[natechols]

1) Because human beings aggressively pursue their self-interest, which extends to getting new credit for scientific discoveries.

2) Because scientific discovery often requires multiple competing approaches (because you don't know which one will work in advance), and top-down control tends to discourage that.

3) Because biomedical discovery is not an inherently directed process most of the time, and top-down control would risk missing out on important discoveries that only happened because we gave individual scientists the freedom to work on whatever they wanted (like bacterial immune systems).

Complaining about this state of affairs is like complaining that housecats aren't vegetarians yet. We have a new genetic manipulation technology that has already revolutionized molecular biology just a few years after it was discovered, and is already being investigated in clinical trials. Anyone who looks at this and says "you're doing it wrong" has a vastly distorted idea of what is actually possible in biomedical science, or any other line of work that requires actual humans to carry it out.

[lvs]

No, while those things are factors, the core problem arises from the structure of the funding and career advancement system. These are systems we've constructed, not aspects of human nature. It's sink-or-swim, and even those swimming are only barely doing so.

[natechols]

You are assuming that the construction of the system has nothing to do with human nature in the first place. I think there are a lot of godawful perverse incentives embedded in our current system, and I suspect we could come up with a much better system if we started over from scratch, but I am extremely skeptical that an ideal system would be any less dependent on competition. And in the current context, the burden is on those who say we should redesign the system to prove that their hypothetical ideal system will perform better in practice than the one that turns out all of these CRISPR-related discoveries at a furious pace.

[lvs]

I'm not sure which assumptions I've genuinely revealed, but I certainly would agree that the ideal systems are those that manage the good and the bad in human nature.

It's a straw man to say that a better system must be competition-free. Simply ameliorating the level of intensity and competition would go a long way. We need a more incremental seniority and funding system, where the difference between being able to do academic science and not to do so isn't defined by dramatic forks in the road. We have a vast separation-of-wealth in science funding and institutional power that must be addressed to get back to a healthier place.

[wombatmobile]

> 1) Because human beings aggressively pursue their self-interest

Some human beings work that way.

Others share and cooperate freely with their peers.

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

― Anaïs Nin

[stainforth]

I don't know why you saw "cooperative" and changed it to "top-down control"

[natechols]

I take it you haven't met very many university research professors. (But I probably should have used the term "central planning" instead since that is much closer to what I meant - the problem of over-coordination when a more distributed approach would have ultimately worked better.)