Comment by FrustratedMonky
3 days ago
Sketchy. It really is only apparent in hindsight after investigation.
When something turns out to be a valid idea, guess that wasn't sketchy.
When something turns out to be wild goose chase, guess that was sketchy, why did we do that?
You don't know the winning paths until you take them. But complaining that some wrong paths were taken, isn't the solution. Because who can pick winners ahead of time?
No. There are some routes that are obviously pointless in foresight, and funding them is just giving money to someone's pet project, for example: Everything Julius Rebek does.
Then, there are people who are defrauding by making claims that are for SURE easy to know are sketchy. I promise you every active researcher (grad student, postdoc) can off the top of their head tell you AT LEAST three results that they know are on shaky ground.
"There are no right answers" is perfectly valid. Saying "there are no wrong answers" is a recipe for disaster, and cronyism.
To put it bluntly: Should the DOE fund perpetual motion research? Of course not. You 100% should block dumb paths of research. We don't do that enough.
Yeah, but was it really obvious we shouldn't pursue String Theory? It seemed promising in the beginning.
Even for Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine.
Recent discussion on pro/con of Alzheimer’s controversy. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
I'm just super wary of the 'right's tendency to throw the baby out with bath water, like JFK JR, and set the US back a few decades. Just because they don't understand science, so it must all be bad.
yes of course JFK jr is brainwormed to hell but he's not setting back the US decades. many things he tears down will be rebuildable and some things he puts in are fine, actually. what is far far more dangerous is the rot in the science infrastructure. because that will take decades to unwind (if we even do), and it's not an obvious problem like the way anything in politics is. people implicitly trust science, which is the problem. people implicitly distrust at least the politics on the other side of the aisle so there's some adversarial challenging going on and the opportunity for growth and integration. science is devoid of that right now.
the FDA is all fucked up anyways and if you doubt that, look up propublicas expose on serious drug safety lapses there.
> Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine
it wasn't perpetual motion level fraud, but it was bad. you weren't there. everyone doing work in the salt mines was like why the fuck arent my experiments working but nobody really stood up to say this is bullshit, because that would be the end of your career if you were a junior researcher... much easier to half ass a result, get the publication, and move on with your life.
> String Theory, It seemed promising in the beginning
maybe it shouldn't have been. there is a heuristic for what actually makes discoveries in science. and the string theory approach is not it. people were sounding the alarm at the time, like, among others some guy named richard feynman. but nobody was listening to them evidentally.
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