Comment by mometsi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mometsi | Hacker News Reader

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A reliable career-advancing publication in the life sciences often follows the pattern: Look, everybody! We've found a genetic marker for X! Here's how we sequenced the organisms, and here are the stats we ran to identify this particular gene or constellation of genes.

This was exciting research in the 90s, but now gene sequencing is routine and the results just get added to the pile. It's scientific chum.

This book's authors, the review author, and the editors at Nature who decided this review was worth publishing and under what headline, would like to coordinate a shift away from this kind of low-impact publication.

To make significant contribution, you can't just identify a marker for cancer or dinosaurism: you need to actually attempt to cure cancer or turn people into dinosaurs.

It's not like that kind of research is value-less though. It's still important to do that kind of thing, firstly for practical purposes such map is useful, and secondly it can help with building a more fundamental theory. (The same is true of the "particle zoo" before the Standard Model was developed in Physics). I don't think stopping doing it means you'll get the big breakthrough any faster, in fact it'll slow things down.

It seems people think that, if we just focus more on Kuhn's "revolutionary science" instead of incremental, "normal science", we'll get more paradigm-shifting theories.

It could just be that paradigm-shifting breakthroughs are exponentially harder to find, and that it's not just a matter of "we just didn't look hard enough"

"We found a genetic marker for X" is even more fuzzy when talking about something like Schizophrenia or Autism, because the diagnosis itself is very far from a precise label. It's not just about missing environmental contributions or dealing with how complex interactions between different generic markers are, though these are also issues. We're averaging over probably dozens of different issues in the vast majority of studies, and that extends to other subfields of biological psychiatry too.

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