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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

Just 7% of studies that do a preliminary study on humans actually get through phase 3 and get approved for use. This is before even the preliminary point, its a tooth (or even a tooth analogue) in a petri dish. No idea if the material will be safe in a human mouth yet.

There is a lot of hyping of results in medicine papers in general but its not really their fault. The entire academic world is being forced to publish or die as governments look to measure results from the science they instead get what is measured and everyone has to embellish the importance of what they found and always find positive results.

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Despite how obtuse the current administration views are, this has been true for decades. The churn of new papers and hype around medicine/biotech is nothing new.

Says nothing about endemic reproducibility crisis of the social sciences.

Since student loans have been basically guaranteed (bankruptcies can’t erase student loan obligations, in an attempt to push rates lower) and tuition steeply rose, academic institutions’ ratio of administrators to students has skyrocketed to a bureaucratic mess, leading to a flywheel of higher education costs and incentivizing research for money’s sake over impact to the field.

Real impact would be reproducing notoriously iffy studies, but that doesn’t bring in the dollars.

KPIism is the death knell of modern society. In the 90s and 2000s this mantra of "measure and improve" took hold like a virus. It is in all instances I observe a rats race where everybody just starts to look for the cheat-codes instead of "doing-the-right-thing".

Arguably America is the pinnacle of this right now, where (many) politicians and (many) business leaders now feel justified do whatever's legal just to score points. I would argue this type of thinking was birthed in the UK though under Thatcher who as a first step removed the general trust in (civil servants in her case) your fellow human beings. Blair then came up to replace that trust with KPIs.

We need to get back to a world where we trust people to do the right thing - without measuring their success in short-term KPIs.

MBAs are the source of KPIism. We have spent many decades minting them at scale in the USA and now the chickens are roosting. Anything can be ruined by pursuit of KPIs at all costs. The model is to optimize a particular KPI, get your bonus, use this story to get your next job at +$X, leave, repeat. The longer story of the company does not matter, you shipped and got paid, even if the village burned down after you left.

> The entire academic world is being forced to publish or die as governments look to measure results from the science they instead get what is measured and everyone has to embellish the importance of what they found and always find positive results.

It sounds like they're running it like a business.

Over time, any large business trends to increase in bloat and inefficiency, and focusing on inappropriate metrics is a big part of that.

This eventually leads to competitors taking over and those business failing, which usually results in people losing their jobs.

When governments get equally incapable, and competitors take over, it tends to be a lot more violent.

> This eventually leads to competitors taking over and those business failing

It's important to note that "eventually" usually takes so long that it might as well be forever.

> This eventually leads to competitors taking over and those business failing

If only that fairytale were true. In the real world bloated inefficient companies bribe government, install themselves into government agencies directly (regulatory capture), and hire lobbyists to write laws which protect them from pesky upstarts through unchecked anti-competitive practices and anti-consumer regulation allowing them to stay wealthy and in power forever while killing off innovation and progress.

...which I suppose is why IBM is still the industry leader in computing, while Ford, GM, and Chrysler can't be competed with. Photographers always use Kodak film, and we all talk on our Nokia cell phones. We all shop at Sears, and fly on Pan Am.

I never claimed that companies can't fail or change, only that bloat and inefficiencies aren't a death sentence. Even several of your examples are still alive and well and it's telling that their major declines took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Companies have gotten a lot better at abusing government and law to protect their profits over the last 40 years.

Companies have gotten a lot better at abusing government and law

Comments like this always seem to lead to calls to give the government greater power to rein in those companies.

I'm not claiming these abuses don't exist. But there's no reason not to also look at them as the government getting a lot better at taking advantage of companies, to protect their offices. If you look at it in this context, it should be clear that increasing regulatory authority is far from a solution: it's actually counter-productive, creating tools to facilitate ever-greater abuses.

OK, look at Boeing. When is it going to improve or fold?

>IBM is still the industry leader in computing

IBM's stock price is 10 times what it was in 1991. What the hell have they even done in that time?

They don't have to be whatever you think is "industry leading in computing", because apparently just once being worth something was enough to enrich an entire generation of management while the rest of us struggle.

>Ford

Despite decades of failure that led to their struggles in 2008 and an increase in energy costs, they didn't die, and despite then selling several lines of cars that had serious defects that should no longer happen, they abandoned selling anything other than overpriced trucks and are STILL doing just fine.

>Sears

Sears was murdered to enrich a few already wealthy people. At no point did it do worse business.

Do you know which companies you didn't even mention that do not support your claim? All the gigantic conglomerates that own you.

From Disney owning a giant chunk of all media and setting national IP policy, to Sysco being one of the only food service companies because they ate all the other ones so now every restaurant is stuck selling the same food as most prisons, to Nestle owning most of the grocery store so they can sell you water that they pumped out of your aquifer for crazy rates while complaining they couldn't be profitable without slave labor, to Dupont poisoning the entire earth, to fossil fuel companies that set national energy policy, to most farming in the US being beholden to a single legal entity, to the vast majority of "Brands" in the US just being a label change of a product they did not design.

You seem to be under this absurd notion that as long as the brand name on a couple consumer items changes occasionally (due to the kinds of technological innovations that we will never see again and cannot be predicted or relied upon), everything is fine?

A lot of this is the direct result of trying to run a government like a business. If we instead left some things that are unprofitable but important to government then we'd probably get better results than having businesses do those things expecting a profit. This was the model in the 30's, 40's and 50's that led to the "golden age" that people are now trying to recapture.

The 1940s you get for free, what with the war and all nothing was ever going to be very tolerable. But what about the 1930s is a "golden age" in your opinion? What exactly is it from that era that you wish we had more of?

Look, I'm just trying to represent as best I can the sentiment that drives a lot of this regression to how things were in the early part of the 20th century. I agree completely the depression sucked. My grandparents on both sides lived through it and you could see how much it sucked in the habits they cultivated. You'll get no argument from me.

The golden age people are trying to recapture is the aftermath of a world war that decimated almost every major power except the US and then the US happily rebuilt everyone’s economies in exchange for riches and power. The 21st century looks very different and only really MAGA folks are looking to rewind the clock as a way to move forward.

The economic theory of MAGA, is that the united states yes rebuilt the world but also exported the US consumer economy through asymmetric nonreciprocal tariffs. Rebuilding countries made money by selling to the US consumer, not the other way around.

You can argue that it's overall bad for the economy, but I think you're missing the arguement.

You're describe an age where the government was a wash with surplus dollars. Secondly, most of these research institutions run as non-profits that effectively just cover costs (but run a large hedge fund as a side business)

The escalation in costs have come from: - Incentives around US News College rankings (and the amenities that drive the rankings) - Administrative (non-teaching, non-research) bloat

Research is definitely in need of reform though, but not sure these outcomes are actually causal or even corrilated.

>You're describe an age where the government was a wash with surplus dollars.

Hey, good point. We should really bring back that 90% top tax bracket rate to get the government back to being financially solvent again.

The government has a spending problem, not an income problem.

Every spending problem is also an income problem. Whether you see it as a spending problem or an income problem is really just showing whether you value the things we spend money on or not.

Yes, correct.

In the 20s-40s (pre-ww2), tax revenue was ~2% of GDP. It is currently >20% of GDP

It's a spending problem. You're anchoring on a talking point with out actually running numbers.

Don't believe me, run the numbers yourself.

I think your 2% number is extremely misleading.

From what I can see, taxation as GDP percentage was never really under 10% since 1950, while big cuts to the top tax rate happened in the 60s and 80s (and the federal budget was continuously in the red since mid 70s basically, with one brief exception before 2000).

OP was specifically talking about the 20s, 30s, 40s but just to add a complete picture.

Just to add some empiricism to the conversation

Fiscal Year Tariffs/Customs Individual Income Corporate Income Top Marginal Rate Receipts (% GDP)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1928 14.0% (approx) DNF DNF 25.0% DNF

1935 8.4% 14.6% 14.7% 63.0% 5.1%

1940 6.1% 13.6% 18.3% 81.1% 6.7%

1944 0.9% 45.0% 33.9% 94.0% 20.5%

1952 1.2% (approx) 42.2% 32.1% 92.0% 19.0%

1960 1.3% (approx) 42.0% 23.0% 91.0% 17.8%

1970 1.1% (approx) 46.0% 18.0% 71.8% 17.9%

1980 0.8% (approx) 47.0% 12.0% 70.0% 18.9%

1990 1.3% (approx) 45.0% 9.0% 28.0% 17.8%

2000 1.1% (approx) 49.0% 11.0% 39.6% 20.0%

2010 1.2% (approx) 41.0% 9.0% 35.0% 14.6%

2015 1.3% (approx) 47.0% 10.0% 39.6% 17.6%

2019 2.0% (approx) 50.0% 7.0% 37.0% 16.3%

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DNF=Did not find

- Tariffs fell from ≈14% of receipts in 1928 to <1% by WWII -> income taxes replaced trade duties.

- Individual income taxes overtook all other sources after 1943

- Corporate shares peaked during war mobilization (~⅓ of revenue in 1944–52).

- Top marginal tax rate was surprisingly not too corrilated to government revenue.

(REALLY wish HN did basic markdown formatting)

> Top marginal tax rate was surprisingly not too correlated to government revenue

Yes. Which is interesting, but also makes sense if you assume that a frequent goal is to shift the tax allocation between wealth classes (adjustments to top rate would be somewhat compensated by other changes).

I think it is always too easy to find arguments for almost any position in data like this, because the overall picture changes dramatically over just a few decades; wealth/income percentiles become qualitatively different as GDP grows ("workers class" pre WW2 is quite different from the same income percentile now) and the data is noisy too, so if you squint you can interpret almost anything in there.

In a perfect world, we would have twenty identical Americas with fixed tax policies, and be able to compare their development over decades; what we have is instead a bunch of different nations radically changing their behavior basically every time a different government comes into power, and many conclusions are inevitably just educated guesswork.

Totally in agreement that we always read a lot from the conclusions based on data. Data often obfuscates.

I do think, however, that empiricism is a better framework for grounding outcomes in reality than pure ideology. Pure ideology (either way) is usually just confirms biases by cherry picking data.

you're describing this during an age where trillions of dollars are spent for the military industrial complex, which makes it hard to believe that there's not enough money. priorities are just...the way they are.

That was my conclusion when I attended... 15 years ago. You're not a student, you're a product.

Is there a way I can search for the studies that recently got approved? Somehow setup an alert for it?

You could follow the NIH news feed that contains some of what gets funded but its actually quite difficult given the various institutions all over the world that all fund studies including charities and the universities themselves. On an individual topic with time you could learn who most of the major players are and follow their news but its unique to every topic.

The potentially easier way at least to get a lay of the land is to follow pubmed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) for the topic you are interested in, if you then look into those papers you will find funding statements as well as the place the research was conducted and use both to build up a picture of the origins of research in a field.

Afraid I don't know of an easier way not a generic one anyway. Sometimes you just have to follow the right person on twitter who announces trials or studies or be at the right conference. Start with pubmed and the output papers and that will get you started. Then also have a search on the NIH and that might lead you to some links to groups and institutions they fund.

You could look at ClinicalTrials.gov, you can quite easily search for completed, phase 3 trials example.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?aggFilters=phase:3,status:...

Publish or perish is more about status & careerism within academia than any sort of govt forcing function. If you don't publish, you are invisible to your peers and your career stagnates, regardless of the govt funding environment.

It is entirely their fault. If no one agrees to do performative research, the problem will be solved.

The problem is some people prefer an academic lifestyle in exchange for doing performative research.

Yes there are other actors eg politicians demanding performative productivity, but mostly it’s the inmates running the asylum.

Academia is one failed western institution amongst many, and those failures are ultimately directed by the actions of the individuals that comprise those institutions.

This is a fallacy: "If no one agrees to do performative research, the problem will be solved."

It is like saying, if everyone stops subscribing to OnlyFans or liking spicy pics on Instagram, it will go away.

There will always be sycophants willing to do "performative research" or ... other things.

Why would I want to stop liking spicy pictures though :P

"Performative research" sounds far more NSFW than it has any right to in the context you've placed it.

If everyone stops subscribing to OnlyFans, why will OnlyFans exist?

So long as funding is granted to do performative research, it will continue to exist.

But it’s granted by the same people that perform performative research.

Academia is beyond broken.

The bad drove out the good.

It's not necessarily performative research just because a pop science author wrote a catchy, exaggerated headline about it

> It is entirely their fault. If no one agrees to do performative research, the problem will be solved.

Right, and the prisoner's "dilemma" isn't a real thing; everyone knows it's their own fault for not just all picking the decision that gives them all the best outcome. Every individual within a network effect is obviously responsible for the outcomes the entire system produces.

Everyone is responsible for their own actions, yes.

They're not responsible for the situations that end up encouraging certain actions though, and they shouldn't be blamed for not being able to solve the collective action problem[1]. I'd argue that the only blame that's fair to place on them in situations like this is from direct results of their individual actions, not the propagation of incentives that are beyond their power to change regardless of their own individual decisions.

If you're willing to blame someone for not acting against their own individual interest, doesn't it make more sense for it to be the people who are going out of their way to reward others for acting in that way?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

Na, not buying it.

Evolution creates a situation that encourages all sorts of terrible actions, and the vast majority of people choose to control their animal instincts.

Additionally: the people who encourage the performative research are the people who control grant review. And those people are the same people as the performative researchers.

A bunch of people figured they could make a career doing bs performative research and corrupted the whole system to serve them.

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