Always the same warning signs
science.org
science.org
Computers mostly are
* well understood at every step (well, at least it was all designed by humans and the bits and bobs do what they say on the tin).
* mostly involve producing some kind of output for everyday normal people to use, in the end.
So they are easy to understand and evaluate. Even some investors can manage it.
Biotech stuff seems to mostly involve making tools for other technicians and scientists. And the process by which is works is some ridiculous, quirk-laden byzantine madness that evolution happened to throw together. At least from an outsider point of view it seems like an absolute nightmare.
While biotech companies carry a lot of all-or-nothing R&D risk, their “product market fit” is all but guaranteed. Their addressable market size is well known based on patient numbers and how much they can charge nationalized healthcare agencies and insurance companies based on quality of life improvements is well understood. Once they have premarketing approval, they’re all but guaranteed an exit to one of the pharmaceutical giants. The most promising ones get acquired in phase II before efficacy is even 100% demonstrated.
Look no further than IPOs: on HN we lament all the unprofitable public tech companies but the average biotech IPOs pre-revenue! Before it’s even legal for them to sell a product! That’s increasingly been the case since the 80s due to the exhaustion of small molecules and other low hanging fruit.
In practice, scientific due diligence is harder to fake than aspirational user growth numbers which are far easier to game (case in point: Reddits ongoing bullshit). The FDA isn't going to let anyone put a dozen people at risk of death in phase I trials without a level of due diligence that puts all VCs to shame.
That's why all those "I tell you about my secret to making 5 grand a day if you click the link below, for free" youtube ads are obviously all scams.
Imagine every time you needed to troubleshoot something in a computer, you had to break out the multimeter. But the multimeter only works for one specific thing, which is an indirect measurement of the phenomena you’re actually interested in and trying to troubleshoot. Also the multimeter has some serious flaws and biases that make it seem like it’s working, but everything you get out of it is wrong and leads you to misinterpreting your results. That’s what its like to do biology.
A lot of innovation and progress is made when new tools to probe what’s going on in biology are invented. For example, cell viability assays used to be conducted by literally counting the number of live cells vs dead cells. Now, you can use a photometric test that’s extremely easy and takes a lot of guesswork out of the assay and makes it routine.
Researchers fundamentally need more of those types of assays to make life easier. And that’s where the dream and the profit people in biotech are chasing after.
What disturbs me sometimes is that many people in software engineering approach debugging like empirical science. Run experiments, gather data, fit some curve, essentially. In the end, a program is a product of the mind. It's pure logic, and fundamentally it's understandable, unlike the real world which can at every turn have new surprises for you. We should think more and measure less.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pick-and-shovel-play.as...
The way computer (and especially internet) companies work is that once you have a working product, you can sell it a practically infinite number of times for practically zero marginal cost.
This means that the successful software/internet companies are INCREDIBLY profitable, since they can sell the same product millions of times.
Are startup investors good at predicting which company is going to be successful? Oh god no, they are awful at it. 90% of the companies they invest in fail completely.
It doesn't matter, though, because they only need one success to make all those failures worth it. The cost of investing in a failure is WAY lower than the cost for NOT investing in a success.
This means they don't really care that they can't evaluate which companies will be successful, they just cast a wide enough net to not miss the successes.
In other words, if this single product the company is working on succeeds, then the unit cost can be brought down so much that it's still a gold mine.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/14/20804029/wework-ipo-tec...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25926188
The problem appears to be that our present text conversation climate is such that you must either pick Team Science or Other Team, and should you mention that there are faked results hiding in plain sight, people get upset because they think perhaps what you're saying is "Maybe vaccines do cause autism" and "Maybe HCQ does cure COVID-19".
But that's not the truth. There is no monolithic Science entity. It is a property of every organization that reward-alignment is a stronger long term mechanism than fact-alignment. And it is impossible to direct the two in the same direction. This means that among the science establishment, there will be those who have ruthlessly optimized for the reward.
This is part of why the general Internet arguer's approach of "There is some evidence that X is Y look at this study url://url.url/url.pdf" is often the blind leading the blind.
Non omnis scientia est scientia.
And some people treat it as a quasi belief system, which makes sense, with precepts like 'the world is deterministic, causes precede effects' and so on. You could do worse. But they aren't scientists and they don't generally grok that science is an activity whose output is sometimes useful models and not 'Truth'.
My mental model here is that you thus get people who trust in science as a paradigm, who then see doubt or skepticism as aimed against the whole edifice that is part of their fundamental understanding of the world, resulting in discomfort and leading to expected results.
In other words pretty normal stuff that resembles when you come across an argument whose implications are opposed to your principles, that you suspect of trickery, but lack the rhetoric to dismantle yourself.
Part of the exasperation of "Team Science" is that so many from "Team Other" are not acting in good faith. Most of "Team Other" doesn't actually care about getting to truth--they only care about winning (for some value of that--the leaders grifting and the followers "sticking it" to the other team).
Assume that you consider yourself unable to evaluate the truthfulness of scientific claims.
Being told that claims you'd thought were properly vetted are actually wrong, then means that you have no way to know if other claims are accurate or not.
If your process doesn't work, then any knowledge based on that process is called into question.
Biotech companies are developing new technology, in a highly regulated environment where, like other comments point out, there's a predictable economic niche. They only share a denomination, the dynamics are wholly different.
You can experiment quickly, and you aren't super susceptible to lock in on any particular vendor that would eat your profits
Making copies is also basically free
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug...
That's when you think you're smart enough to be there, but you're really not.
I don't know how much this happens, but in areas such as education I think it could happen, as the criteria for most tertiary, and some secondary, educators isn't competency in teaching, but competency in a subject. And teaching effectively, especially to a large class, is quite hard.
I could be one of those. But the thing is: a) one can rarely tell. And b) one way to look at imposter syndrome isn't that everyone is actually great while feeling terrible; it's that most people are quietly struggling in a lot of ways, which they see in themselves, but which are hidden from others. We could mostly be (and likely are) mediocre.
So I can be struggling for real, and be a real "impostor", and be doing fine relative to the average population of my peers, all at once. I see many ways I'm struggling with things my peers seem to breeze through, but I might not see the ways I'm succeeding where they're quietly struggling themselves, and vice versa.
May you find your proper niche!
https://www.deviantart.com/eldahast/art/Foolproof-way-155527...
I did actually Submit that when I wrote it. Getting to the front page is kinda a crapshoot, of course.
It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I never broke a sweat. I never developed study habits because I didn't need them. One semester my junior year, my friend and I just spent one week in early November doing the entire semester's work, some late, some early. The rest of the time I could spend doing dumb shit and also hacking away on my computers.
I did so well I got into a college where I was annoyingly average. By the time I developed some semblance of study habits and realistic sense of my abilities, it was too late to get my GPA much above 3 (this was before grade inflation was much of a thing). In graduate school I finally got my shit together and learned to just work, but I wasn't in as elite of an environment anymore thanks to my performance in undergrad.
I had wanted my whole life to be away from the normies in high school and once I got there, I didn't love it. It was humiliating. But that was good for me. Realizing you're 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in a million is probably much more realistic. And also annoyingly, this is exactly what testing when I was like 7 years old told me, but the illusion of being in an exurban high school made me think otherwise.
Now I read we are shaped more and more and more by our experiences at around age 18. That's the music you hang on to and even, I read this week, the politicians we hang on to. I love to think I'm different, but I really am part of Generation Clinton. I really am not 1 in a million or 1 in 100,000 even.
I think a lot of the kinds of people drawn to tech had similar experiences in their formative years. You see a lot of posts here with ideas about reforming education, but schools need to get everyone through, not just the 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100 types. In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
So my interpretation of what you're writing is that people just get used to being the smartest guy in the room. Some may like being around others like that, but if they're honest I bet most people don't. They should!
The lamest possible source turned me around on this. I was listening to Howard Stern (not my parents, not my friends, not my teachers) rant about how when he did his movie he found the movie people interested in building stars up, but his background in radio was all about burning people down and recycling them. I decided I liked building people up more. The karma didn't take long to pay me back.
When you're anonymous on the Internet, nobody knows if you're full of shit or really pack the gear, so we see a lot of bullshit words to add the kind of credibility you might see from a resume.
> In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
Programs for regular and exceptionally gifted students do exist in the US, but this varies state-to-state and district-to-district.
The best "reform" I've thought of to address almost everything you've mentioned is to teach kids, early on, about failure. That it isn't the end of the world, what they can do to try to identify it happening, and how they can recover from it. Though like anything else this has to be done in moderation, as people who keep failing eventually give up entirely.
Also, I wasn't screwed over. I live a charmed existence that I am thankful for every day. (=
eta: 100% agree we need to teach kids about failure. I understand the concerns about too much, but right now I don't think they are exposed to enough.
There are some magnet schools for highly gifted or aptitudinally talented students, including an online one: https://www.davidsongifted.org/the-davidson-academy/
But yeah, the situation for regularly gifted students is often as you say. And any school program that truly held them to higher standards would also end up penalizing them with lower grades that would make them look non-competitive to highly selective universities.
> but right now I don't think they are exposed to enough.
Except those in the bottom 25%. They are human too, and deserve a good, well-tailored education.
Anecdotes are plentiful.
My dad was against my going there; I wouldn't be able to talk to ordinary people if I was only ever around those "gifted" kids.
I suppose there's something to that; I cited this article:
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite...
by a guy who didn't know what to say to the plumber standing in his kitchen, whereas I'd much rather be around people like that than the Reverse Imposters.
Naively it might seem that this could lead to bullying, but from what I read it tends to work really well. The older students aren't threatened by the prodigy.
I don't recommend it. I recommend letting kids accelerate, but right now the consensus seems to be accelerate most people who need it at 9th grade, not 7th, and definitely not before. As with most of these things the consensus goes back and forth, but that squares with my lived experience.
The recommendation you cite conflicts with Miraca Gross's recommendation for exceptionally gifted students, but they will be a minority of those who can grade skip.
The kid is always going to be off from their age group, which is not regular people
The modern age-cohort school system is the historic exception. Prior to it single-room schools were common. And prior to those apprenticeships in which some of the apprentices or journeymen were older and younger were common.
Heck, in my neighborhood kids were older and younger. I remember getting advice from an older neighborhood kid when beginning elementary school (the part I remember is that lunch boxes weren't cool, and to use a paper bag instead).
You're right in that being the single odd-ball is unusual. But I think it would be better to just make partial and full grade skips more common than to make them rarer.
You see it all over HN too, for instance, people coming up with a "new" idea, writing a blog post about it, and self-promoting as if they've contributed something novel.
Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution. Suppose I give an exam to 30 people, and the results are normally distributed around a score of 70 with a low of 40 and a high of 97. The bottom of the distribution may accurately predict that they scored about 40 on the exam, but if you ask them how they performed relative to their peers, they will believe that they are about average and guess that a sizable portion of the class performed worse than them. Alternatively, if you ask the top performer who scored a 97, they will say that they think they scored about 97, but they will think maybe a few other people scored higher and maybe that the average was in the high 80s. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that people are actually pretty good at accessing their own knowledge without being a good judge of how knowledgeable others are.
Put differently, isn’t this saying it’s a misattribution of confidence? In the context of the original claim about investing, that seems very relevant.
Look through any etymological dictionary and you'll see this phenomenon. What does a computer have to do with "to strike" in PIE? Something! But it's not the literal meaning.
That's _not_ Dunning-Kruger
It's why people say "and I" as an object and don't know what question begging is or whatever. It just doesn't matter in the long run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dunning%E2%80%93K...
It started as a syndrome. I don't think it would survive Wikipedia's modern standards if it hadn't generated its own support by existing in a different era.
I like it. Better than "reification."
Fantastic to learn from in terms of seeing lots of varying opinions with different arguments
It seems obvious to me that Substack assesses your quality as a writer by checking on click-throughs from various sources and I would wager good money that they pay out differently depending on the behavior of the users who follow those links, either algorithmically in realtime or whenever it comes time to renegotiate terms. It's not even 2+2 here, Bob.
PS: morality is more than just "would someone else do it". Don't make me start quoting cliches typically reserved for 5 year olds.
Maybe you should try writing something people like to read. Come back and tell us how it went.
Tell you what: all publicity is good publicity. Why don't you mention my book titles next time?
Thanks junior, the issues you found were real, even if small, and things will be better when I return and fix them.
(I just loved that use of capital letters!)
They have gobs and gobs of money to invest. Rich people chasing ever riskier rewards just handing money to them! They have to find something promising to throw it at. But who is it going to? Evidently, a lot of it goes to founders whose primary skill is storytelling. I used to think, no matter how handsome and smooth and persuasive you are, you at least have to have a little substance behind your enchanting narrative and ivy-league mannerisms. But here we are with failure after failure (and a once-a-decade colossal failure like Theranos) where all the warning signs were visible to someone not under the spell, and these bullshitters are still getting funding shoveled at them.
It's pretty sad that "look like you know what you are doing and convince gullible people" is probably the best future career advice I can give to my school-age daughter.
It's been my experience that you can't tell who's smarter than who by what they do for a living. On the whole, no group is actually smarter than any other group.
> It's pretty sad that "look like you know what you are doing and convince gullible people" is probably the best future career advice I can give to my school-age daughter.
I don't agree with that takeaway. I think the takeaway is that confidence is the primary thing that people take as a proxy for competence. It's not really about gullibility as much as people engaging in a heuristic. So learn to fake confidence, but have the chops to back it up.
I suppose it depends on the definition of smart which I understand as intelligent/good rational decision making but maybe you mean somthing else.
Two pianists:
Autistic savant syndrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Paravicini
https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_paravicini_and_adam_ockelfor...
Acquired savant syndrome:
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/derek-amato-acquired-s...
I doubt a biochemist would have savant syndrome. It's possible, maybe. It would probably look like someone who could recall all of the enzymes (and their variants) and intermediates in various biosynthetic pathways and could tell you without research which enzymes would need to be expressed together to get from one starting chemical to another.
I assumed they meant professional investors are smarter about evaluating potential investments. Not generally smarter, just smarter about what they put their money into.
I guess when I think of professional investors picking some of these dogs, my mind imagines that scene in Moneyball[1] where the old timers are trying to pick baseball players by who "looks good," "has a good jaw," "how the ball sounds when it pops off his bat, and "what the player's girlfriend looks like."
On a practical level, there's also the matter that, even if some fund managers do beat the market, some other fund managers don't, and it's hard to tell which is which. By going with an actively managed mutual fund, you take on "how do I know my fund manager is one of the good ones?" risk, which you don't have with index funds.
There are always exceptions of course. But it is most definitely true that (for example) the average IQ of people doing high end physics is way higher than the average IQ of people laying bricks.
This is the law of averages. Almost never true.
This first sentence indicates that they are writing about individuals with a vocation, not a group average. Statistically, in developed countries, any given manual laborer is likely to be less smart than any given venture capitalist, but Elon Musk, for instance, has been both. If you'd randomly picked him, in December of 1989, from the pool of manual laborers, you would have been wrong.
And my threshold for having "too much" of these is pretty low...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
That was not my intent. The point of the essay was exactly the opposite. Maybe I fall for the same stuff, but Eliezer is a very smart guy who was predisposed (as he makes clear in the essay) to believe that the people he met were all fluff. He was surprised that they were not just demonstrably knowledgeable, but, in addition, had other appealing characteristics.
That's really the only way you ever could do it. But the key words there are "reasonable" and "sensible". Reasonable and sensible things don't revolutionize the entire world. They're not brand new, unprecedented technologies. It's not sensible to claim you'll create a ten-billion-dollar+ market overnight. It's not reasonable to claim that a problem that 10,000 smart scientists have worked on for decades was just solved in an unexpected way by this twenty-something "wunderkind" upstart and no you can't see behind the curtain. And yet these people get hundreds of millions in investment anyway. That's the question: why the hell did that ever sound reasonable; why the hell did those numbers ever look sensible!?
I would like to think that you would want your daughter to get more out of life than just raw cash.
"you can't cheat an honest man" definitely applies.
It's a greater fool shockwave, pretending to buy into something and betting that you can get someone else to buy into it before the bottom falls out. Not that you know for sure the bottom will fall out, but if you're going to buy in based on how marketable the pitch is, examining it too hard might weaken that pitch or make it fall apart. In that case you've wasted time and money and have to find something else. If you're committed, the last thing you want to do is examine the business; you're shortening your bullshit runway.
IF the company agrees, but then shows fraudulent data, then you are fucked.
to conflate movie quotes, a fool and his money were lucky enough to get together in the first place, and we just can't help ourselves
Theranos was unreasonable on the face of it. VCs were among the conmen, rather than the marks
Is there a mechanism for betting against a pre-IPO company?
Lack of short-sellers increases fraud, it doesn't reduce it. Nobody spreads more anti-short seller animus that people trying to commit fraud.
That's not how I meant it. I was thinking more generally about pre-IPO companies that you think (for reasons that you can legitimately use when investing in this manner) have dim prospects.
If it is a fraud you're rewarded, if it isn't a fraud, you're punished
The marks are screwed regardless, but they're betting against you, claiming that it isn't a fraud, against your evidence that it is
Got to stop thinking that people with money are smarter than anyone else.
Abolish Venture Capital.
No matter what is the case, legitimate mistakes made by egotistical scientists compounded by negligent management or outright deceit and fraud, it is amazing that hundreds of millions of dollars were invested before it was discovered.
Sometimes I lament the fact that I feel nervous asking for a raise even though I have demonstrably provided value and delivered massive projects. One the other side of the spectrum is the gall to ask for 100 million with nothing to show. It sometimes feels like there is a missing middle.
It's like when you watch a movie with a twist that you didn't see coming. But then you go back and re-watch it knowing the ending and you gleefully point out all of the places the film makers put subtle clues which you didn't catch. Imagine telling the ending to a friend. He then watches the film and says: "how could anyone not see the twist? it was so obvious the entire time!"
What seems in hindsight as "withholding data" might have been seen at the time in a completely different light.
It reminds me of situations I heard stories about at two workplaces. Both were cases where a new hire was given a task to complete. They were giving excuses, showing partial progress, dodging inquiries. In both cases the new hire lasted over 3 months before it was realized they were doing absolutely no work at all. In all cases it was obvious in hindsight but during the course of the deception all of the excuses added up.
These patterns of bad research tend to go on for a while because the involved people might be powerful and in any case calling them out requires effort and exposure, not because discovering that unreasonably defensive behaviour hides bad research is a surprising "twist".
Sadly, the replication crisis in science shows that the causes are equally present in purely academic settings as well. Status, power, job security or ego can be as powerful as money and the effects can corrupt someone subtlety and even entirely unconsciously. It's good to remember that no human is immune from confirmation bias or self-deception.
Yeah. How many times have any of us had what seemed like a good idea, tried it, and found it didn't work? It just takes a little more effort to try it a few more times thinking that something was wrong. Eventually you might get a result due to random chance. And at that point you've convinced yourself that your idea was a good one all along.
The reality is that as long as there is no liability for passing the buck (ie the scammer's and middemen's beloved caveat emptor), the system continues to encourage bad players.
There is liability for knowingly passing the buck. VCs have been sued before.
With hundreds of millions on the line, is it so much to ask that VC firms employ a couple statisticians to at least do a sanity check on the data? Fake data can often be identified as fake.
I'd think a smaller VC would be more conservative with their risk, while a large one would be more liberal, in that the larger VC could withstand more failures to get the even bigger infrequent wins
So those people are supposed to assess the science. We never hear their names.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
VCs: How the hell you put 100MM+ in a company without having a 3rd party verify that the "thing" works ?
But in the last couple years there are so many cases of outright data falsification from famous scientists’ labs and in Science/Nature/Cell publications.
It seems even worse than the social science replication crisis, and with worse consequences.
If you do really well with life sciences, you'll convince people that you've got a miracle cure, while convincing regulators that you aren't selling a miracle cure. Like an ivermectin
Brilliant writer!
Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
You haven't proven you know how to do something until you've done it twice.
There are certain aspects of my life that are informed by a general dread that some day I will leave my house and never be seen again. For instance I try to tell tell people I love them when we part, even if I'm mad at them, in case those are our last words for a long while, or forever.
If I really thought I was doing something at work that would forever change a corner of the world, I'd be super paranoid that the secret could die with me. That's the perfect recipe for me overworking. If I can't trust anyone with the information (eg, intellectual theft), then I positively vibrate. If I told people and they don't care, I have to finish it enough that I can demonstrate why they should care.
"The first test result is an error. The second is a coincidence. If the third lines up, then you might be getting a hint of a result."
As in: if you can't reproduce it reliably, you have nothing.
An experiment gets you a little money and attention to try it a few more times. A few successful runs in different lab conditions should let you get a little money to start systematizing your experiment, and that should get you money and attention from industry, manufacturing.
That has always been an 8 year process at the best of times (most things take ten). Seems like a lot of people don’t have that sort of patience anymore, and they try to make things go from lab to shopping cart in three years or they endlessly loop on generating news articles (aka bullshit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk#Official_probe_a...
Open-source research is thus the only kind of research that should be allowable with public funds, and closed-source proprietary research shouldn't be publishable in any research journal. If people want to invest in the latter they'll be the ones responsible for due diligence, I suppose.
but they don't care, they don't share....