Why Science is Failing Us

I don't quite know how to adequatly articulate my displeasure with this article but lets try.<p>The article basically seems to be relying on some philosophy and muddy and different definitions in different contexts (philosophy vs science vs standard usage) of words like "fact". Then it talks about how things are getting more complex and we're spending more effort to learn things now than we used to because "we know all the easy stuff". And seems to conclude that we'll still be no better than religious shamanistic people once we "know all there is to know" and it still won't do us a lot of good.<p>It seems to be advocating give up on science now, with some rational like "while we're ahead".<p>I honestly don't get it. It seems like cloudy wooly thinking, bad arguments.<p>Sure, things are getting more complex and will continue to, but that doesn't mean we should give up, or that "it's mysteries all the way down". Every year we learn more and fix more problems. And we have to and always have had to make a lot of mistakes in the process. The author seems to think we're making more mistakes now and that's an indication the game is almost up.<p>I disagree, medical science is still churning out amazing breakthroughs, like HIV and cancer vaccines this year. And physics is still coming up with amazing things.<p>Just because it's getting harder doesn't mean we should stop or that we'll hit a wall and be able to go no further (and if we can see that wall coming we might want to think about stopping prematurely?)<p>Everytime we thought we'd learned everything we've been able to push on and learn more, discover more depth, and use it more to our advantage. I don't strictly speaking see why that has to stop just because it's getting harder. At least any time soon. Each new level also gives us better tools to work with.<p>And there have always been people saying we know enough now, or it's getting harder so lets stop now. And some have, and many haven't and that's why we still have progress. This is a age old endless reoccurring trend and bares the same ignoring it has always gotten. Or you can step off the train of progress and be left behind.<p>I do not think science is failing us at all in anyway. I think this article is poor on many standards.

Wow, that article was a little annoying.<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that he thinks our current approach to science is wrong due to our tendency to attribute cause and effect to things where we have no conclusive proof of cause and effect?<p>Well, if he has a better suggestion on how to approach research, I'm all ears!<p>First off, I don't think ANYONE who was involved with the development of torcetrapib thought it was a "slam dunk". The success rate of drugs that have reached phase III is only slightly north of 50%.<p>Second, there is no way you could possibly figure out all the effects a particular drug has on the human body. You'd be doing research for the next 100 years and you still wouldn't come close. So what we do is we come up with a hypothesis (high HDL is good), we gather evidence in the most efficient manner we can (other drugs that raise HDL help prolong life in humans and animals), then we move forward with our BEST GUESS. That's how science works, you create a hypothesis, then test it.<p>Are our hypotheses wrong sometimes? Of course. Do we learn something from the failures? Yes. Trying a being successful 10% of the time is far better than not trying at all and being successful 0% of the time.<p>Merck's CETP inhibitor is in phase III right now and there is a chance that it will fail too. And I don't think any scientists feels that high HDL is the cause of reduced cardiac risks. A more accurate description would be to say "High HDL is associated with reduced cardiac risks, this drug increases HDL levels, so it stands a chance of reducing cardiac risks".<p>I think the author does a bad job of describing how scientists approach their work. If anything a scientist would be the first to call out a claim that something _causes_ something else. That's how their trained!

The advice of pnathan, elsewhere in this thread, is good. This <i>is</i> a better article than what I've come to expect from Wired.<p>The main point of the article is that scientists have exhausted the low-hanging fruit of useful correlations and are now grasping at the more dubious correlations. The author claims that things are complicated by the concept of causation.<p>He cites David Hume: "...causes are a strange kind of knowledge. This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered -- they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a 'lively conception produced by habit.' When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity -- we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact -- it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts."<p>It's been a while since I've taken philosophy, but Hume's skepticism of causality is itself a story by its own criteria.

I think scientists see this as a success. You get data and you revise your hypothesis. You get more data and you revise it again.<p>A lot of people want science to be like politics. They want you to pick a side and stick to it regardless of the data.<p>IMO, when conventional wisdom isn't at least occassionally overturneed -- that's when I'll begin to think science is failing us.

"Another meta review, meanwhile, looked at the 49 most-cited clinical research studies published between 1990 and 2003. Most of these were the culmination of years of careful work. Nevertheless, more than 40 percent of them were later shown to be either totally wrong or significantly incorrect."<p>If science was really failing us, I don't see how we would have managed to retract those incorrect studies. It feels like the writer had no bigger point than "biomedical research is hard, let's go shopping." It's sensationalist to consider science a failure every time it makes a mistake.<p>I thought the Hume references were pretty bad, too. If you read what he says, he questions the existence of relations such as "A causes B" and prefers to phrase them as, "In the past, we have observed A-like events are always correlated with B-like events." For practical purposes, that's enough to behave as if causality "really" exists. You just have to avoid mixing up causality with mere correlation, which every good scientist already knows.

I find this article troubling for two reasons: it fails to back up with evidence some of its boldest claims, and it suffers from the same problems presented by it's own argument.<p>Claims like this one:<p>&#62; "First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations."<p>May be true, but the author presents no evidence to support them, with relevant studies, articles, etc..<p>The second, much more troubling problem however, is that the argument suffers fromt the very problem it presents! The author's conclusion that the returns on scientific research are diminishing due to an inherent flaw in conclusions being drawn from correlations-- is <i>itself</i> a correlation. He's correlating the increasing cost of research to the increasing difficulty of finding new correlations in the data.<p>There are other, simpler, less circular and philosophical explanations for why the returns on pharmaceutical research have decreased, such as increasingly strict regulations and fear of risk on the part of regulatory organizations. See this TED talk, where Juan Enriquez talks about these issues: <a href="http://www.tedmed.com/videos-info?name=Juan_Enriquez_at_TEDMED_2011&#38;q=updated&#38;year=2011" rel="nofollow">http://www.tedmed.com/videos-info?name=Juan_Enriquez_at_TEDM...</a>

This article misses the mark completely, both by extrapolating medicine to science as a whole, and by attacking the idea of causation rather than the sketchy practices of medicine.<p>All of the examples are pulled from medicine, notorious for its lack of experimental rigor. To say that "Science has failed us" implies that either medicine is the the only important science or that all science is equally as sloppy, which is pretty insulting to a scientist in any harder field.<p>His focus on causation is even more misguided. The very purpose of science is to understand the way the world works; to understand what causes what. To attack the idea of causation is to attack the very idea of science, and in turn all of the advances it's brought about over the past 300 years. Beyond that, we implicitly accept causation in almost every aspect of our lives (Pressing the space bar causes a space to appear, etc). Certainly causes can't be 'seen' like facts, but to suggest that this trivializes them, or somehow makes them less useful is nonsense (and, for what it's worth, is total misreading of Hume).<p>Complexity isn't a valid reason either. Some very well understood systems are incredibly complex (look at the computer you are using now). What is true is that like all other humans, scientists make mistakes. We often make the incorrect causal links or are influenced by our biases. This is why experiments exist (instead of pure data collection); to make sure the causes we have assumed are correct. To point to a couple of experiments with an unexpected result and then say that all of science has failed isn't even a little bit right.

Science isn't failing us. Big bureaucracies getting in the way of science are failing us. Even just to experiment with semi-controlled drugs, for example, is a massive headache and ungodly expensive. Everybody wants to get into journals and paid by government institutes, so a lot of science being done is very safe and not venturing out to the controversial as much. Studies are being funded by corporations looking to get some cooked data to support their bullshit.<p>Science has never failed us, as science is inherently just human curiosity. The continuing structural growth and big bureaucratic developments that many governments, schools, and businesses are implementing are failing us.<p><i>"Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible."</i> - Javier Pascual<p>Science can't fail. It only illuminates. But a lot of shady assholes run this place, and the last thing they want is a light shone on them.

This is a very wrong-headed article. The author seems to think that science should be able to get the right answers on the first try, and that if we can't, it's somehow a failure of science and any attempts at understanding should be abandoned.<p>I think he has a basic misunderstanding of science. He doesn't realize that "made up stories" to explain how things work are just a starting point to understanding. They have to be tested and revised and re-tested until we come up with an explanation that reliably predicts how something works. And failures are an integral part of the process. Failures advance understanding.<p>It reminds me of the quote by Thomas Edison, after a thousand failed experiments, "We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb".

This article does a great job of pointing out how science has limited it's thinking. It's not that science is wrong or is going to perish, it's simply needs to open it's perspective more.<p>Take for example the first time you came up with a cool new product. You took it to a VC/someone who's done it before, and they ask you about your market, price, revenue etc. Science is still creating cool new products, not paying attention to everything else around it.<p>Here's another good example: wind farms. We've been creating massive new wind mills that are more efficient bigger, etc etc. Have we ever looked at how to install them in such a fashion that they become more efficient as a team rather than an individual? And have we looked at how wind patterns change because of them?

The title itself is really bad - trial and error is the only way science works. You observe a cause and an effect, propose a theory, and tweak it based on more causes/effects. There are very few instances in the history of science where someone without any contact with actual experiment sat in a closed room and came up with an a theory that was eventually proved correct. If the author of the article was alive in the 1920s-1950s, and observed the chaotic scientific development of Quantum mechanics, he would have the exact same opinion that he has of the current state of medicinal research.<p>I am curious to see if the author has any actual suggestions on how to do science.

That's one of the best Wired articles I've read in a long time. I recommend reading it.

I was helping do data analysis at a spine surgery clinic in the 90s. I remember when that healthy-person MRI disc study came out. It was interesting, but I don't think it slowed us down one bit. :-)

The author seems surprised that we don't understand everything. Feynman: Nature's imagination is greater than your imagination.<p>A more interesting limit is relationships that cannot be understood in isolation. When these exceed our working memory, we can't perform our usual trick of hierarchical abstraction to look at one part or one aspect at a time. Perhaps <i>that</i> could be our limit of intuitive understanding, unless we come up with a fundamentally new way of understanding complexity.

The standard test for causality (at least in biology, where I work) is to test for rescue. You first establish that under conditions a, event b happens. You then reverse a, and observe b returning to normal. This, followed by controls demonstrating that you're only changing a and are actually measuring b serve as a stringent test for causation.

This is an important article with well chosen examples. But I think the headline points to the wrong "cause" of failure. Scientists, the directors of science research funding projects, and the general public can better understand what we know and what we don't know about causation from correlation if science teachers and journalists do a better job. For a long time, members of the journalistic community and members of the general public have been overinterpreting tentative scientific findings,<p><a href="http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html</a><p>and if we learn the lessons of how to interpret research findings more cautiously, we can all do our part to guide further research better.<p>As the author of the submitted article points out, "This doesn't mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally problematic. Some explanations clearly work better than others, which is why, thanks largely to improvements in public health, the average lifespan in the developed world continues to increase. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, things like clean water and improved sanitation—and not necessarily advances in medical technology—accounted for at least 25 of the more than 30 years added to the lifespan of Americans during the 20th century.) Although our reliance on statistical correlations has strict constraints—which limit modern research—those correlations have still managed to identify many essential risk factors, such as smoking and bad diets."<p>So with caution about assuming causation where the data cannot reliably show causation,<p><a href="http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz" rel="nofollow">http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz</a><p>the huge task of biomedical research can still go forward, eventually yielding other findings that can improve health or longevity compared to today's baseline.<p>AFTER EDIT: The question posed in the first reply below is interesting. One reason that biomarker interventions are tried more often than "hard endpoint" interventions is simply that they are faster and easier. To really check carefully for hard endpoints--reduced mortality and morbidity, for a medical treatment--takes time in a clinical trial. Sometimes an effective on a biomarker, for example serum cholesterol, can be observed right away, but if the subjects in a study are at an age at which few subjects die from any cause, it can be a long while before a study reveals which treatments actually increase rather than decrease the risk of death.<p>The case of the drug rimonabant,<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimonabant</a><p>which had reasonably strong support from animal experiments as an antiobesity drug, is instructive. Studies of human subjects after the drug was approved in Europe revealed a huge increase in suicidal risk among patients taking rimonabant,<p><a href="http://www.pharmacist.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Pharmacy_News&#38;template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&#38;ContentID=24206" rel="nofollow">http://www.pharmacist.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Pharmacy_N...</a><p>and eventually approval of the drug in Europe was withdrawn, and the drug was withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer, before rimonabant was ever approved in the United States.

pg one wrote in an essay about how if you manage to stumble onto something tabu you probably found something interesting (heavily paraphrased). A lot of people are seriously offended at this article.... just sayin'.

Odds of this article containing the answer? Not good.

&#62; At any given time, about 10 percent of Americans are completely incapacitated by their lumbar regions<p>How can this possibly be true? <i>Completely</i> incapacitated, ie bedridden and immobile? Surely the country would be in near collapse if 30+ million of its inhabitants were randomly bedridden at any one time just by that one medical issue.

TLDR<p>Way too long, meandering, full of anecdotes.<p>How is it at all surprising that trying to "fix" problems with the body is uber-complicated?<p>Plus, there's the obvious missing bigger point - all these companies are trying to find a solution that is a pill, as opposed to changing the underlying problem: bad food, bad environment, bad physical conditioning, etc. Billions spent on finding pills, very little money in solving the root causes...