“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.”
—Richard Feynman
TL;DR
Science is in trouble: Scientific research has become too self referential and status seeking, causing the field to be highly susceptible to fraud.
Rethink government funding: government funding should include a bounty program for scientific research that disproves major studies.
Web3 science: new scientific DAOs like Molecule are reinventing how scientific research projects are being funded.
🏝 vibes:
keep on shining
I never liked people who bet on the Don’t Pass Line.
You know the type: sunglasses, no smile, skulking up to the craps table like the grim reaper at the very moment everyone is at their happiest.
I drop chips on the Pass Line bet.
It’s the consensus bet, my starter position as the dice begin to roll. It has some of the best odds in the casino, with a normal house edge of 1.41 percent.
And yet, it turns out that no good, vibes killer Don't Pass bet is actually kinda smart. It’s not far behind the Pass Line bet with an ever-so-slightly lower house edge of 1.36 percent.
What can I say?
The contrarian bet turns out to be correct almost as often.
back to the lab
You may have heard the news: critically important research on the causes of Alzheimer’s may have been a total lie.
More than a decade of time, resources, and billions of dollars have gone to waste, poured into fighting one of the most awful diseases known to mankind, all built on what’s called the “amyloid hypothesis” of Alzheimer’s research.
My extremely rudimentary understanding of the hypothesis is that some amino acids clump together in a neural pathway in the brain, causing the brain to degenerate.
Turns out not to be the case.
The NIH has devoted nearly half of its federal funding to learning more about the amyloid hypothesis to find a cure to Alzheimer’s. The FDA approved an Alzheimer’s drug called Aduhelm produced by Biogen, on the basis of evidence that it reduced amyloid in the brain.
All chasing a lie.
Researchers are now left scrambling to find new theories and alternative explanations for the role that the amyloid protein may have played in Alzheimer’s.
How could this have happened?
Groupthink bias: scientists have increasingly become a self-referential, credential-seeking, and consensus-driven profession. Many scientists don’t thoroughly check, or even read, papers once published, expecting that if they’re peer-reviewed, they’re fine. Bad papers are published by a peer-review process that is not adequate to catch them, and once they’re published, they are not penalized for being bad papers.
Replication crisis: scientific studies have become increasingly difficult to replicate, and therefore difficult to question, let alone disprove. One of the best essays on this phenomenon is Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis, but the main takeaway is that scientists are pressured to publish lots of papers and therefore favors those who can put them together quickly, leading to cutting corners.
bounty hunter
Money and notoriety have overtaken scientific truth.
To buck this trend, NIH should create some kind of whistleblower bounty program for scientists that disprove foundational scientific research.
This is necessary to combat a market failure in the way that scientific research is funded by creating a forcing mechanism for scientists who would otherwise be too afraid to question major research, especially by luminaries in their field.
The federal government has experience in this type of thing: for example, the SEC established an anonymous whistleblower program under Dodd-Frank that allows individuals to alert authorities about securities fraud with protections against employee retaliation and a share in the money collected.
NIH could do something similar by establishing a program that supports anonymous research that disproves widely-accepted research and pays out a substantial bounty for such breakthroughs. Congress could also intervene, siphoning portions of NIH appropriations to support this type of research.
If this is all a little too much like betting on the Don’t Pass Line, at the very least we should draw some inspiration from projects like the UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).
A great write up on ARIA was in the Economist recently, but the main takeaway is the UK government is creating a new type of science research agency that is less bureaucratic, flat, and entirely devoted to funding moonshot projects that might otherwise fall into the cracks between existing funding options.
This is similar to the work that the Arc Institute has been doing. I’m biased, but check out their incredible work:
dao hypothesis
Web3 could provide an additional path forward in finding new and innovative ways to fund and support scientific research. Cool projects include:
Molecule Protocol: decentralizing ownership, financing and governance processes within drug development through fractional and decentralized IP and data ownership.
DeSci Labs: established what are called “DeSci Nodes” for creating a credibly-neutral, reproducible, decentralized and open access record of scientific knowledge.
VitaDAO: a community of web3 enthusiasts, biomedical researchers, and longevity scientists who believe decentralized networks will shape the future of scientific research and development.
It’s time to place larger bets on those brave enough to step out against the so-called scientific experts to advance real scientific progress.
Let’s short science.