[ramraj07]

I think the opposite - hold the highest standards for the quality of the data and it's interpretation, but we need to allow the wildest of hypotheses to be tested without judgement. Conservatism at the hypothesis step is the biggest reason science today sucks if you ask me. I'll say the job of being conservative belongs to engineers, and is one of the main differentiators between science and engineering.

The most amazing discoveries even in the recent times often come from scientists testing some of the wildest hypothesis - a rotation student in Andrew Fire's lab thinking he's injecting RNA into the gonad of a worm when he was stupidly injecting them into its mouth, or when a young Yamanaka had no clue basically and did a random experiment in his new lab adding a bunch of genes to cells to see if they do something.

I've sat through sessions seeing scientists laughed at for their wild hypotheses, by what I can only call as old, over-congratulated high school valedictorians who are only actually good at playing politics and writing grants, with a self professed love of science and discovering things that's as genuine as a Republican saying he is all for facts.

Let the crazies risk their lives on the wildest hypotheses. Fund them as long as they are systematic and methodical in their efforts to prove them. That's how you make science take the leaps it needs to be truly transformative for civilization. That's how I intend to do science and I learned clearly that I don't belong in academia. I have no intention of even swinging the science bat if I'm not at least trying to shoot for the moon!

[cycomanic]

The large problem is the limited funding. If there is only funding for 10% of applications and a large portion of the success hinges on previous success and your experience on this topic, then you automatically breed conservatism.

[bsenftner]

This problem of limited funding is due to the unnatural influence of Capitalism and unnatural existence of too many billionaires absorbing the majority of what would be disposable income and tax revenues that would otherwise fund any nation's infrastructure, including federal science initiates. We're learning now the entire Texas power grid failure dates back to G.W. Bush's state government dismantling Texas power upon the council of Enron's financial advisers. The majority of our problems in society is due to overt greed and it's influence on key infrastructure - power, education, law, law enforcement, food safety... it goes on and on. This is the reason we have regulations, because without them the greedy would have us eating Plutonium Pops for breakfast, and washing it down with Petro-plastic Orange Drink.

[rramadass]

Exactly Right! I think this mindset is fundamental to advancing Science. One of the reasons i feel that "doing" Science has fallen out of favour with the public is because the "Researchers" are not being daring and brave enough to "dream up" far fetched hypotheses and in general not pushing the envelope. Most are just regular "salaried employees" with no great dreams/ambitions.

[sitkack]

/s I know, most of the people I know came for the money but stayed for the science.

Those "salaried employees" started life as curious people, yeah some of them might be looking at the world with a blurrier lens. But they were constructed, the system made those people. While they make the problem worse, they are symptom not a cause.

[sitkack]

The same exact process you painted has a direct analog in tech businesses right now.

I think the problem is the hierarchy.

A development organization is an amplifier that brings a new capability into existence. Currently, organizations have to get big to amplify what their qualities. But to get big to achieve its goals it needs to be hierarchical, and because the hierarchy and the practitioners are the same folks, the org structure becomes the product.

The goal of the organization is to maintain its structure. Innovation happens when you have less structure. How do we scale, and maximize the organizational power while enabling create autonomy?

[throwawayboise]

At the same time, labs and researchers and equipment cost real money. There are opportunity costs. There some good reasons to not spend money on wild conjectures.

[StavrosK]

Eh, you can allocate a percentage of resources on wild conjectures, since many of our biggest discoveries have been made that way. No need to shut them down and ridicule them.

[boomboomsubban]

So do you pick the wildest conjecture to test, or one of the somewhat more plausible ones? And how much money should go into one before you move on?

[StavrosK]

> So do you pick the wildest conjecture to test, or one of the somewhat more plausible ones?

20% of the former, 80% of the latter.

> And how much money should go into one before you move on?

3% of the available funds each year.

Hope this helps!

[boomboomsubban]

>3% of the available funds each year

So after years without results you'll continue propping up the one long shot you picked?

My larger point is that you're treating this like there are just a couple wild conjectures that need just a bit of money. There are vast amounts of alternative ideas, and often the necessary experiments will not be cheap. While ridiculing them isn't right, the idea that obviously we should fund them is ridiculous.

[StavrosK]

> the idea that obviously we should fund them is ridiculous.

Ridiculous like feeding people mold to see if they get sick less, or injecting people with the pus of other people to inoculate them?

The discovery of antibiotics alone has paid for all the moonshots you can fund, even if none of them work out.

[2muchcoffeeman]

So after years without results you'll continue propping up the one long shot you picked?

You need basic research to move science and technology forward. And you need to accept that the majority of the research will have no direct result for a long time or ever.

The history of flight spans back 2000 years.

Semi conductors date back to the late 1800s. And don’t forget that to even get to the beginnings of understanding semi conductors, a bunch of basic stuff needed to be figured out first.

Darwin took 2 decades collecting evidence and writing On the Origin Of Species.

[f6v]

Yet the venture funds are absolutely fine with spending money on wildest moonshots that have one in a million chance of becoming the next Facebook

[ramraj07]

Sure let's spend it on what, MOD-ENCODE version two? That's super useful and curing cancer and tuberculosis left and right eh!

[hyperpallium2]

UBI can free scientists from grants, but democratization of hypotheses will become populistization.

Also, engineering leads science at time: this works but we don't know why.

[mjfl]

> UBI can free scientists from grants

No it would not. The money necessary to find a lab is orders of magnitude higher than any reasonable UBI.

[keldaris]

I'm a theoretical physicist. UBI would absolutely free me and most of my colleagues from grant writing (and IT freelancing, which frankly has better ROI at this point). I do basically all of my research on a mildly high end home computer and bits of paper.

[mjfl]

The theoretical physicists I know get their funding from teaching and don’t need grants.

[keldaris]

That varies by country and sometimes even by university. In some universities there are far fewer teaching positions than staff scientist jobs, particularly when you count research institutes, while in others a typical teaching load without additional funding hovers somewhere around the poverty line.

In my case it's both, so instead of teaching I take half-time IT consulting gigs here and there, which pay enough for me to be able to do science even if I had no funding at all. I still get some grants, mostly because you're looked at funny if you don't, but I'm done losing sleep over them, plus if I finally decide to give up academia I'll have an easy transition.

[hyperpallium2]

But they need teaching, a day job, right?

While teaching helps consolidate your own understanding, and is useful and satisfying, it's a matter of degree.

[hyperpallium2]

Some do, but not all scientists need expensive labs. Some equipment is getting cheaper too.

[shakow]

Bio lab equipment is getting cheaper as in $100K's instead of $1M's, not as in “can be bought with UBI”.

[f6v]

With the amount of computations you needs to do this days, no UBI is going to cover that.

[ajdegol]

How about a co-op of scientists pooling money to rent the kinds of AI chips the big players are starting to put out? I’m sure there are holes in that argument too; but c’mon, this is hacker news. If we don’t try to overcome the hard challenges then what’s the point of this community? ;)

[senderista]

How much effort do you think we should put into testing homeopathy?

[Kliment]

Given the extremely wide evidence basis from existing data (there's millions of worldwide users) I'd argue no more than has been, and that the current data is sufficient to show its lack of effectiveness without any additional effort. But had the obviously-silly hypothesis (adding a tiny bit of something bad can have a good effect) been rejected from the start in a different context we'd never have gotten vaccines (which originate from a similar hypothesis in a different context).

The problem with homeopathy is not that it's a crazy idea. It's that it's been extensively shown not to work and is still being pushed as a good idea.

[Shacklz]

> It's that it's been extensively shown not to work

This is going off-topic, but I really think it depends on your definition of "not to work".

If people essentially throw in low-cost placebos to cure themselves of headaches and other minor ailments, while believing that this is exactly what they need, I consider this a net-positive for society compared to giving them actual medication that costs more with potential side-effects/harms.

Obviously, the fun ends when quacks prescribe homeopathy for serious stuff that needs actual treatment (in Germany, there was a case a few years ago where such a quack tried to treat his wife's breast cancer - obviously, this is beyond what should be legal). But for minor things that aren't too big of an issue even if left untreated, letting people use homeopathy if they're into that - why not.

[hutzlibu]

But it is known, that placebos work.

It is also known, that placebos work better, if people believe; they are medicine.

Thats why Homeopathy "works"

"in Germany, there was a case a few years ago where such a quack tried to treat his wife's breast cancer - obviously, this is beyond what should be legal). "

But this, I see actually different. People of clear mind, should have any right to choose their treatment of choice. So informing them on the best options, yes! Telling them of the mechanism of fraudsters who prey on peoples hopes, yes! But in the end maybe not forbidding them if they choose - for whatever reason - less standard methods.

Maybe the placebo works in their case. Maybe the alternative treatment with the roots of plant X had by chance an actual unknown effective drug in it. Who knows. But I know that telling people to follow standards is not allways the best way.

Btw. because if a recent case I know there are homeophatic cancer clinics in germany. So it seems to be legal?

I know of other alternative cancer treatment by the very weird "Dr. Hamer" who cannot be practised in germany if the patient actually has cancer. And I think this is not helping to disprove scams. (because I know people who are into it)

[Viliam1234]

> People of clear mind, should have any right to choose their treatment of choice. So informing them on the best options, yes! Telling them of the mechanism of fraudsters who prey on peoples hopes, yes! But in the end maybe not forbidding them if they choose - for whatever reason - less standard methods.

In theory, I agree with you. People should be clearly told "there is evidence that X works, and there is no evidence that Y works, however you are free to try Y at your own risk". And then they would make their choice.

But I am afraid that it wouldn't work so well in practice. First, there is the problem of who is this authoritative voice that tells people "X works, Y does not". Is it government? (Will it not become subject of political fighting? Like, depending on who wins the election, evolution either exists or does not exist, masks either help or do not help against COVID, etc.) Or is it some professional organization of experts? Then the fraudsters will make their own alternative organizations, that for a layman will look exactly the same. -- At the end, the layman has no idea whom to trust.

Second, the fraudster talking to you can be more persuasive than a website you read, simply because they can adapt their argument to your knowledge. Even if the website says "X works, Y does not", the fraudster can explain like "by 'Y does not work' they actually refer to Y1, but what I am selling is Y2 which is not the same thing", and there will be no one there to say "actually, Y refers to both Y1 and Y2" or "Y2 is just Y1 under a new name". For a layman it is difficult to evaluate when two things are or are not the same.

So at the end, either fraud is legal, or illegal. "Legal, but you have been warned, so use your best judgment" does not work for people with average intelligence and average expertise.

[hutzlibu]

"First, there is the problem of who is this authoritative voice that tells people "X works, Y does not""

Isn't that a problem with your solution?

"So at the end, either fraud is legal, or illegal"

(In my scenario common doctors tell people of the treatments.)

Also, people offering alternative treatment are often very convinced that they are offering indeed the superior solution and the others are commiting fraud.

[ramraj07]

None, for the most part. If data exists that already disproves your hypothesis then there's not much to work on here is there?

[refurb]

It sounds like you’re judging wild ideas. I though you didn’t want that?

[f6v]

It’s rather simple. The wild idea shouldn’t be judged until it had been refuted with data.

[inglor_cz]

It is not that simple. We already have a replication crisis; some data out there is wrong, possibly the one that refute some wild idea.

In the ideal world, everything would be replicated and retested at least a few times. Practically, we do not have the resources, and sometimes other interests come into play. For example, those of some industry to fund studies that refute some wild idea that threatens their business. How many studies on safety of sugar are paid by Coca Cola?

[ramraj07]

We do have a replication crisis. But what you're saying is that because we have a replication crisis all prior data about basically everything is moot. As far as I know the replication crisis is most predominant in psycology and social sciences. In biology the replication crisis a bit more interesting, and while it needs addressing, it's fair to say that homeopathy seems to have been reasonably thoroughly debunked. However, in the spirit of exactly what I said above, never say never. If someone proposes a new type of experiment that can explore the homeopathy hypothesis further, that should definitely be at least slightly encouraged. The question is, what experiment DO YOU want to do? Double blind control trial? More basic than that, at the molecular level!

[refurb]

Homeopathy hasn’t been proven to not work in cancer. I mean, there is no double blinded randomized trial of say healing crystals. Should we still fund such a trial? I mean, there is no data to refute it.

[refurb]

If someone wanted to test the ability to shrink tumors through prayer that shouldn’t be judged?

[ramraj07]

If it can truly be tested, then it should be tested! But how do you truly test it? Even if God isn't real, acts like prayer give you emotional support and that can have a very real effect! So if you merely want to test whether an act like prayer is effective, then that's simple and probably already done and also probably shows some effect. However if you want to prove that prayer in a particular method to a particular God is effective, that's tricky. If someone can design an elegant enough study then it should be tested!

[f6v]

If they could build a mathematical model and simulations...Why not? Seems like a low-effort experiment.

[refurb]

You’d need to run a double blinded randomizes controlled trial with enough patients to test the effect.

And it would be wildly unethical to use prayer which by any reasonable understanding of cancer biology would not work.

[ramraj07]

Why does it have to replace therapy? One arm can be prayer + therapy and another can just be therapy

[refurb]

Ok, that would address the unethical part, but still, does that sound like a good use of limit research dollars?

This is one of those instances where judgement is a good thing. Don’t run such a silly trial. Spend the money on something that actually has a chance to work.