I agree with you in spirit but would suggest that pushing for more funding of schools, universities, basic research, and applied research is something that we should all be doing.
Imagine if all the smart people tried to cure cancer instead of working in Wall Street and Adtech
Yes, the general spirit is good but the clinical trial stage is the very end of a long process. The clinical trial the most visible part of getting a new cancer treatment to patients, but the bulk of delay in developing a new treatment is waiting for the basic science. More aggressive clinical trials could save ~ years. More aggressive education and fundamental research could save ~ decades. Can't run a trial on a treatment that doesn't exist yet.
Think about how difficult it is to make a significant contribution in your particular field of expertise that is not about to be done right now anyway because the time is right. Very difficult indeed.
It is the same with cancer research. Not saying the world can‘t be better, but science cannot be done faster, probably.
> Think about how difficult it is to make a significant contribution in your particular field of expertise that is not about to be done right now anyway because the time is right. Very difficult indeed.
The absolute opposite of my experience. Every one of the fields I've gained expertise in over the years indicates to me that more human effort would pay not just dividends but increasing returns. Particularly so with research. The biggest thing I learn when I gain expertise is just exactly how much we don't know.
> Think about how difficult it is to make a significant contribution in your particular field of expertise that is not about to be done right now anyway because the time is right.
I independently reinvented my entire field of research by accident, because I didn't know it existed; and I'm pretty sure I did a better job. There are a few puzzle pieces and key insights it probably would've taken me a few years (or decades) to discover, without which I couldn't demonstrate (or, if I'm being honest, know) the immense superiority of my approach, but I'm pretty sure the majority of the field is obsoleted by the ideas I've had.
Oh, look at me, I'm so clever… right? Good guess, but actually no. When I ask the right questions to my peers (outside the field), they usually propose a similar approach. (The main differences can be attributed to the fact I've thought about this for years, and they've thought about it for minutes: a few of the obvious things don't work, but then things get elegant when you replace them with ones that do.)
That must mean the time's right, then? I did suspect it was this… until I found a few dozen publications by a widely-respected expert, from half a century ago, talking about a (slightly underdeveloped, idiosyncratic) version of the approach like it was common sense, remarking that people were a lot more receptive to this idea than they used to be, but still it was not being adopted.
A minor application of this approach to a different field would completely revolutionise it (even moreso than it does my field). I briefly fantasised about doing that, before dismissing as "something to investigate later" (i.e. "a childish fantasy I haven't found the holes in yet"). But not only does that application work, it was implemented and trialled. The results were published 26 years ago, in a paper that concludes by confusedly asking why nobody was doing this. After reading the paper (which I found completely by accident while looking for something else), I felt much the same way. (Still nobody is doing it, in case you're wondering. It's been cited six times – once in its field, two years after publication, and five times in other fields in papers where it isn't really relevant.)
In physics, parts of chemistry, and parts of mathematics, there is room for revolution. I'm not sure any of the softer fields (counting mathematics qua philosophy as soft) are particularly good at being revolutionised. (Economics is particularly bad: nearly every economist knows that economics is wrong, and yet it persists.) And it's not because new ideas are slow to be adopted: at least 10% of my field's practitioners dropped everything to try to solve its Hard Problems with LLMs. (Those I know, I talked out of this, by describing – with non-rigorous theoretical arguments – what they would find. After years of work, the best result I've seen is only slightly better than the bound I predicted.)
I'm sure there's some way to solve this problem, but I don't know it. I wouldn't be surprised if the solution has been identified, written down, published, forgotten, independently reinvented, tested, found to work, published again, ignored…
I don't say this to cast aspersions on science, or the academic system; nor to blame people or institutions for their failings. This problem is well-known. It's not a matter of people being stuck in their ways: if anything, academics are too credulous, too willing to believe that things work which don't. But I don't think adjusting the "credulity" dial, or the "speed" dial, or the "try novel approaches" dial, is a solution. Science, as it stands, cannot be done faster, because the system doesn't know how.
All I'm saying is, watch out for this. Support people who think they have a better way, check the literature for interesting things (and then confirm them, if you can). Question not whether your current approaches are good, but what they actually do – and ask whether that is really what you want to be doing, or a proxy goal that everybody's lost sight of.
And if you find yourself along with your peers, dismissing something out-of-hand without having tried it, maybe don't lend your voice to the snubbing crowd. Maybe it's bogus, maybe its proponents are wrong about its merits, but it might have merits. We can't afford not to know.
Also: Don't get so enamoured by the idea of incremental progress, of scientific legacy, that you can scarcely imagine the idea that everybody you know might have taken a wrong turn 30, or 50, or 400 years ago. Science is the study of what is _not_ true, of falsification: how _not_ to cure a patient, how _not_ to go to the moon. It says nothing about what _is_. (That's the domain of engineering.)
The discovery of germs did not prove the non-existence of prions.
The good thing about finance and ad-tech (both of which I've successfully worked in) is that if you're good your clients (if any) are happy to pay you lots. With cancer, if you succeed, you're supposed to give away what you've got since not doing so is going to kill people. If you don't, you are the Great Satan.
Since most people subscribe to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, I think I'd rather not touch the field at all. Let those who are altruistic be altruistic. If I never create a cure, I need never be considered evil for not giving it away.
To put a finer point on this, the capitalistic enterprises that many are very excited about and believe will solve problems via the invisible hand, may not not pursue basic research because you can't demonstrate potential profit in it to an investor.
But of course basic research, including all of its false starts, failures, and irrelevant discoveries, are precisely what lays the groundwork for the for-profit enterprises that come later.
That's going to be hard to do so long as we continue regarding someone who makes a billion from a new cancer drug as as a price-gouging murderer while regarding someone who makes a billion from starting an adtech company with mere indifference.
Universities have their own problem such as no one attempting to replicate each others work [1] and keep on publishing or they won’t get promoted. We should fund replication trials in universities . Also , cancer is not some kind of monolithic problem nearly every cell has some mechanism to mutate so it becomes cancer. For example new cancer techniques come from mRNA research [2] . The problem of solving cancer isn’t some monolithic problem that throwing any amount of people will solve and even if they tried they would probably get burned out which is why they work for Wall Street or Adtech in the first place. One of the people that developed the research in mRNA got her career torpedoed to work for John Hopkins University [3]
[3] In 1988, Karikó accepted a job at Johns Hopkins University without first informing her lab advisor Suhadolnik of her intention to leave Temple, as recounted in Gregory Zuckerman's 2021 book A Shot to Save the World. Suhadolnik told her that if she went to Johns Hopkins, he would have her deported, and subsequently reported her to U.S. immigration authorities, claiming that she was "illegally" in the United States. In the time it took her to successfully challenge the resulting extradition order, Johns Hopkins withdrew the job offer. Suhadolnik "continued bad-mouthing Karikó, making it impossible for her to get a new position" at other institutions, until she met a researcher at Bethesda Naval Hospital who "had his own difficult history with Suhadolnik".
