[jdietrich]

>Is there a shortcut?

Controversially, I think we need to do less research. The publish-or-perish culture has created a perverse incentive to crank out junk papers. Most working scientists will privately admit that most research isn't actually advancing our understanding of nature, it's just a desperate effort to dredge up something sufficiently novel to publish. Conversely, there's a substantial amount of research that is potentially useful to clinicians, but is languishing unread in some third-tier journal. Most research is never published at all because it supports the null hypothesis, but we can't do good meta-analyses based on a cherry-picked set of studies. We're glutted with data, but we have a remarkable paucity of actionable information getting to the people who need it.

The problem isn't that scientists are doing a bad job, but that the funding mechanisms of science incentivise the wrong kind of work. We should be focusing a far larger proportion of our funding - perhaps even a majority - on replication, meta-analysis and dissemination. Primary research is only one small part of the information architecture of science, but it dominates our spending.

In the case of nutrition, we're spending huge amounts of money on figuring out whether coffee increases or decreases your life expectancy by a fraction of a percent, but almost nothing on behavioural research to figure out how to stop people from gorging themselves to death on food they know to be terrible for them. There's a morbidly obese elephant in the room, but we're preoccupied by the micronutrient-rich mice scuttling around the periphery.

[api]

This is the only good reply I've seen so far.

I think a lot of information economies suffer from oversupply. I've heard it said that there are too many books, too much music, too many different open source projects trying to solve the same problems, and so on. It causes information overload on the demand side and perhaps paradoxically increases the odds of something genuinely important being neglected.

[pixl97]

>but almost nothing on behavioural research to figure out how to stop people from gorging themselves to death on food they know to be terrible for them.

I'd also say the converse is true. Corporations spend lot on how to get you to eat their low cost high profit food that is not good for you. Think if we treated junk food like cigarettes in many countries where they had to be in a generic white box and no advertising.

[pas]

Junk or not, if someone's daily caloric intake is in the sky, they can overeat themselves on the most non-junkiest of foods. Let's say a lot of vegtable seeds, superhealthy all organic bread, some premium right out of the cow diary stuff, and some fruits, just to get more sugar.