But that's a bit more subtle than "they screwed up because SCIENCE."
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Thought experiment for you--we switch roles and you get to be a "soft science" psychologist for a few years. It might change your perspective (and it might be fun). Of course, it would be an abject loss for Apple. 1/
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Replying to @BrentWRoberts @StephenPiment and
But, that is not a bad analogy to what NIH has done for the last 2 or 3 decades. They've taken a lot of talented people and thrown them at "narrow hypotheses" with inadequate tools and wasted billions??? What have the brain and genetics programs at NIH cost? I'm not sure 2/
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Replying to @BrentWRoberts @StephenPiment and
All those smart folks working for not on studies designed so that they couldn't find anything useful were wasting not only their talents, but a lot of money. All the while other topics went unstudied for a lack of human and capital resources. 3/
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Replying to @BrentWRoberts @StephenPiment and
In the case of genetics, you have to deal with the fact that the geneticists told the "field" that the whole enterprise--candidate genes and GWAS--was not going to do what they said it was going to do. We knew before we knew. 4/
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Replying to @BrentWRoberts @StephenPiment and
So, I remain unsympathetic to the argument that "sometimes we just have to go down blind alleys as scientists, because..." By the way, there is never a conclusion to that sentence which I hear predominantly from people who've gotten the $ to do fMRI and genetics work 5/
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Replying to @BrentWRoberts @StephenPiment and
Science would do well to have an off switch, or at least a quality control mechanism that allows us better and more timely ways to inform investments--especially stopping investments in dead ends. Currently we don't. 6/
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I don't think I have any strong disagreement with the above. I think the Border et al. paper was awesome. I think that science needs stronger and more robust procedures for filtering. I think that the centralization of funding leads to pathologies in resource allocation.
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Replying to @StephenPiment @BrentWRoberts and
I was reacting mostly to what I saw as some over-simple rhetoric from
@Meaningness (although I know he has a deeper view). I'm also a bit cautious about applying retrospective intuitions about which things turn out to be wrong, creating a sense of false obviousness.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @StephenPiment @BrentWRoberts and
This is not to deny that your particular examples are on point. But I worry about the wrong lesson being learned, e.g., "investigate nothing improbable."
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Yes, I’d like to draw the exact opposite conclusion. Candidate genes were funded because they were thought to be a sure thing.
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