[bz33t]

According to Bret Weinstein who figured out the connection between telomere length and breeding, they seem to have quietly changed the breeding protocols to bring the telomere length back down to be in line with wild type mice. He talks about it in a long interview that gets really interesting about a hour in: https://youtu.be/JLb5hZLw44s?t=4083

[meremortals]

+1 Summary: https://podcastnotes.org/portal-with-eric-weinstein/bret-eri...

[kobieyc]

The real question is why is this not the headline news

[bz33t]

For headline news, I think we would need studies that show that this effect changes results from high ranked studies that used mice. But publishing these would be hard in peer reviewed journals because the peers who will referee the papers will likely be researchers whose own previous publications would be questioned by these new results. In the same podcast, Bret talks about the failings of peer review.

Another problem is that even if the results are published, usually it takes a long time for information to diffuse into the wider community. I assume this is largely because finding a novel ideas is like searching for a needle in the haystack of common knowledge that has been spread far and wide.

[kleer001]

The hand waving answer is The DISC or the distributed idea suppression complex.

[dwd]

I think that is Eric's facetious term for what Universities are (a play on the military/industrial complex) but the main problem he points to is the inventivisation through market forces to not release non-monitisable research and that the best researchers don't teach because they are more value to the University generating grant money and basically being salespeople.

The not publishing research was interesting in that holding research in-house, making predictions, getting grants to research those predictions and then using the original unpublished discovery as the basis for the whole lot makes a lot more money.

[kleer001]

As I understand it the DISC was a bit more diffuse and while it had tendrils in Universities, it didn't stop there. But yes, that was the main thrust of the DISC in the discussions.

Yes, the perverse incentives of the market play havoc with the spirit of the process of science. Which seems to be the source of the brain drain, in as much as talent leaves the university for the market instead of staying and teaching more talent.

[dwd]

It was interesting to listen to Bret in a podcast talking about whether it was a conspiracy of silence and in describing it as an emergent phenomena rather than being planned he was very much reading from Assange's manifesto on how they form and operate and the need for open government.