A system with feedback loops generally equilibrates on roughly the timescale of its slowest component
When it comes to illnesses, the system frequently is not in an equilibrium. Alzheimers in particular gets worse over time till the person is dead.
I don’t think that big pharma actually makes all that strong an effort to understand root causes, nor are they particularly incentivized to do so
Clinical trials are very expensive. To the extend that you can spend a few million to choose promising candidates for your clinical trials, big pharma is incentivized to spend that money.
FDA approvals aren’t as easily P-hacked given that you need multiple studies that come to the same result as academic papers.
It might be true that currently neither big pharma nor Calico employs people who are actually well qualified to run the exploration, but that’s similar to employing someone who’s bad at airplane design to design your new airplane.
People who fund billion dollar trials normally demand that they be run by relatively cautious people. That conflicts with the need for innovative models.
The good news is that there’s wide variation in how expensive trials need to be. The larger the effect size, the smaller the trial can be—see the TRIIM trial.
When it comes to illnesses, the system frequently is not in an equilibrium. Alzheimers in particular gets worse over time till the person is dead.
Clinical trials are very expensive. To the extend that you can spend a few million to choose promising candidates for your clinical trials, big pharma is incentivized to spend that money.
FDA approvals aren’t as easily P-hacked given that you need multiple studies that come to the same result as academic papers.
It might be true that currently neither big pharma nor Calico employs people who are actually well qualified to run the exploration, but that’s similar to employing someone who’s bad at airplane design to design your new airplane.
People who fund billion dollar trials normally demand that they be run by relatively cautious people. That conflicts with the need for innovative models.
The good news is that there’s wide variation in how expensive trials need to be. The larger the effect size, the smaller the trial can be—see the TRIIM trial.
Yes, that would be an equilibration timescale of infinity. The “slowest component” never reaches equilibrium at all.