Yeah I’ll concede that GiveWell is fairly good in terms of not reinventing the wheel, though I think that they could be taking even more shortcuts.
It’s not that I think research is useless—I actually take a very positive view of scientific research as a whole, but this means that an individual is constrained to small marginal returns. Maybe we’re just going to have to accept that, instead of saying “scientific research is fundamentally broken and I’m gonna come in and change everything” the way I used to think. I still think scientific research is a good EA option, though I don’t think translational research is systematically underfunded. There are many incentives to have biomedical applications. In fact, some people argue basic research is underfunded compared to applied research. I’m not sure what you mean by “breakthrough research”.
If one does want to make a more radical difference, one needs to identify systems of incentives that do result in brokenness, like government spending as a whole.
Incentives causing brokenness—We’re going well beyond the subject of your post now, but science still seems to be broken in many ways. As you say, people are incentivised badly—to publish, rather than for the social good. People are incentivised to fund projects with sure incremental progress, much of which is not on the biggest problems facing humanity. Fields are fairly insular and inwards-looking. It takes too long for people to recognise paradigm-shifts. Replication is poor. Science infrastructure is neglected (e.g. LaTeX is old and has lots of room for improvement). Things like cognitive genomics are neglected because of political reasons. So there are a lot of different problems here, although they’re not obviously fixable by an individual motivated researcher. I guess we agree that a person in science might be well-served to try to combat these head-on, rather than just performing research that might be replaceable. I don’t agree that one has to zoom out all the way to government-spending to see problems to be fixed. That would seem to be an overcorrection.
The most prestigious publications like Nature and Science love to publish breakthroughs, but this also leads to sloppiness, like the paper on arsenic-based life that was retracted and the paper on induced stem cells that was retracted. When we see really bold publications like that, we always ask, “How long do you think till this is retracted?” On the other hand, there are also incentives to produce research with social benefit. It’s odd to complain about both breakthrough (i.e. basic, high-risk/high-reward) research and translational (i.e. applied, incremental) research being underfunded. You can’t have it both ways here.
There’s a similar contradiction in this: “It takes too long for people to recognise paradigm-shifts. Replication is poor.” The reason science is slow to change theories is because replication is poor. Individual studies have an inherent stochasticity, so one has to consider a body of work as a whole before being willing to shift the paradigm. (Note that Galileo’s and Mendel’s studies didn’t replicate initially.)
What I think are neglected are science that is ambitious, with low probability of success (e.g. Hsu’s cognitive genomics work, Ioannidis’ statistics work), and work bridging new research to humanitarian applications (e.g. using machine learning to classify medical images, or to detect online fraud or risks to security). These are overlapping sets.
In paradigm shifts, I mean adaptation to different ways of doing things. e.g. working to develop BCI and brain implants, or to apply deep learning in machine learning. These things have occurred too slowly. The replication problems are mostly in soft sciences like psychology, and arise from systemic problems with study pre-registration. The causation of these problems is somewhat entangled, but they’re not the exact same problem. Both should be fixed.
My point is: there are a range of important structural changes that effective altruists might want to make in science.
Yeah I’ll concede that GiveWell is fairly good in terms of not reinventing the wheel, though I think that they could be taking even more shortcuts.
It’s not that I think research is useless—I actually take a very positive view of scientific research as a whole, but this means that an individual is constrained to small marginal returns. Maybe we’re just going to have to accept that, instead of saying “scientific research is fundamentally broken and I’m gonna come in and change everything” the way I used to think. I still think scientific research is a good EA option, though I don’t think translational research is systematically underfunded. There are many incentives to have biomedical applications. In fact, some people argue basic research is underfunded compared to applied research. I’m not sure what you mean by “breakthrough research”.
If one does want to make a more radical difference, one needs to identify systems of incentives that do result in brokenness, like government spending as a whole.
Breakthrough research—this kind of thing: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/04/14/breakthrough-fundamental-science/.
Incentives causing brokenness—We’re going well beyond the subject of your post now, but science still seems to be broken in many ways. As you say, people are incentivised badly—to publish, rather than for the social good. People are incentivised to fund projects with sure incremental progress, much of which is not on the biggest problems facing humanity. Fields are fairly insular and inwards-looking. It takes too long for people to recognise paradigm-shifts. Replication is poor. Science infrastructure is neglected (e.g. LaTeX is old and has lots of room for improvement). Things like cognitive genomics are neglected because of political reasons. So there are a lot of different problems here, although they’re not obviously fixable by an individual motivated researcher. I guess we agree that a person in science might be well-served to try to combat these head-on, rather than just performing research that might be replaceable. I don’t agree that one has to zoom out all the way to government-spending to see problems to be fixed. That would seem to be an overcorrection.
The most prestigious publications like Nature and Science love to publish breakthroughs, but this also leads to sloppiness, like the paper on arsenic-based life that was retracted and the paper on induced stem cells that was retracted. When we see really bold publications like that, we always ask, “How long do you think till this is retracted?” On the other hand, there are also incentives to produce research with social benefit. It’s odd to complain about both breakthrough (i.e. basic, high-risk/high-reward) research and translational (i.e. applied, incremental) research being underfunded. You can’t have it both ways here.
There’s a similar contradiction in this: “It takes too long for people to recognise paradigm-shifts. Replication is poor.” The reason science is slow to change theories is because replication is poor. Individual studies have an inherent stochasticity, so one has to consider a body of work as a whole before being willing to shift the paradigm. (Note that Galileo’s and Mendel’s studies didn’t replicate initially.)
What I think are neglected are science that is ambitious, with low probability of success (e.g. Hsu’s cognitive genomics work, Ioannidis’ statistics work), and work bridging new research to humanitarian applications (e.g. using machine learning to classify medical images, or to detect online fraud or risks to security). These are overlapping sets.
In paradigm shifts, I mean adaptation to different ways of doing things. e.g. working to develop BCI and brain implants, or to apply deep learning in machine learning. These things have occurred too slowly. The replication problems are mostly in soft sciences like psychology, and arise from systemic problems with study pre-registration. The causation of these problems is somewhat entangled, but they’re not the exact same problem. Both should be fixed.
My point is: there are a range of important structural changes that effective altruists might want to make in science.