I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. The administration has a bunch of different actors with very strongly held beliefs that are simultaneously making decisions. These people don’t all agree with each other, but Trump is letting everyone who is nice to him do whatever they want at the same time. So the collective behavior looks incoherent, but the individual behavior is quite calculated.
Reproducibility issues are not uniformly spread. Social sciences seem to have a particular problem, as the subjects have agency and know about prior experiments. The famous Milgram experiment is not reproducible in its original form because we all know about it and what it says about the test subjects.
Medical science is another, partly because it is funded by vested interests that want favorable outcomes for their interests. Data mining was also a problem, which noted journals like JAMA have countered by demanding that the experiment's aim is published first to avoid being rewritten around a p-value discovered "target".
China has been vexed with extreme publish or perish incentives for researchers. And let us not forget that the US has a similar problem that incentivizes researchers to cheat.
But reducing funding is not the answer. Lack of reproducibility just means that science is doing its correction work. It helps cancel the noise of false results.
How can we "pick gold standard winners"? We cannot, any more than governments can generate a track record of always picking winners for industrial policy.
In reality, federal funding of science has declined a fraction of GDP. The slack has been taken up by commercial R&D, with the result that blue-sky experimentation has declined. This lack of blue-sky funding has also affected the NSF, where funding has become more cautious, aimed at experiments where the outcome is fairly assured. So science increasingly fills in the details.
As a warning, look what happened in Nazi Germany when the "Jewish science" was destroyed and the scientists forced out. The result was that those Jewish scientists helped ensure that the US was able to build the atomic bomb first. Germany was very lucky to have surrendered before it was quite ready, otherwise, Berlin might have been the first target, rather than Hiroshima. We should be very, very wary of going down a similar path. As it is, we may have already disrupted the US lead in science, almost guaranteeing that we lose our future global standing.
I live in Sweden where the schools mostly stayed open during covid and from here the school closings in the US looked as crazy ad they turned out to be in hindsight. I think covid responses as the proximate cause of the attacks on American universities is only capturing part of the picture though. I think that many people also remember how the so called experts also caused the global financial crisis and this plays in as well.
Ultimately though the real cause is I believe an epistemic one: scientists are elites even if we won't admit it and social inequality leads elites to inhabit a different world than most people. Worse, being trained to be an elite is largely a training in how to follow the rules, so this is not conducive to paradigm shifts.
Finally, historically most innovation has been the product of research within firms, so perhaps it is advisable to move away from a university lead research model anyway.
I was with you up to that last sentence! There's an ebb and flow between academic and industrial research, no? Moreover, plenty of science at the university is targeted towards building a system of understanding rather than innovation.
This is the trickier part of the debate surrounding reproducibility. A lot of what is called "science" in these debates (e.g., medicine, development, etc.) is probably better described as engineering.
I am not trying to claim that there is no role for the state in organizing research. But consider that thermodynamics and information theory were both developed largely or entirely by people in firms trying to solve very practical problems. Perhaps another way to put my claim (I would not claim it too strongly as a fact) is that if companies were forced to do their own research as opposed to relying on the state to do it for them, said companies might have a better insight into what research they need to do. Perhaps the division of labor is too advanced for this model to work any more. But the fundamental point I want to make is about decentralization of decision making, not really that companies necessarily do research better than unis.
Perhaps the most iconic corporate research institution was Edison. Literally a patent factory where inventions, not blue sky research, were the commercially oriented output. Information theory came out of Bell Labs, which was not directed at commercial research but acted as more like a university.
Corporations do commercially oriented research, where ideas can be patented for commercial value, and hopefully, successful products. Conversely, universities do science to gain knowledge that may or may not lead to useful products. Recall that nuclear fission was discovered at the University of Cambridge, England, and Rutherford thought it would never have practical use. How wrong he was! Most science does not lead to commercial value. It may be used as part of the edifice of human knowledge, and may be used to advise on government policy, e.g. climate models. The current nuclear science being done at CERN is far too expensive to be done by a corporation, and it is at present, unknown what technology could be developed from its discoveries.
One aspect of public research is the benefit that the knowledge gained can be used by anyone. Corporate research is for the sole use of the corporation and list licencees. This stymies R&D, most notably in pharmaceutical R&D, as potential drug targets must be unpatented for a corporation to do further R&D. This is not a good outcome, as it leads to monopolies. The BRCA "breast cancer gene" testing is an example.
If public research were ended, corporate research would eventually use up the "seed corn" of existing discoveries and slowly stagnate. Imagine if Shockley's development of the transistor (at Bell Labs) was made and tightly controlled by a corporation. Would we have the efflorescence of semiconductor-based technology today?
Even in the context of engineering it's an ebb-and-flow. For example, the first publicly known practical use of the Kalman filter was by the NASA Ames Research Center for the Apollo mission (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19860003843/downloads/19860003843.pdf). It became an industry mainstay only after that.
While I cannot say if school openings vs closures were the cause, Sweden's Covid-19 mortality rate was 10x higher than Norway, which did close schools. We did rapidly find that Covd-19 transmission was primarily by exposure to the breath of infected individuals, which logically led to mask usage. The difference in policies between states that mandated masks and business closures showed a statistically lower mortality rate between matched cohorts. We also know that anecdotally, some school kids did infect their elsders wo contracted Covid-19 from them.
Policy-wise, there are a trade-off. Do you prioritize the health of individuals, or the effects on remote education and business profits? The extreme POV of the latter was the Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, who made the comment "No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
Texas appears to be the poster child for Social Darwinism. I would hope that Sweden hasn't drifted that far right-wing yet.
Over the course of the whole pandemic there was no significant difference in overall mortality rates between the Nordic countries, though Sweden did have the lowest.
There are certainly trade offs to be made but its important to keep in mind that society must be reproduced over the short and medium term. There is no need for social darwinism, only the need to recognize that its hard to get people to change their behavior quickly in the context of a society where people need food and healthcare and childcare (no healthcare if the doctors are at home tending their children).
I learned something today. If you google "sverige lägsta överdödlighet covid" you get very different sources than if you google the English equivalent "sweden lowest excess mortality covid". In the Swedish case you get a bunch of newspaper articles from several years ago (which I remember being made a big deal of at the time). The English language sources have similar headlines but are all from right wing nut job putfits like cato (I didn't bother to read any of them though).
This is an interesting finding. But taking a step back, this blog has one of its central aims as describing the difficulties of using statistics to explain the world. I would urge you to apply some of that logic here. There is no way to prove that Sweden took the best approach to covid. But neither does it seem to be the case that the strategy in Sweden was much worse than other strategies based on available evidence.
One thing is important - use quality data. Johns Hopkins' COVID-19 tracking was the best and most accurate (given country reporting) data source. Since it shows Sweden's mortality rate was far higher than that of geographically adjacent Norway, one can be fairly sure that it reflects different policies. One can always dig down into the details, but for a bird's eye view, Sweden traded lives for less strict rules.
There are many COVID-19 deniers in the US who swear on stacks of Bibles that the mortality rate in right-wing-controlled states was no worse, or even lower, than in more progressive states. Yet the statistics show otherwise, as well as peer-reviewed medical papers. Good statistics are very helpful in describing the world because they are quantitative rather than qualitative. It is harder to push an ideology or agenda in the fact of data that refutes a position.
You can certainly argue about tradeoffs, but as the primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens, keeping pandemic mortality as low as possible should be the priority.
Joe Jordan made a key point I am repeating here: the cumulative excess mortality of the Scandinavian countries over the course of the pandemic is basically the same (Finland a bit worse IIRC). Different countries had different initial conditions. Sweden did have a strong initial wave/seed. But the excess mortality rate of its neighbours was higher for the subsequent years (very awkward since presumably most people were then vaccinated before infected, which everyone was anyway). Plot twist: in the end Sweden had the lowest excess mortality in all of Europe (or close to it). Did policy affect anything here, or is coronavirus gonna coronavirus no matter what you do? There are lots of interesting open questions here for the curious. Strong opinions should be held loosely.
Data always has an underpinning ideology. If you don't believe this then I would sincerely counsel you to think more about the problem. Some works that might help to think through this might include Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, Theodore Porter's Trust in Numbers, or Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact. Or if you don't like reading books, just try doing some actual data analysis and seeing how hard it is to not smuggle in your conclusions to your methodology.
Data always has an underpinning ideology. If you don't believe this then I would sincerely counsel you to think more about the problem. Some works that might help to think through this might include Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, Theodore Porter's Trust in Numbers, or Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact. Or if you don't like reading books, just try doing some actual data analysis and seeing how hard it is to not smuggle in your conclusions to your methodology.
I'm curious what part of it was crazy? Sweden so I understand did push for schools to go remote and did implement limits on gatherings as well as masking and distancing rules. Sweden also implemented functional contact tracing according to public reports which the US did not.
Is it that our schools stayed closed for so long or was the closing at all odd?
In Sweden only high schools went remote and only for a short period. The limits om public gatherings we only on very large events. Bars were also eventually made to close a few hours early. There were no masking or distancing rules. I never heard about contact tracing (or maybe don't remember). The main actions taken were having robust sick leave policies already in place.
Interesting, what I read online suggested that Sweden did have masking rules and contact tracing but also that many Swedes also generally complied with the distancing without being forced.
What is the general level of health and healthcare in Sweden?
I ask because in my experience one of the things that stood out in the US is that some states (e.g. Colorado) performed better than others (e.g. Florida) in part because they just had better healthcare an overall healthier population, and better compliance, despite the same level of public restrictions.
There were no mask requirements. There was for a time a recommendation to wear masks on public transit but compliance wasn't high, may 15% at peak. Everyone gets healthcare. You have unlimited sick days but don't get paid on the first sick day and need a doctor note after 14 days. You also get sick days if your kid is sick. I often travel for work and when I went to Italy or Germany where masks were required you would see people on the train with masks but everyone would sit in the office with a mask hanging from one ear in case someone who actually cared about masks came by. That is clearly a worse stragegy than just having people who can work from home.
That may be the kicker. While you had fewer requirements the large healthcare and rigid support for working from home makes all the difference in the world. In the US we were hit by poor healthcare and ineffective combined with noncompliance. In my view the distancing works if people practice it, but I'll concede that with better healthcare and stronger social support they may have been less necessary.
Yes. It is always fun to think of 80/20 Pareto or Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) as having some sort of causal direction; that 90% filler generates the 10% good stuff or at least allows the 10% to exist. Or maybe the 20% produces the 80% as waste products?
However, the spirit of these statements (by Vance and others), I think, is to try to shift from attention-seeking to truth-seeking. Bad/fraudulent research that leads to serious misdirection of research funds seem to happen too often, especially in medical research.
You recently wrote yourself about trying to step up the quality and reduce the quantity of publications (https://www.argmin.net/p/too-much-information). Somewhere there must be common territory in the Venn diagram of Recht, Vance, and Pareto/Sturgeon no? Help us out.
I keep throwing around this bad faith/good faith divide on this topic. What makes the attacks on academia so difficult to parry is that they are turning academic self-criticism back on itself.
As I mentioned in another reply, you'll never see Silicon Valley bros criticize themselves in public. Relentless smarm is a key component in how they maintain their power.
Academics, on the other hand, love to hate on academia and other academics. It's part of our thing. That means we're open to bad-faith critics externalizing our internal debates. But that doesn't mean it's time to let up with internal critique. Extroverted introspection is how we can slog forward.
All that to say: let me stew on it a bit, and I'll get to your closing question next week.
as Stafford Beer said "it is only when you have evidence that some part of a research budget has definitively been wasted that you can have any confidence whether any of it has been well spent at all".
It's difficult to distinguish between good and bad science, or at least to predict what will be quickly forgotten and what will stand the test of time. The field of AI offers a compelling example of this conundrum.
One thread I'd like to pull on more is that engineering research is a very particular branch that plays by different rules than those of what most people call "science." And also that medical research is much closer to engineering than science. To be continued...
Frequently whole scientific communities get stuck in dead ends but do not realize or cannot acknowledge that they are stuck. Is there some way to incentivize change?
There is a lot of truth in "one funeral at a time". And it is also true that progress demands sacrifice. Still, personally I am opposed to killing off senior researchers on humanitarian grounds.
Can you unpack how Bhattacharya isn't a demon? He ran one bad study of COVID infection rates, got the result very very wrong, and then used it to make policy recommendations that, if followed, would have killed many many people. Rather than take ownership of any part of that, or just learn from experience, he is has called for accountability for the people who disagreed with him and is now apparently pushing to deny vaccines to pregnant women and children.
While he may be personally good and compelling nothing in his public actions suggests that he should be trusted. I'm honestly open to counter evidence but I have not seen any.
I wouldn't call anyone a "demon", including Bhattacharya. But I agree, his public protestations, intemperance, and advocacy for bad policy have rendered him, if nothing else, an exceptionally unreliable narrator.
Hi Ben, first time your blog has moved me to comment. Who defines what is "good" and "bad" science? Is it the administration? Is it you? It strikes me that this is a bad faith argument, and trying to engage in it can yield no benefits.
We clearly do not "need" bad science (by whatever definition). In fact, we work very hard to avoid it. Researchers serve on review panels for grants; they argue against grants being awarded that would not (in their professional opinion) yield good science.
Vance is arguing in bad faith, but I don't think that science-reform metascientists are. Those who argue for "better science" have their heart in the right place, even though I don't think their desire to impose rigid rules on how to conduct science will achieve much of anything. I have written about this before, but I'm in favor of open science, open code. I'm not in favor of forcing everyone to preregister their data analysis plans and teaching everyone about robust confidence intervals. Scientists should be free to explore new methods and ways of seeing and interpretation.
Now, with regards to your lat paragraph, I disagree with your assessment of scientists working hard to avoid promoting bad science by others. I have a different opinion of peer review, be it about papers or grants. Our prestige systems fail to determine what is good and bad all the time. People don't work hard at peer review. Grant panels are usually plagued by old guys yelling at clouds. Scientists are prone to herding around hype. That science trudges forward despite all of the apparent "irrationality" is what makes it such a remarkable human endeavor.
Wondering if "give us ever increasing amounts of money and don't ask too many questions about what we do with it, it's always been a mess and the mess is good and necessary actually" might be construed as a bit too self-serving by the general public.
"don't ask too many questions about what we do with it"
Every cent spent on a grant needs to be accounted for when reporting, and heaven forbid if it was spent on something outside of the scope of the grant (e.g., a printer)! Every study funded by a grant has been searchable and is folded into every year's update. Hell go to NIH Reporter if you want to verify for yourself.
Transparency has been baked into the entire process, for at least my brief time in the sciences so far, and I dont see much evidence to suggest this has been a recent change.
So let's all drop the strawman bullshit about being self serving.
Yes to this. There is so much reporting, explaining, and oversight, not to mention consequences for mistakes that the idea that there are no questions is disconnected. Indeed I would argue that the primary result from reducing overhead will just mean more reporting and more paperwork, technically copy charges, phone fees, etc, can be put back into the budget lines and they will, so more paperwork with no savings.
Wonderful. They've decided to replace a reproducibility crisis with a producibility crisis.
The admin does not have a plan for literally any executive decision they take.
I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. The administration has a bunch of different actors with very strongly held beliefs that are simultaneously making decisions. These people don’t all agree with each other, but Trump is letting everyone who is nice to him do whatever they want at the same time. So the collective behavior looks incoherent, but the individual behavior is quite calculated.
Reproducibility issues are not uniformly spread. Social sciences seem to have a particular problem, as the subjects have agency and know about prior experiments. The famous Milgram experiment is not reproducible in its original form because we all know about it and what it says about the test subjects.
Medical science is another, partly because it is funded by vested interests that want favorable outcomes for their interests. Data mining was also a problem, which noted journals like JAMA have countered by demanding that the experiment's aim is published first to avoid being rewritten around a p-value discovered "target".
China has been vexed with extreme publish or perish incentives for researchers. And let us not forget that the US has a similar problem that incentivizes researchers to cheat.
But reducing funding is not the answer. Lack of reproducibility just means that science is doing its correction work. It helps cancel the noise of false results.
How can we "pick gold standard winners"? We cannot, any more than governments can generate a track record of always picking winners for industrial policy.
In reality, federal funding of science has declined a fraction of GDP. The slack has been taken up by commercial R&D, with the result that blue-sky experimentation has declined. This lack of blue-sky funding has also affected the NSF, where funding has become more cautious, aimed at experiments where the outcome is fairly assured. So science increasingly fills in the details.
As a warning, look what happened in Nazi Germany when the "Jewish science" was destroyed and the scientists forced out. The result was that those Jewish scientists helped ensure that the US was able to build the atomic bomb first. Germany was very lucky to have surrendered before it was quite ready, otherwise, Berlin might have been the first target, rather than Hiroshima. We should be very, very wary of going down a similar path. As it is, we may have already disrupted the US lead in science, almost guaranteeing that we lose our future global standing.
I live in Sweden where the schools mostly stayed open during covid and from here the school closings in the US looked as crazy ad they turned out to be in hindsight. I think covid responses as the proximate cause of the attacks on American universities is only capturing part of the picture though. I think that many people also remember how the so called experts also caused the global financial crisis and this plays in as well.
Ultimately though the real cause is I believe an epistemic one: scientists are elites even if we won't admit it and social inequality leads elites to inhabit a different world than most people. Worse, being trained to be an elite is largely a training in how to follow the rules, so this is not conducive to paradigm shifts.
Finally, historically most innovation has been the product of research within firms, so perhaps it is advisable to move away from a university lead research model anyway.
I was with you up to that last sentence! There's an ebb and flow between academic and industrial research, no? Moreover, plenty of science at the university is targeted towards building a system of understanding rather than innovation.
This is the trickier part of the debate surrounding reproducibility. A lot of what is called "science" in these debates (e.g., medicine, development, etc.) is probably better described as engineering.
I am not trying to claim that there is no role for the state in organizing research. But consider that thermodynamics and information theory were both developed largely or entirely by people in firms trying to solve very practical problems. Perhaps another way to put my claim (I would not claim it too strongly as a fact) is that if companies were forced to do their own research as opposed to relying on the state to do it for them, said companies might have a better insight into what research they need to do. Perhaps the division of labor is too advanced for this model to work any more. But the fundamental point I want to make is about decentralization of decision making, not really that companies necessarily do research better than unis.
Perhaps the most iconic corporate research institution was Edison. Literally a patent factory where inventions, not blue sky research, were the commercially oriented output. Information theory came out of Bell Labs, which was not directed at commercial research but acted as more like a university.
Corporations do commercially oriented research, where ideas can be patented for commercial value, and hopefully, successful products. Conversely, universities do science to gain knowledge that may or may not lead to useful products. Recall that nuclear fission was discovered at the University of Cambridge, England, and Rutherford thought it would never have practical use. How wrong he was! Most science does not lead to commercial value. It may be used as part of the edifice of human knowledge, and may be used to advise on government policy, e.g. climate models. The current nuclear science being done at CERN is far too expensive to be done by a corporation, and it is at present, unknown what technology could be developed from its discoveries.
One aspect of public research is the benefit that the knowledge gained can be used by anyone. Corporate research is for the sole use of the corporation and list licencees. This stymies R&D, most notably in pharmaceutical R&D, as potential drug targets must be unpatented for a corporation to do further R&D. This is not a good outcome, as it leads to monopolies. The BRCA "breast cancer gene" testing is an example.
If public research were ended, corporate research would eventually use up the "seed corn" of existing discoveries and slowly stagnate. Imagine if Shockley's development of the transistor (at Bell Labs) was made and tightly controlled by a corporation. Would we have the efflorescence of semiconductor-based technology today?
Even in the context of engineering it's an ebb-and-flow. For example, the first publicly known practical use of the Kalman filter was by the NASA Ames Research Center for the Apollo mission (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19860003843/downloads/19860003843.pdf). It became an industry mainstay only after that.
While I cannot say if school openings vs closures were the cause, Sweden's Covid-19 mortality rate was 10x higher than Norway, which did close schools. We did rapidly find that Covd-19 transmission was primarily by exposure to the breath of infected individuals, which logically led to mask usage. The difference in policies between states that mandated masks and business closures showed a statistically lower mortality rate between matched cohorts. We also know that anecdotally, some school kids did infect their elsders wo contracted Covid-19 from them.
Policy-wise, there are a trade-off. Do you prioritize the health of individuals, or the effects on remote education and business profits? The extreme POV of the latter was the Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, who made the comment "No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
Texas appears to be the poster child for Social Darwinism. I would hope that Sweden hasn't drifted that far right-wing yet.
Over the course of the whole pandemic there was no significant difference in overall mortality rates between the Nordic countries, though Sweden did have the lowest.
There are certainly trade offs to be made but its important to keep in mind that society must be reproduced over the short and medium term. There is no need for social darwinism, only the need to recognize that its hard to get people to change their behavior quickly in the context of a society where people need food and healthcare and childcare (no healthcare if the doctors are at home tending their children).
Just stop. Sweden had a far higher mortality rate from COVID-19 than Norway, which did close schools.
Johns Hopkins tracker data:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
I learned something today. If you google "sverige lägsta överdödlighet covid" you get very different sources than if you google the English equivalent "sweden lowest excess mortality covid". In the Swedish case you get a bunch of newspaper articles from several years ago (which I remember being made a big deal of at the time). The English language sources have similar headlines but are all from right wing nut job putfits like cato (I didn't bother to read any of them though).
This is an interesting finding. But taking a step back, this blog has one of its central aims as describing the difficulties of using statistics to explain the world. I would urge you to apply some of that logic here. There is no way to prove that Sweden took the best approach to covid. But neither does it seem to be the case that the strategy in Sweden was much worse than other strategies based on available evidence.
One thing is important - use quality data. Johns Hopkins' COVID-19 tracking was the best and most accurate (given country reporting) data source. Since it shows Sweden's mortality rate was far higher than that of geographically adjacent Norway, one can be fairly sure that it reflects different policies. One can always dig down into the details, but for a bird's eye view, Sweden traded lives for less strict rules.
There are many COVID-19 deniers in the US who swear on stacks of Bibles that the mortality rate in right-wing-controlled states was no worse, or even lower, than in more progressive states. Yet the statistics show otherwise, as well as peer-reviewed medical papers. Good statistics are very helpful in describing the world because they are quantitative rather than qualitative. It is harder to push an ideology or agenda in the fact of data that refutes a position.
You can certainly argue about tradeoffs, but as the primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens, keeping pandemic mortality as low as possible should be the priority.
Joe Jordan made a key point I am repeating here: the cumulative excess mortality of the Scandinavian countries over the course of the pandemic is basically the same (Finland a bit worse IIRC). Different countries had different initial conditions. Sweden did have a strong initial wave/seed. But the excess mortality rate of its neighbours was higher for the subsequent years (very awkward since presumably most people were then vaccinated before infected, which everyone was anyway). Plot twist: in the end Sweden had the lowest excess mortality in all of Europe (or close to it). Did policy affect anything here, or is coronavirus gonna coronavirus no matter what you do? There are lots of interesting open questions here for the curious. Strong opinions should be held loosely.
Data always has an underpinning ideology. If you don't believe this then I would sincerely counsel you to think more about the problem. Some works that might help to think through this might include Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, Theodore Porter's Trust in Numbers, or Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact. Or if you don't like reading books, just try doing some actual data analysis and seeing how hard it is to not smuggle in your conclusions to your methodology.
Data always has an underpinning ideology. If you don't believe this then I would sincerely counsel you to think more about the problem. Some works that might help to think through this might include Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, Theodore Porter's Trust in Numbers, or Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact. Or if you don't like reading books, just try doing some actual data analysis and seeing how hard it is to not smuggle in your conclusions to your methodology.
I'm curious what part of it was crazy? Sweden so I understand did push for schools to go remote and did implement limits on gatherings as well as masking and distancing rules. Sweden also implemented functional contact tracing according to public reports which the US did not.
Is it that our schools stayed closed for so long or was the closing at all odd?
In Sweden only high schools went remote and only for a short period. The limits om public gatherings we only on very large events. Bars were also eventually made to close a few hours early. There were no masking or distancing rules. I never heard about contact tracing (or maybe don't remember). The main actions taken were having robust sick leave policies already in place.
Interesting, what I read online suggested that Sweden did have masking rules and contact tracing but also that many Swedes also generally complied with the distancing without being forced.
What is the general level of health and healthcare in Sweden?
I ask because in my experience one of the things that stood out in the US is that some states (e.g. Colorado) performed better than others (e.g. Florida) in part because they just had better healthcare an overall healthier population, and better compliance, despite the same level of public restrictions.
There were no mask requirements. There was for a time a recommendation to wear masks on public transit but compliance wasn't high, may 15% at peak. Everyone gets healthcare. You have unlimited sick days but don't get paid on the first sick day and need a doctor note after 14 days. You also get sick days if your kid is sick. I often travel for work and when I went to Italy or Germany where masks were required you would see people on the train with masks but everyone would sit in the office with a mask hanging from one ear in case someone who actually cared about masks came by. That is clearly a worse stragegy than just having people who can work from home.
That may be the kicker. While you had fewer requirements the large healthcare and rigid support for working from home makes all the difference in the world. In the US we were hit by poor healthcare and ineffective combined with noncompliance. In my view the distancing works if people practice it, but I'll concede that with better healthcare and stronger social support they may have been less necessary.
Yes. It is always fun to think of 80/20 Pareto or Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) as having some sort of causal direction; that 90% filler generates the 10% good stuff or at least allows the 10% to exist. Or maybe the 20% produces the 80% as waste products?
However, the spirit of these statements (by Vance and others), I think, is to try to shift from attention-seeking to truth-seeking. Bad/fraudulent research that leads to serious misdirection of research funds seem to happen too often, especially in medical research.
You recently wrote yourself about trying to step up the quality and reduce the quantity of publications (https://www.argmin.net/p/too-much-information). Somewhere there must be common territory in the Venn diagram of Recht, Vance, and Pareto/Sturgeon no? Help us out.
I keep throwing around this bad faith/good faith divide on this topic. What makes the attacks on academia so difficult to parry is that they are turning academic self-criticism back on itself.
As I mentioned in another reply, you'll never see Silicon Valley bros criticize themselves in public. Relentless smarm is a key component in how they maintain their power.
Academics, on the other hand, love to hate on academia and other academics. It's part of our thing. That means we're open to bad-faith critics externalizing our internal debates. But that doesn't mean it's time to let up with internal critique. Extroverted introspection is how we can slog forward.
All that to say: let me stew on it a bit, and I'll get to your closing question next week.
as Stafford Beer said "it is only when you have evidence that some part of a research budget has definitively been wasted that you can have any confidence whether any of it has been well spent at all".
Lmao Ben never misses an opportunity to dunk on RDDs.
Amen, brother.
It's difficult to distinguish between good and bad science, or at least to predict what will be quickly forgotten and what will stand the test of time. The field of AI offers a compelling example of this conundrum.
One thread I'd like to pull on more is that engineering research is a very particular branch that plays by different rules than those of what most people call "science." And also that medical research is much closer to engineering than science. To be continued...
Frequently whole scientific communities get stuck in dead ends but do not realize or cannot acknowledge that they are stuck. Is there some way to incentivize change?
"Science progresses one funeral at a time."
There's much truth in that statement.
But also many paths can appear to be dead ends before ultimately leading to breakthroughs...
There is a lot of truth in "one funeral at a time". And it is also true that progress demands sacrifice. Still, personally I am opposed to killing off senior researchers on humanitarian grounds.
Hah, I agree that as senior researchers we have to argue on behalf of our own self-interest!
Shh.. Don't tell anyone!
"If we need the bad science to get the good science, a tenfold cut could lead to a hundredfold contraction of innovation."
What scaling law do you assume here for the good/bad science ratio?
LOL. Clearly a power law...
Can you unpack how Bhattacharya isn't a demon? He ran one bad study of COVID infection rates, got the result very very wrong, and then used it to make policy recommendations that, if followed, would have killed many many people. Rather than take ownership of any part of that, or just learn from experience, he is has called for accountability for the people who disagreed with him and is now apparently pushing to deny vaccines to pregnant women and children.
While he may be personally good and compelling nothing in his public actions suggests that he should be trusted. I'm honestly open to counter evidence but I have not seen any.
I wouldn't call anyone a "demon", including Bhattacharya. But I agree, his public protestations, intemperance, and advocacy for bad policy have rendered him, if nothing else, an exceptionally unreliable narrator.
Hi Ben, first time your blog has moved me to comment. Who defines what is "good" and "bad" science? Is it the administration? Is it you? It strikes me that this is a bad faith argument, and trying to engage in it can yield no benefits.
We clearly do not "need" bad science (by whatever definition). In fact, we work very hard to avoid it. Researchers serve on review panels for grants; they argue against grants being awarded that would not (in their professional opinion) yield good science.
Vance is arguing in bad faith, but I don't think that science-reform metascientists are. Those who argue for "better science" have their heart in the right place, even though I don't think their desire to impose rigid rules on how to conduct science will achieve much of anything. I have written about this before, but I'm in favor of open science, open code. I'm not in favor of forcing everyone to preregister their data analysis plans and teaching everyone about robust confidence intervals. Scientists should be free to explore new methods and ways of seeing and interpretation.
Now, with regards to your lat paragraph, I disagree with your assessment of scientists working hard to avoid promoting bad science by others. I have a different opinion of peer review, be it about papers or grants. Our prestige systems fail to determine what is good and bad all the time. People don't work hard at peer review. Grant panels are usually plagued by old guys yelling at clouds. Scientists are prone to herding around hype. That science trudges forward despite all of the apparent "irrationality" is what makes it such a remarkable human endeavor.
Wondering if "give us ever increasing amounts of money and don't ask too many questions about what we do with it, it's always been a mess and the mess is good and necessary actually" might be construed as a bit too self-serving by the general public.
"don't ask too many questions about what we do with it"
Every cent spent on a grant needs to be accounted for when reporting, and heaven forbid if it was spent on something outside of the scope of the grant (e.g., a printer)! Every study funded by a grant has been searchable and is folded into every year's update. Hell go to NIH Reporter if you want to verify for yourself.
Transparency has been baked into the entire process, for at least my brief time in the sciences so far, and I dont see much evidence to suggest this has been a recent change.
So let's all drop the strawman bullshit about being self serving.
Yes to this. There is so much reporting, explaining, and oversight, not to mention consequences for mistakes that the idea that there are no questions is disconnected. Indeed I would argue that the primary result from reducing overhead will just mean more reporting and more paperwork, technically copy charges, phone fees, etc, can be put back into the budget lines and they will, so more paperwork with no savings.
I don't think Emin was writing about documenting expenses, though?
Oh, I have no doubt that they would have the receipts for that $11k they paid to Springer Nature for a useless, junk paper.
Edit: turns out it's actually $12690.
Masterful goalpost maneuver! You should take pride in your useless cynicism!