There is a close parallel in academic research. Here, the “market” is generally efficient: most problems that are solvable are already solved.
That’s false. For most problem that are solvable nobody cares about solving them as it’s not valuable to solve them.
Larry McEnerney’s LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively has a huge impact on how I think about reasearch. The research that’s done depends highly on what’s valued in certain research communities.
Two look at two of my recent research questions:
After reading about how Fibrin fixates fascia because it’s in fascial fluid and accumlates when the flow of fascial fluid is blocked, I wanted to know the protein composition of fascial fluid. I don’t think there’s any available paper that gives me the answer. That’s not because it would be very hard to do the relevant research but because few people care about the protein composition of fascial fluid. This is not research I can do, but someone who had a lab could easily do it.
My other recent research idea came after reading Core Pathways of Aging. I had a feeling like “Why did I believe the bullshit they told my in MicroBiology 101 (might also have been 102) about transposons?” Then I started running an evolutionary simulation of human hunter gatherers for transposons to understand better what’s going on. While I searched around for papers on other simulations on hunter gatherers and found that nobody really does this and that people instead use some differential equations from the 60′s with fancy math from a time before the compute to do good simulations was available.
While I’m still in my project and the outcome isn’t yet final, it’s very interesting how my model produces right now the 51% male birth rate that’s the literature value and not the 50% I would have naively expected. It seems to me like the research topic is underexplored because it didn’t fall into what any researcher in the field considered interesting.
True, I guess a more precise statement is “most problems that are important and solvable are already solved”. There are lots of small gaps in my research as well, like “what if we make a minor adjustment to method X”—whatever the outcome, it’s below the bar for a publication so they’re generally left untouched.
True, I guess a more precise statement is “most problems that are important and solvable are already solved”.
No, there are plenty of important problems that nobody has an incentive to solve. See Eliezer’s Inadequate Equilibria. It’s central that there’s a research community that cares about the problem.
Take Ivermectin pre-COVID. It worked very well for getting rid of parasites after being invented in 1975. Well enough to lead to a Nobel prize. In 2018 there’s a paper saying:
Ivermectin has long been clinically administered for the treatment of parasitosis (63), but has recently come to attention as a potential inhibitor of IMPα/β (64). Ivermectin inhibition of IMPα/β has shown to inhibit the replication of RNA viruses such as dengue virus and HIV-1 (64). Ivermectin was recently tested for the inhibition of IAV in vitro, with nuclear import of vRNP complex (of both wild-type and antiviral MxA escape mutant) efficiently inhibited (65). Given ivermectin’s longstanding record of clinical applications and FDA-approved status, repurposing of this drug for the treatment of IAV should be considered, especially while under threat of pandemic IAV outbreak.
The question whether Ivermectin is a viable treatment against influenza and maybe a broad spectrum antiviral is an important problem. On the other hand it’s not a very valuable problem for anyone to find out given that Ivermectin is long off patent.
The way the last sentence of the paper is formulate is very interesting. As far as Influenza being important, the fact that we have every year a lot of influenza deaths should be enough to demonstrate that it’s an important problem. The community that produces regular drugs however doesn’t really care about repurposing a generic.
On the other hand there’s a community that cares for pandemic preparedness. The pandemic preparedness community cares less about whether it’s possible to patent treatments and cares more about health outcomes so he pitches it as being valuable for the pandemic preparedness community.
The tools to solve the problem of whether or not you can use ivermectin as antiviral against influenza and also against Coronaviruses exist since it hit the market in 1981. It was just never valuable enough for anybody to find out until some people thought about running small trials for all the substances that might help against COVID-19.
The people who did consider it valuable also were mostly small funders so we still haven’t highly powered trials that tell us with high certainty about the effects of ivermectin. The big healthcare funders didn’t consider it valuable to fund the studies early in the pandemic but that doesn’t mean running the studies wasn’t important.
MIRI’s attempt to publish ideas into the academic community had the problem of there not really being an existing academic community that values what they do. That doesn’t mean that MIRI’s work is not important. It just means nobody in academia cares.
Important work that has no field that values it has a hard time getting produced.
To be fair, almost nobody considered a pandemic to be a serious possibility prior to 2020, so it is understandable that pandemic preparedness research was a low-priority area. There may be lots of open and answerable questions in unpopular topics, but if the topic is obscure, the payoff for making a discovery is small (in terms of reputation and recognition).
Of course, COVID-19 has proven to us that pandemic research is important, and immediately researchers poured in from everywhere to work on various facets of the problem (e.g., I even joined in an effort to build a ventilator simulator). The payoff increased, so the inefficiencies quickly disappeared.
Now you can argue that pandemic research should’ve been more prioritized before. That is obvious in hindsight but was not at all obvious in 2019. Out of the zillions of low-priority research areas that nobody cares about now, how will you decide which one will become important? Unless you have a time machine to see into the future, it remains a low-payoff endeavor.
In the US alone depending on the year there are something between 10,000 and 60,000 flu deaths and a lot of additional harm due to people being ill. Whether or not pandemics are a concern it’s an important problem to deal with that.
There was money in pandemic preparedness. The Gates Foundation and organizations like CEPI were interested in it. They let themselves be conned by mRNA researchers and as a result funded mRNA research where there’s a good chance that it had net harm as it made us focus our vaccine trials on mRNA vaccines instead of focusing them on well-understand existing vaccine platforms that are easy to scale up and come with less side-effects.
The study from 2018 I referred is written in a way it is to advocate that part of this money goes into studying ivermectin for influenza. With the knowledge of hindsight that would have been more important.
In any case, my main point here is that what was prioritized (or was found to be valuable in Larry McEnerney terms) and what was important were two different things.
If you want to do important research and not just research that’s prioritized (found to be valuable by a particular community) it’s important to be able to mentally distinguish the two. Paradigm changing research for example generally isn’t valuable for the community that operates in an existing paradigm.
Sydney Brenner who was for example on of the people who started the molecular biology field is on record for saying that the kind of paradigm creating work back then would have been a hard time getting funded in today’s enviroment.
Given that there’s an efficient market as far as producing work that’s valued by established funders and not an efficient market for creating important work any researcher that actually wants to do important work and not just work that’s perceived as valuable has to keep the two apart. The efficient market hypothesis implies that most of the open opportunities to do important work are not seen as valuable by existing research communities.
That’s false. For most problem that are solvable nobody cares about solving them as it’s not valuable to solve them.
Larry McEnerney’s LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively has a huge impact on how I think about reasearch. The research that’s done depends highly on what’s valued in certain research communities.
Two look at two of my recent research questions:
After reading about how Fibrin fixates fascia because it’s in fascial fluid and accumlates when the flow of fascial fluid is blocked, I wanted to know the protein composition of fascial fluid. I don’t think there’s any available paper that gives me the answer. That’s not because it would be very hard to do the relevant research but because few people care about the protein composition of fascial fluid. This is not research I can do, but someone who had a lab could easily do it.
My other recent research idea came after reading Core Pathways of Aging. I had a feeling like “Why did I believe the bullshit they told my in MicroBiology 101 (might also have been 102) about transposons?” Then I started running an evolutionary simulation of human hunter gatherers for transposons to understand better what’s going on. While I searched around for papers on other simulations on hunter gatherers and found that nobody really does this and that people instead use some differential equations from the 60′s with fancy math from a time before the compute to do good simulations was available.
While I’m still in my project and the outcome isn’t yet final, it’s very interesting how my model produces right now the 51% male birth rate that’s the literature value and not the 50% I would have naively expected. It seems to me like the research topic is underexplored because it didn’t fall into what any researcher in the field considered interesting.
True, I guess a more precise statement is “most problems that are important and solvable are already solved”. There are lots of small gaps in my research as well, like “what if we make a minor adjustment to method X”—whatever the outcome, it’s below the bar for a publication so they’re generally left untouched.
No, there are plenty of important problems that nobody has an incentive to solve. See Eliezer’s Inadequate Equilibria. It’s central that there’s a research community that cares about the problem.
Take Ivermectin pre-COVID. It worked very well for getting rid of parasites after being invented in 1975. Well enough to lead to a Nobel prize. In 2018 there’s a paper saying:
The question whether Ivermectin is a viable treatment against influenza and maybe a broad spectrum antiviral is an important problem. On the other hand it’s not a very valuable problem for anyone to find out given that Ivermectin is long off patent.
The way the last sentence of the paper is formulate is very interesting. As far as Influenza being important, the fact that we have every year a lot of influenza deaths should be enough to demonstrate that it’s an important problem. The community that produces regular drugs however doesn’t really care about repurposing a generic.
On the other hand there’s a community that cares for pandemic preparedness. The pandemic preparedness community cares less about whether it’s possible to patent treatments and cares more about health outcomes so he pitches it as being valuable for the pandemic preparedness community.
The tools to solve the problem of whether or not you can use ivermectin as antiviral against influenza and also against Coronaviruses exist since it hit the market in 1981. It was just never valuable enough for anybody to find out until some people thought about running small trials for all the substances that might help against COVID-19.
The people who did consider it valuable also were mostly small funders so we still haven’t highly powered trials that tell us with high certainty about the effects of ivermectin. The big healthcare funders didn’t consider it valuable to fund the studies early in the pandemic but that doesn’t mean running the studies wasn’t important.
MIRI’s attempt to publish ideas into the academic community had the problem of there not really being an existing academic community that values what they do. That doesn’t mean that MIRI’s work is not important. It just means nobody in academia cares.
Important work that has no field that values it has a hard time getting produced.
To be fair, almost nobody considered a pandemic to be a serious possibility prior to 2020, so it is understandable that pandemic preparedness research was a low-priority area. There may be lots of open and answerable questions in unpopular topics, but if the topic is obscure, the payoff for making a discovery is small (in terms of reputation and recognition).
Of course, COVID-19 has proven to us that pandemic research is important, and immediately researchers poured in from everywhere to work on various facets of the problem (e.g., I even joined in an effort to build a ventilator simulator). The payoff increased, so the inefficiencies quickly disappeared.
Now you can argue that pandemic research should’ve been more prioritized before. That is obvious in hindsight but was not at all obvious in 2019. Out of the zillions of low-priority research areas that nobody cares about now, how will you decide which one will become important? Unless you have a time machine to see into the future, it remains a low-payoff endeavor.
In the US alone depending on the year there are something between 10,000 and 60,000 flu deaths and a lot of additional harm due to people being ill. Whether or not pandemics are a concern it’s an important problem to deal with that.
There was money in pandemic preparedness. The Gates Foundation and organizations like CEPI were interested in it. They let themselves be conned by mRNA researchers and as a result funded mRNA research where there’s a good chance that it had net harm as it made us focus our vaccine trials on mRNA vaccines instead of focusing them on well-understand existing vaccine platforms that are easy to scale up and come with less side-effects.
The study from 2018 I referred is written in a way it is to advocate that part of this money goes into studying ivermectin for influenza. With the knowledge of hindsight that would have been more important.
In any case, my main point here is that what was prioritized (or was found to be valuable in Larry McEnerney terms) and what was important were two different things.
If you want to do important research and not just research that’s prioritized (found to be valuable by a particular community) it’s important to be able to mentally distinguish the two. Paradigm changing research for example generally isn’t valuable for the community that operates in an existing paradigm.
Sydney Brenner who was for example on of the people who started the molecular biology field is on record for saying that the kind of paradigm creating work back then would have been a hard time getting funded in today’s enviroment.
Given that there’s an efficient market as far as producing work that’s valued by established funders and not an efficient market for creating important work any researcher that actually wants to do important work and not just work that’s perceived as valuable has to keep the two apart. The efficient market hypothesis implies that most of the open opportunities to do important work are not seen as valuable by existing research communities.