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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the decline of this style of testing is one reason the rate of progress is lower today.

It's almost certainly a factor, in the same way that improvements in safety standards and stronger adherence to them have slowed progress and increased cost in construction (and many other fields).

I don't think it's controversial to state that. Where it gets controversial is in what value judgements you place on it, because to a large extent it boils down to 'how much human life are you willing to risk for how much progress?'.

Less of an issue if it's an individual choosing freely to risk their own neck, but hard to distance even that from whatever safety culture and norms surround them. Perhaps less people take these risks today because it's no longer the norm in their field.

Of course if it goes really bad(fatal or stroke or something), you just lost years of expensive science education just to test a drug that's not gonna work. Sure it's faster if you get it right, but the if you do the math on doing this as the standard method it would quickly be fae too costly to society.

At least that's my take on why this is perhaps not the most ideal methodology in terms of opportunity cost.

Definitely shouldn't be considered "standard", the value judgement would be left to the inventor who decides whether or not to take it.

This. I live in Africa where I estimate we have at a minimum a few decades to go to catch up with the world when it comes to everyone having a decent house to live in. Trouble is in the towns some of the modern construction rules have slowed things down considerably. No I am not advocating for having no rules but I contend that when the more advanced countries started building hundreds of years ago they didn't have to contend with modern building laws we are having to contend with.

What is interesting is that there are no building codes to conform to in the village. So you can build as you please.

New construction slowing down isn't too much of a problem if the construction lasts longer and costs less to maintain.

When you a few hundred years behind most of the world it is a problem. I don't know of any building in sub Saharan Africa that predates the colonialists. I know Egypt and North Africa do have old buildings but not where I am from.

Result is overcrowding and people living in shacks.

great zimbabwe and other ruins in southern africa predate the colonists others like benin city were destroyed by the colonists

I get your point but I was specifically refering to houses in cities that people live in. The majority of houses were mud huts in Zimbabwe and these were not dwellings passed on from generation to generation. This is contrast to cities like London were some buildings have been standing for hundreds of years. This means new generations are not starting building from scratch.

What makes you think new construction would last longer? If anything, new innovations in building techniques and materials are optimized to be cheap and last just long enough.

You have nothing to support your claim of "rate of progress" and drug safety is significantly improved from fifty years ago when drugs would turn out to have mutagenic effects on unborn kids and such.

Possibly, also possible this type of testing worked great when the low hanging fruit was available. When there was easier discovery of miracle molecules.

Lots of great stuff in the pipeline right now, including for obesity.

The difficulty of progress depends on what you try to treat. Otherwise healthy people get pain and swelling. Otherwise healthy people get HIV (my dad is on the patent for one of the world's best-selling HIV drugs). If you concentrate research on afflictions of the dying, progress is harder.

Not really because any good scientist knows a unblinded, uncontrolled sample of 1 doesn’t tell you much.

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