemporary science can readily counter, despite very considerable advances in molecular and cell biology.”

Rather than argue the details of this, I want to remark on how refreshing this perspective is, to criticize the “bazaar-like approach” to anything. In a famous internet document from 1995, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond contrasted the top-down and bottom-up or self-organizing approaches to construction and argued strongly and persuasively in favor of the latter. The cathedral is central planning, bureaucracy, and projects that take centuries to complete, at which point the original goals have become irrelevant. The bazaar is evolution, it’s competition, it’s small groups working together when they need to, and going their own way when appropriate.

In the context of scientific research, the cathedral is big research labs and PNAS; the bazaar is Arxiv and internet comment sections. Or is it the other way around?

Big research looks like a cathedral only from a distance; close-up it’s thousands of competing research groups. Meanwhile, Arxiv is run by a small group, and much of the discussion on the internet has been absorbed within the walls of Facebook.

Anyway, I don’t plan any cathedral/bazaar manifesto myself, I just wanted to register my interest in Anotolovic’s refusal to hold a reflexive pro-bazaar position. Instead, he recommends scientific management focused on a national level aimed at particular goals, rather than the current loose system where goals are stated but then money is given to research teams with little outside direction or management. I don’t know how well this will work, but the possibility seems worth looking into.

p.18, “Perhaps it is understandable that the supernatural has greater emotional traction in the human mind than the natural. The supernatural is the product of the mind itself, a story told to both stir and assuage the anxieties of a social animal: supernatural causes are always personal, they are somebody, good or evil. Empirical explanation, on the other hand, endeavors to discover causes that are unfamiliar, emotionally indifferent and invariably impersonal; there is, at the core of it, certain disappointing banality to every factual explanation.”

Well put.

p.19, “Religion, specifically Roman Christianity, is of course the arch-villain of the foundational narrative of science, but from the perspective of the empiricist, the conflict, or at least the intellectual part of the conflict, is entirely avoidable: insofar that religion asserts that certain doctrines are factually true without presenting factual evidence, that assertion is intellectually worthless. Any theological speculations that do not make factual claims are open to consideration, discussion or disregard, as one may wish, but science has no inherent conflict with them.”

“Intellectually worthless” is a bit too strong: if I come up with an assertion without presenting factual evidence, I still may be making a contribution if my assertion is taken as a hypothesis or if it inspires others to useful thought. Just as one can argue, for example, that Jules Verne could’ve made a useful intellectual contribution to undersea exploration, even had he decided to insist on the factual existence of Captain Nemo.

p.21, “Objections raised by romantic movements are substantive and conscientious, and they speak from the authority of their historical present. They do not represent a reflexive “opposition to progress,” but rather they are a legitimate effort of the human mind to come to terms with the full implications of the changing image of the world, emotional as much as rational; we regard the romantic periods as an integral part of the story of empiricism.”

p.22, “A new scientific theory must account for those facts that were understood under the old one before it ventures to offer new explanations.”

Not quite! Sometimes science can make progress, working around well-known anomalies that resist clean explanation in any existing framework. Indeed, it could well be that certain aspects of the real world will never be explainable by human theories. 1/137, anyone?

p.25, “Putting it in a straightforward way, secular ethics asks: How should I treat others? Should I “do unto others” as I would wish to be treated (or at least give them decent consideration), or should I do unto others whatever it takes to attain my own goals, goals which, in the absence of a credible supernatural authority, I am free to set however I please?”

Well put. Here’s my definition, from my first ethics column in Chance: “An ethics problem arises when you are considering an action that (a) benefits you or some cause you support, (b) hurts or reduces benefits to others, and (c) violates some rule.”

Antolovic continues, “Empirical observation convinces me that societies in which the golden rule is generally followed are happier, free of strife, and productive; reason tells me that I can live a good life in such a society, and it can guide me in contributing to its welfare, if I so choose. But reason also tells me that, under right circumstances and with right effort, I can acquire much more for myself by manipulating, destroying, robbing and enslaving others; the same reason will help me accomplish that objective also.”

p.29, “Since its 16th century beginnings, science has reached far and wide into the world of phenomena, and for perhaps a century now, it has continuously exploited its proven methods of investigation, making available an ever greater power over that phenomenal world. However, only a small fraction of its effort has been expended toward understanding the one thing which is both the source of scientific inquiry and the recipient of its fruits: the human mind.”

Not anymore, right? Neuroscience is a big deal these days. And psychology’s been a big deal for awhile. Even more “external” social sciences have been turning inward; consider, for example, the claim by economists that theirs is the science of human behavior.

And then there’s computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence.

But this: “We accept, and always have accepted, that procreative aggression of young males – the bellicosity of the rut – will be harnessed for state’s purposes, making them into cannon fodder for whatever cause is being fought about at the moment. We accept that civilized peoples can and will be coaxed back into the depths of pre-civilized horde loyalty and set against some conveniently chosen outside group as the ‘enemy.’ We observe public words and actions of decision makers of nuclear-armed nations, and we recognize in them thinly disguised impulses of the dominant animal in a primate horde – and we accept that as natural. We allow the fruits of technological progress to be used for vertiginous enrichment of individuals who are devoid of all but a boundless drive for acquisition, and we do not see this drive as a pathology, a personality disorder: rather, we see it as a trait to be envied and lived out vicariously through admiration.”

Ouch. As a human, I feel the shock of recognition.

p.32, “First truly scientific insights into the mind came with the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s method of investigation was not empirical observation, but rather introspection, but he used introspection as if it were empirical observation of external phenomena. He regarded the patients’ introspective monologues as authentic and reliable observables of the mind, although he did not treat them as literal reports, but as material to be analyzed. . . . Freud’s work has in it much that is speculative, and it does not (yet) exhibit the rigor of a developed scientific discipline . . .”

He’s no Freud-worshipper: “Proponents of psychoanalysis in their turn believe that dark subconscious impulses and conflicts can be resolved by reason, once they have been brought into the light of consciousness by analysis. In reality, psychoanalytical approach has been shown to have limited success even in its original role as a clinical therapy for neuroses, and it is entirely impractical to think that the ‘talking cure’ could be employed to lead the broader mankind out of instinctual darkness.”

But: “The contribution of [Freud’s] work lies in having proposed both a methodology and a set of working hypotheses in an area of science which is still deficient in that respect today.”

p.33, “Human governance throughout history has amounted mostly to murderous rule by individuals whose only claim to power was that they wanted it badly enough to fight for it; this accompanied by equally murderous sycophancy of the ruled, usually directed against the heretic, the infidel, the traitor to the cause, the ‘other.’ In modern times, unfettered overconsumption is practiced by most of the western populations, accompanied by equally grotesque over-accumulation of wealth and economic power by a few individuals. All of these behaviors can be readily recognized as driven by primitive instincts that were unilaterally freed from their natural constraints, their effects amplified by human power over nature.”

The rest of Antolovic’s book is interesting too.

57 thoughts on ““A mixed economy is not an economic abomination or even a regrettably unavoidable political necessity but a natural absorbing state,” and other notes on “Whither Science?” by Danko Antolovic

  1. It got a little long somewhere in the middle and I skipped to the end so I could comment, so perhaps you address this. I’ll read some more later… but when you say:

    Antolovic writes, “Infantile gratification of personal vanity cannot remain the primary motivation for doing science.” But I think he’s missing the point here. Prestige buys us money, and money amplifies our research efforts, so we go for prestige for sensible instrumental reasons

    I think you are missing the point, which is that Prestige, particularly Prestige meted out in an in-game in which many of the players are similar to characters in A Confederacy of Dunces… is a poor currency to be exchanged for money.

    If prestige were based on having produce true, correct, and societally useful knowledge, then we could argue that the whole thing is working well. But think of all the prestige that the top 10 TED talkers have, and the money it might buy them… and the outright fraudulently wrongness of so much of it…

    Not to mention the prestige factory that is Medical School, and the way in which Doctors, who very typically have about the research chops of a 2nd year terminal masters student in biology, are nevertheless hyperinflated so that there are large pools of money for research that isn’t available to biologists to do biology research, and so many many doctors dink around on the edges of research as a second or third order pastime in between the very very difficult job of remaining at the top of their game in surgery or the treatment of infectious diseases or whatever so that patients don’t die… and even then patients die.

    The point isn’t that infantile desires for prestige drives scientists to do science. The point is an infantile notion that prestige as its meted out today is a good reason to give people money is killing the possibility for careful researchers who do good and correct research to get the funding they need to keep the whole enterprise afloat.

  2. I’m going to disagree with your own description of yourself. The reason I read your blog is that you’re interested in making your field better. You are interested in having a lasting impact on the practice of statistics. You are interested in having a lasting impact on the quality of work done in science. You want statistics to be better defined, more accessible to various levels of users and more useful for determining meaning. Yes, you really like to publish. My observation is that you have clearly correct but general ideas about what should be done, based on clear and detailed understanding of the flaws in how it is done. You are capable of expressing these ideas in general statements like ‘garden of forking paths’, and I sometimes wonder if you don’t hold yourself back from putting these together. The representations you express, meaning the public actual work and this blog plus your work on Stan, suggest you’re willing to overthrow the relatively short history of statistics but unwilling to take on the task of rewriting. I don’t know if this is inability or self-perceived inability or if some key parts aren’t missing in your conception. Hard to say because you don’t talk about that. Every field needs a rewrite now and then. It astonishes me that your field is still presented literally backasswards: it was a nice idea to treat acceptance or rejection of null as a means of tipping the brain toward statistical thinking but it’s a logical mess and leads to the dead ends and dark alleys you’ve described thousands of times.

    I think you’re better than you say you are, that this means more to you than you let on, that your real life interests are more important to you than fleeting conceptions of prestige.

  3. Way way too much information for the amount of sleep I’ve had, the age I am, the time of day it is…. whatever. Let me focus on just one item –
    “We must point out that the pool of unowned resources is an essential factor for the competitive market to exist: that is what the market players compete for, either directly, by extracting the resources themselves, or indirectly, by trading with others in the wealth derived from these resources.”

    As you correctly point out, this is the opposite of what economics claims. I was trained as an economist and so let me focus on just this one aspect. I’m open to alternative theories and I’m not even fond of traditional economic theory that claims we can solve externality problems by replacing unowned resources with well defined ownership. But this idea that unowned resources are somehow essential for competitive markets just strikes me as whacky.

    If it is an empirical observation, I could buy the idea that wealth and power have been based on exploiting unowned resources (though it is debatable). But that is quite different than a competitive market – in fact, it could be argued that it is precisely the lack of competitive markets that have permitted the accumulation of such wealth through exploiting unowned resources.

    If it is a theory that competitive markets somehow require (necessary condition) unowned resources then it seem like just another faulty theory of value – like the energy theory of value that was espoused in the 1970s. The fact that environmental resources are necessary for economic activity in no way means that they must be unowned. I would accept the notion that it is not possible to articulate an ownership scheme that would cover all environmental resources. I would even accept the notion that more complete ownership of environmental resources may not be a good thing. But I just don’t see how competitive markets require such resources for their existence.

    Perhaps this is a scientist of singular brilliance who sees things I cannot. He does share some of Taleb’s style – though less egotistical but perhaps making less sense as well. Sorry, but I can’t even begin to process all the other myriad ideas – many of which might be more sensible than the economics. But I don’t find the economics to make any sense at all.

    • As another economist who comments here a lot, let me second Dale, or state it another way: the main unowned resource is IDEAS and the contents of people’s brains as instantiated in management techniques and discoveries. The economic proposition is that you can buy raw materials (owned by someone, but who cares) and transform it into something valued at more than the raw materials and machinery that went into its production. That’s how the economy advances. If you want to think of the idea to make Coca-Cola or a Mac Computer as unowned in some Platonic realm until John S. Pemberton or Steve Wozniak exploited it, go ahead, but there’s no particular benefit in doing so, and furthermore you’ll miss the fact that Asa Candler and Steve Jobs took the entirely unowned resources inside their own brains to *really* make money.

      • As another economist (how many of us in the commentariat here?), I was also struck by what seemed to me to be the complete arbitrariness of the claim that competitive markets require unowned resources. I agree with Dale that, empirically, it is true that much profit has been made from appropriating unowned resources. I don’t think this has much to do with the degree of competition, if it is understood that markets operate in historical contexts with inherited circumstances and in some cases the amount of unowned resources was large relative to the pace of appropriation (so that the circumstances persisted).

        If I can be a mind reader, however, I think that what Antolovic meant was that markets function much more productively if resources subject to the nonexhaustion property (my use does not take away from yours) are excluded from private ownership. The most important example for science is the intellectual commons, the whole body of cultural and scientific accumulation, which should remain freely available to all potential users. Don’t patent algebra! But it is also true that markets can function at a lower level of social productivity through enclosure of this commons, and this process has been occurring at the margins. Of course, behind this is the game-theoretic mechanism by which individuals who profit by defecting (enclosure) reduce the payoff to the whole group. So, yes, from a social interest standpoint markets need rules to restrict profit-making in certain activities.

        At a high level of generality, I think it’s been established that science benefits from lots of competition from producers of “ideas” with as little restriction as possible to access to the ideas they are producing. Having prestige (which benefits from access) serving as the currency of the realm works better than monetary rewards based on selling ideas (based on the ability to exclude).

        What Antolovic doesn’t consider (in the sections quoted) is the possibility of clientelist modes of allocation. These have historically played an important role in the sciences, and from what I hear in hallway gossip are still in force. There are pluses and minuses to client-patron networks. That’s a whole post (or book or research program) in itself.

        • As yet another economics wonk, I cringed at the quoted passage. IIRC, day one of Econ 1 was dedicated to dispelling this notion. The whole point of specialization and trade is that they can extract dramatically greater value from the same resources. Not to mention specialization opening up new avenues of technological development.

          Case in point–Andrew posted just yesterday about Stan improving rice yields. New technology from incredible specialization yielding the extraction of greater benefit from the same resources.

          I also cringed at the paragraph about lack of recent scientific progress. The number of people lifted out of abject poverty in the last few decades is in the billions. All built on the back of modest incremental improvements.

          Antolovic seems to fetishize flashy breathroughs, which makes a strong implicit assumption about the nature of technological progress.

        • You could however question whether the technological progress that lifted billions out of abject poverty really had much of anything to do with scientific research conducted since say 1975. Of course, there are some good drugs and vaccines and things, but much of what’s responsible for this improvement in the third world is just the effective application of stuff that’s been known since well before 1960: breeding crops, pesticides. I mean for heavens sake they’re still using DDT all over India (I’ve heard).

          So, name 10 major improvements in basic knowledge that contributed substantially to enabling a new kind of thing that helped those billions. It’s hard. Yes lots of specific refinements (ie. do this particular set of stuff to produce this particular variant on the diptheria vaccine… or variant on a particular antibiotic, or whatever)

          One big thing that might be contributing is communications devices, reducing waste, improving price structures, improving liquidity, leading to better resource utilization and soforth. The impact on price volatility in fishing was in a paper that JRC sent me a while back. You could definitely argue that billions of people each having some information that keeps them from wasting say 10% of their productive work is more or less like having hundreds of millions of extra people working.

          But both ethernet and the first portable mobile phone were produced for actual consumption in 1973, and the fundamental breakthroughs in the science and mathematics behind them was the transistor in 1947 and Claude Shannon’s information theory in 1948 leading to efficient coding schemes designed in the 50s and 60s

          Heck even the touch screen was first invented in 1965.

          I’m not pooh-poohing the importance of all the applied stuff that is necessary to actually get things produced that eventually provide cellular phone service to fishermen in Bangladesh or whatever… but there’s not really a lot of new *science* in the sense of understanding the fundamental aspects of the world that is involved.

        • Some Fundamental scientific discoveries that were of key importance to advancing knowledge so that new technologies could be built starting ca 1900

          The Photon, and quantum mechanical nature of light/matter
          Fundamental structure of electron orbitals of atoms
          Relativity
          The bipolar junction transistor
          DNA as a mechanism of heredity
          Structure of DNA
          The DNA polymerase enzyme
          Discovery of Penicillin
          Discovery of Vancomycin
          Invention of vaccines for Polio, Diptheria, Pertussis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and various diarrheal diseases
          Discovery of Tetracycline
          The FET transistor
          Mathematics of information theory and coding systems/error correcting codes/cryptography etc
          Coding schemes for radio waves: spread spectrum, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, and the like
          Invention of key polymers: Nylon, polyethylene, polypropylene, acrylics, PVC,
          Invention of fluorocarbon based refrigerants
          Invention of rare earth magnet ceramics etc
          Invention of various battery technologies (this is actually recent, last 20 years)

          The vast majority of these things were done pre 1980 even pre 1970

          Between 1980 and 2000 what fundamental research breakthroughs in human understanding will result in vastly improved quality of living in say 2027? I’m pretty happy with cetirizine and fexofenadine allergy medications but at its core the existence of the H1 histamine was discovered around 1900 and that was the fundamental new knowledge.

          Again, I’m not pooh-poohing the enormous amount of work that goes into refinement of knowledge and improvement in applications of that knowledge… but dang the 1900’s through 1960’s were pretty damn spectacular in terms of fundamental knowledge growth. you might expect with all that discovery that it’d just take decades and decades to exploit it all.. maybe that’s fine. I’d still like cheap safe nuclear fusion energy, or a breakthrough in materials science that enables solar panels an order of magnitude less expensive, or an effective mechanism for designing custom immune system based therapies for individual cancers… or heck I’d be happy with someone even really explaining how allergy shots work (I’ve asked researchers in immunology and they give some kind of half assed answers, it’s clear the mechanism of why injecting pollen under the skin leads to reduced allergic reaction is basically unknown).

          so, yeah, we’ve covered this before. Lots of good stuff has happened in the past, but far less of it very fundamental to new knowledge than kind of adding on new features to the products based on tiny refinements.

        • The market economy is great at generating this type of applied knowledge, which extracts additional value out of the same resources (including existing scientific knowledge). I believe that is the point under debate here.

          I think you are confusing terminal and instrumental goals.

        • Yes, the market economy did a great job of generating the applied knowledge needed to exploit new knowledge…. But the scientific enterprise of discovering new knowledge seems to have stagnated broadly. And that is the point I’m trying to make.

          the article goes across so many different topics that we could be having different conversations I suppose. But his point about:

          “In the eyes of the supporting public, and in those of prospective practitioners, present-day science is the heir and descendant of the heroic achievements that dispelled the darkness of superstition, changed our image of the universe, and wonder-worked what we today know as the industrial world. And so it is, but we should examine the heir on his own merits”

          is more or less what I’m saying here. We’ve got modern science as a trust fund child who has been great at leveraging a huge inheritance into a lot of cash (poverty eliminated for many for example) and some marginal improvements to the investment vehicles (better vaccines, smaller cheaper communications equipment, etc), but is not fundamentally creating new kinds of wealth (discoveries of new information about the world) in the way that the ancestor did.

        • Nah, @Daniel. You’re clearly missing the effect of this great invention, Facebook, on the election of Trump. What a marvelous result m.

        • I strongly believe that your comment is a matter of recall bias. You list ideas you can identify as important, because they have been around long enough to have an impact. Things that were discovered less than 30 years or so ago are unlikely to be seen as fundamental, simply because they haven’t been around long enough.

          Going through noble prizes from the last ten years (as a convenient shorthand for scientific discoveries) that might be seen as fundamental in the future:
          Molecular machines (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2016/press.html )
          Artemisin (ok, original paper in 1979, so probably too old to count https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2016/press.html )
          BLue LED’s (and with them the LED revolution) https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2014/press.html
          The discovery that mature cells can revert to being stem cells ( https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2012/press.html )
          CRISPR (ok, no nobel price yet, but surely just a matter of time)
          HPV causing cancer (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2008/press.html 1984, so a bit late..)
          etc. etc. etc.

          Interestingly enough, a lot of the recent Nobel prizes are for work in the 1980s or earlier, which again indicates, to me, that it takes time before new research can be identified as important.

    • This whole “unowned resources” concept struck me as bizarre too.

      I think he actually means just “raw resources”, i.e., materials that can be transformed into useful products with the input of labor and capital.

      I don’t see what “ownership” has to do with anything. An economy could function perfectly well if all resources were “owned” by someone, so “unowned” resources are not necessary to a functioning economy. It wouldn’t damage the economy one bit if we declared that everything that is currently “unowned” will henceforth be “owned” by a king-of-the-world that is willing to sell unlimited rights for a penny.

      To boot, the whole point of the Coase Theorem is that ownership doesn’t matter.

      If all he means is that you need raw materials for an economy to function, well duh. Analogously, research needs there to be unexploited discoveries because new ideas are the unexploited ore of research. Again, duh.

    • The author’s use of the term “money” is confusing too.

      Economics is focused on trading goods. Money is irrelevant to much of economics because it is just a convenient method of trading goods – rather than trade goods for goods (barter), you trade money for goods so the recipient can trade that money for goods at a different time and place (much more efficient than barter). Money has no value in and of itself like goods do. It is only valuable insofar as it is a claim on goods.

      Thinking of goods, especially intangible goods, as money can get very confusing. Is it really helpful to analogize prestige to money? Money is easily exchanged, but prestige is not. Exchanging money is zero sum, i.e., when I give you a dollar, I have one less dollar and you have one more dollar, but that’s not true of prestige. Prestige is not standardized and portable across space and time the way money is. Prestige can be beneficial to a human in and of itself, while money has no intrinsic value.

      It is probably better to avoid the analogy of prestige to money. Just think of prestige as another good that some workers accept as compensation. Like other goods received as compensation, it can provide utility to the receiver, and it may help the worker to increase future compensation. It is more straightforward if you think in terms of just goods and leave money out of it.

      • No I think the point is that prestige is basically like casino chips. There are a small number of organizations who will cash it in for money in the form of grants and salary increases. It’s not broadly fungible but it is fungible at key “academic banks”

        • I understand the point, and it can pithy to talk of prestige as “the coin of the realm” in research. Such usage can be helpful.

          My point is that prestige is not like money in a lot of ways, and it can lead to sloppy thinking if you believe in the analogy too deeply.

          I’m being fussy.

        • Perhaps this analogy can be extended further.

          Some players (scientists) seem to only like to play poker (doing science) with chips (prestige) in Casinos (“peer-reviewed” journals).

          And perhaps the entire publication system at large, and more specifically some individual journals, can be seen as playing at the invite-only or high-stakes table at a private club.

      • Terry:

        Daniel puts it well. Prestige is like casino chips. Yes, prestige has some consumption value—it can be pleasant to bask in prestige—but, then again, money has some consumption value too, in that people can enjoy the very fact of being rich, or of not being poor. But the primary value of prestige, at least for those of us who have not yet reached retirement, is that it can be converted into more useful goods such as grant funding or other access to resources.

  4. Is it April 1? It must be April 1, because this can’t be a serious post. This guy’s offering sophomoric nonsense, particularly on the economics.

    I’ll limit attention to this nonsense:

    “It is our thesis that the past half century or so has proven the bazaar-like approach to science a failure. This period has filled libraries with scientific publications to the point of bursting, while offering disappointingly little toward what has always been the underlying premise of the techno-scientific endeavor: betterment of the human condition. The great killing diseases of our time, cardiovascular disease and cancer, have remained with us through this period, and no fundamental approach to curing them is in sight. As the average population age creeps up, degenerative diseases of body and mind are becoming an ever greater economic drain, yet progress in that area moves at glacial pace. Even new infectious pathogens, such as HIV and the Ebola virus, seem to be more than what contemporary science can readily counter, despite very considerable advances in molecular and cell biology.”

    In fact, by almost any measure of the biological or material standard of living, the human condition is vastly better now than it was 50 years ago. Global poverty rates have plummeted, pulling billions of people out of grinding impoverishment. Deaths due to communicable disease have fallen dramatically, contrary to the Antalovic’s ill-informed impression, largely because of improvements in the standard of living combined with medical technologies such as vaccines (and science did in fact all but conquer HIV, with HAART and related treatments). The average population age is “creeping up” precisely because we are living longer—citing this fact as evidence of lack of progress is stupid. Similarly, heart disease and cancer are only the most common causes of death in developed countries *because* we have largely eradicated—directly and indirectly through science—mankind’s age-old scourges: communicable diseases like smallpox, plague, polio, and malaria.

    The public health arguments are bad enough; the economics is about the level I’d expect from a lunchroom conversation at a high school.

    “It sounded like this guy might be a crank.” You should’ve gone with your first impression, Andrew.

    • Yeah, not only HIV had a dramatic drop in deadliness after HAART treatment, but an Ebola vaccine has been tested recently that was extremely effective… so both of those go counter to his claims.

      That being said, the mechanism by which money gets allocated in research is definitely a problem and it has held back a lot of good science at the expense of funding a lot of stuff that had no hope of working, or which is outright unreplicable.

    • Given that this is supposed to be such obvious nonsense,I don’t find your rebuttal particularly convincing.

      First, you say that “The average population age is “creeping up” precisely because we are living longer—citing this fact as evidence of lack of progress is stupid”, but the author didn’t do that. What he said is “As the average population age creeps up, degenerative diseases of body and mind are becoming an ever greater economic drain, yet progress in that area moves at glacial pace”. He merely states the increase in average age as a premise for the argument that diseases of old-age will become bigger problems and we’re not making (much) progress in combating them. This seems to be a fair judgement.

      Second, you note that CVD and cancer are so prevalent only because we have eradicated the previous top killers. That may be true but doesn’t falsify the author’s statement that these diseases are still with us, without” any fundamental approach to curing them in sight”.

      Third, citing the vast improvements in the human condition over the past 50 years does not invalidate the author’s claim that “This period has filled libraries with scientific publications to the point of bursting, while offering disappointingly little toward what has always been the underlying premise of the techno-scientific endeavor: betterment of the human condition.” As pointed out by Daniel Lakeland, much of this progress is not due to scientific discoveries in that time period.

      In fact, when we’re talking about research waste in all its forms (misspent funding, bad research methodology with irreproducible outcomes, etc.), we’re implicitly also taking about the tremendous opportunity costs of this waste, with very real consequences: better research, better funding decisions etc. might well have lead to a much greater betterment of the human condition than what we see now.

    • Agreed on the cancer, but I’m inclined to assume that the increase of death due to heart disease is mostly not attributable to reduced death from other diseases (unless you want to reach way back in time when average lifespan was 45 or whatever).

    • Chris, I agree that the guy seems like a bit of crank, but I don’t think his position is that the “bazaar approach” to science failed because nothing good has happened in the past 50 years, rather that the good stuff that’s happened in the past 50 years has come from wider and more effective application of scientific ideas (like antibiotics or the Haber-Bosch process or whatever) that are more than 50 years old. That the early twentieth century environment in which all these scientific revolutions were occurring simultaneously didn’t last and was replaced with a system in which lots of incrementally significant but not Earth shattering work is done in large organizations.

  5. Prestige: “widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality”.

    F#ck that sh#t!

    I am eagerly waiting for the 1st prominent scientist to decline an award/prize, by saying something like “science is a collaborative effort and therefore individual awards have no place in it”.

    If i were to ever get a scientific award, that would be the 1st thing i would do as i reason it 1) would be the right thing to do, and 2) it could possibly influence several things related to improving science.

    • Anon:

      In the Academy Awards and on rap albums, isn’t it standard to thank a long list of people, from your childhood babysitter all the way up to God, without whom none of this would be possible?

      Also there’s that “standing on the shoulders of giants” quote.

      I agree with you that it is best for science awards to be for group rather than individual efforts. On the occasions that I’ve received individual awards, I’ve always thought of them as being for my collaborative research, not for me individually.

      • “In the Academy Awards and on rap albums, isn’t it standard to thank a long list of people, from your childhood babysitter all the way up to God, without whom none of this would be possible?”

        Yes, but in essence this does not matter much in my reasoning, because 1) the focus is still on the individual, and 2) it is impossible to know who or what really made “all of this possible”, which makes thanking other people/ collaborators arbitrary. I actually thought of your example myself, and quickly reasoned that it does not make much sense to thank you co-actors, or director, and leave out the pizza-guy. The interaction with this pizza-guy, who was very nice to you when delivering your pizza while you were reading your lines, could have possibly resulted in you finding a different approach to playing your character, which ultimately resulted in your performance being much better in the movie. My conclusion was that you never know who, or what, may have made the thing possible that you are getting an award for…

        Leaving aside showbiz-awards, the idea of individual (or collaborative) awards in science especially makes no sense in my opinion and reasoning. How can i ever accept an award for my scientific work, when i am reminded every day in my work that science is a collaborative effort (e.g. by citing other people’s work in my papers). It just boggles my mind that scientists accept individual awards…

        This is the 2nd time i am bringing this thought forward on this blog (the 1st time i even quoted that “standing on the shoulders of giants” thing you mention). I am still looking forward to the 1st prominent scientist to decline an individual award. I say a “thank you” to that scientist in advance!

        • Feynman supposedly tried to decline, but ultimately was convinced that the overwhelming novelty of this would lead to far more attention than if he just graciously accepted. Of course, that’s his Feynman story, but I think there is something to be said for the problems created for the scientist by doing this, and the lack of actual effect on the world of prize-giving

        • I’m not sure if you’d count this as science exactly, but Grigori Perelman turned down the Millenium prize for precisely this reason.

        • Thank you both for the information on Feynman and Perelman! I can’t remember ever hearing about this before.

          I did a quick google search, and it seems that Perelman didn’t want the attention, and i assume (based on the above post) that Feynman also did not want the (possibly extra) attention.

          Perhaps i am proposing something slightly different, and/or viewing it from a slightly different perspective:

          I reason that there is no place in science for individual awards. This has less to do with attention, but more with things that were said above like science being a collaborative effort/”standing on the shoulders of giants”/ etc.

          Because if this, and compared to Feynman’s possible reasons for eventually accepting the award, I actually would welcome the extra attention it could possibly bring when i were to decline an award. This is because to me, the problem is not about the attention, it’s about the award. Extra attention when declining the award could possibly be very useful for my goal: making my statement and possibly help starting a discussion about awards in science.

        • Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature.

          http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/12/17/sartre-on-the-nobel-prize/

          “The personal reasons are these: my refusal is not an impulsive gesture, I have always declined official honors. In 1945, after the war, when I was offered the Legion of Honor, I refused it, although I was sympathetic to the government. Similarly, I have never sought to enter the Collège de France, as several of my friends suggested.

          This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner.”

          Although I heard that later he asked for the money. Which is funny enough to relate here even if it isn’t true.

          I am also an economist. That is not relevant, but everyone else here is announcing it and I felt left out.

      • Modern science is no longer about “standing on the shoulders of giants” but about “standing on a mountain made of dwarfs”. Science is such a massive enterprise, making a “gigantic” contribution is hardly possible

  6. “Antolovic deserves to be recognized as the next Nassim Taleb,” I think for many of your readers this is a pretty searing burn. “Next Taleb” and crossing out of your area of expertise to pontificate are not things that blend well nowadays.

    • +1 Nassim Taleb comes out as a pompous egotistical ass pretending to have the most profound novel insights which when you dig deeper are either straight out hogwash or just mundane facts, known for a long time to practitioners.

      He’s one of the bigger cons of our times.

  7. Dale, Jonathan, Chris, Peter:

    You all make good points. So let me clarify that I find Antolovic’s reasoning to be thought-provoking but I agree that he’s only getting part of the story. I can fully believe that people who study economics for a living have a much better perspective on the economy.

    Just by analogy: sometimes I’ve written about outsiders who have wacky theories of statistics. All these wacky theories that I’ve seen have been hopelessly flawed, and they often involve a lower-quality, naive reinvention of some existing statistical method. Nonetheless these wacky theories can be interesting in reminding us of some important aspects of statistics that we usually don’t think enough about.

    I don’t know enough economics to evaluate Antolovic’s ideas in the context of the economics literature—in the same way that I don’t know enough finance to evaluate Taleb’s ideas in their context—but reading these books did provoke some thought, and I appreciate that.

    • Sure, Andrew, but “provoke some thought” is very different from being a “plain-speaking yet deep revealer of true structures.” The latter implies that the speaker actually knows what they’re talking about. Which Taleb typically does not (and Antolovic doesn’t seem to, either).

    • Also: “Nonetheless these wacky theories can be interesting in reminding us of some important aspects of statistics that we usually don’t think enough about.”

      I disagree. Cranks like this muddle the conversation by injecting misleading views to a public who can rarely correctly evaluate who legitimate experts are, and they waste valuable time among experts by forcing them to respond to bad science.

      When Terrence Howard insists that 1 x 1 = 2 (yes, seriously), that doesn’t remind us of some important aspects of algebra. When a bunch of celebrities convince people that the world is flat (yes, this is also real), that just weakens public understanding of and trust in science. It doesn’t sharpen anyone’s teeth.

    • Zc:

      Fair enough. I felt that Antolovic was revealing true structures when it came to the sociology of science. For the rest: Sure, “thought-provoking” is a better way of putting it.

      Also, yes, the value (positive or negative) of cranks depends on context. I found Antolovic’s cranky ideas on economics and sociology to be interesting and thought provoking, even if they are surely flawed in many ways. Meanwhile, I found Daryl Bem’s cranky ideas on ESP to be kinda boring. We each have our own perspective. One reason that Antolovic’s cranky ideas don’t bother me is that I don’t see them as being presented with an air of authority: there’s none of this “You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true” sort of thing.

      • Yes, Andrew, but that’s only because you’re capable of evaluating Antolovic’s expertise from his style, because you know how these sort of things should typically be written. The average Joe *does* read this as being from an authority, and that is generally who these cranks write for.

        I mean, I find lots of fiction novels interesting and thought-provoking, but their authors don’t attempt to present them as a theory of science. I guess you can find interesting whatever you prefer. I don’t think I’ve ever found an autodidact of this type to be insightful in any way.

      • < revealing true structures when it came to the sociology of science
        I agree, I thought he brought some real crispness to that.

        But overall, there are inference issues between parts and aspects of any argument. For instance, if an author makes a serious error in an area that you know well, should you trust their arguments in other areas? Maybe just ones that you do know fairly well or can verify elsewhere.

        Such inferences _can_ be poor when its typos and poor grammar that are noticed to dismiss the rest of the work. Or lack of prestige!
        (So the only option is good or poor inference.)

    • All these wacky theories that I’ve seen have been hopelessly flawed, and they often involve a lower-quality, naive reinvention of some existing statistical method. Nonetheless these wacky theories can be interesting in reminding us of some important aspects of statistics that we usually don’t think enough about.

      Mandelbrot had an interesting way of turning up ideas that hadn’t been thought about enough. He read through old journal articles. That approach screens out most naive reinvention, while giving some assurance that the author gave serious thought to the idea. Research is a garden of forking paths, and it could be useful to check on some of the paths that were abandoned.

      • I once was informed that is optimal to look back two generations as the latter generation always fallibly screens out some of the former generation.

        In statistics though, reading anything might give you an advantage as Brian Ripley used to say “statisticians seldom read other statisticians”.

  8. The economists seem a bit dubious.

    “First truly scientific insights into the mind came with the work of Sigmund Freud.

    Antolovic’s knowledge of psychology seems on par with his knowledge of economic theory. Freud had no “scientific insights into the mind”. He had some half-baked ideas he had dreamt up.

    “The contribution of [Freud’s] work lies in having proposed both a methodology and a set of working hypotheses in an area of science which is still deficient in that respect today.”

    I would say that Freud’s fantasies did incalculable damage to the development of the clinical areas of psychology and ruined lives. His bloody stupid idea of repressed memories has sent people to prison.

  9. The point people don’t get about Nassim is that he is a trader, hence has a real world experience and a different perspective. People in academic finance are just hot air. He annois them like hell.

  10. “The great killing diseases of our time, cardiovascular disease and cancer, have remained with us through this period, and no fundamental approach to curing them is in sight.”

    For cardiovascular disease and, to a large extent for cancer, the cure is known. It’s just a matter of getting the word out. Dr Greger at https://nutritionfacts.org/ has collected and indexed the relevant articles.

    • Well, I’d say he’s collected a lot of interesting potential avenues for good research, but the existing research on diet is so poor and sooooo based on the same kinds of problems that are constantly discussed on this blog, that no, the answer is not “known”. Still, I buy into a lot of what is collected there as good guesses and starting points for intense research based on better research practices than what is standard in diet-epidemiology. It’s particularly true that inflammation is poorly understood and should be researched intensely over the next decade. (But, probably won’t be, at least not in the way that’s needed… sigh).

      • 1. Usually when you say something is good I click through, and usually (when I can understand it) I agree. So this is preamble to 2, and should be read as “I suspect I am about to be unfair to this guy”.

        2. “How Not to Die:”… so I stopped there. What because we are all gonna die.

        I also don’t agree with you about the state of nutrition research. I mean look at this – we can now basically cure child growth faltering if we just hang 2 or 3 posters in everyone’s home.

        “Simple growth charts, which allowed parents to see if their child had a normal height for their age, reduced stunting rates among malnourished children by 22 percentage points.”

        https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Poster%20Child%20for%20Healthy%20Growth-5.pdf?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-oct-2017

        I assume effects are additive if you increase the number of posters you hang, but maybe we can only get that 0.5sd, or about 25-35% of the relative growth shortcoming of the median 3 year old in Bangladesh. Either way, that’s the miracle of science right there.

        • Yeah, he’s a self promoter, so there’s that. But if you look at some of the actual nutrition items he discusses, it seems not terrible. I mean, there are people in this field who claim that if you eat a “ketogenic” diet you can “cure cancer” or that kind of garbage, so this guy’s site is all about reducing inflammation by reducing exposure to certain animal proteins, and more mechanistic science based theories of diet….

          So, basically while none of it is so solid I’d call it “definitely true” or “known answers” or the like, I think if you want to understand the effect of diet on health you need to understand it in terms of the biological pathways that are or are not activated by exposure to various kinds of chemicals, as opposed to “we fed people chocolate and their LDL cholesterol was reduced p less than 0.05”

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