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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research, and so I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.

Is this a field you've been following closely, or am I listening to the equivalent of a person with no interest in quantum mechanics complaining that nothing new has happened in quantum mechanics?

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> I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research,

Man, you guys keep finding fun new ways of saying "if you don't like what I like, you must be uninformed".

Instead of doing that, inform me: what revolutionary new finding in SDOH have we discovered in the last 20 years? Prove me wrong.

> I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.

That's called a metaphor. Feel free to substitute any other example that you feel better illustrates the concept of "studying a question we already know the answer to".

Knowledge is always fractal, so it's not particularly responsive to argue that there might be something we don't know about the thing we've already intensively studied. Of course there might be...but when there are lots of questions we don't know the answer to, it's smarter to focus on those, instead.

Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.

Here's another one: a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural. I.e. two neighbors living side by side in suburban America, the one who perceives themselves to be rural will have dramatically worse outcomes than the one who perceives themselves to be urban/suburban.

These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans.

You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?

FWIW, the specific cited research where she's trying to quantify the health impacts of living near pollution sources is actually important for e.g. lawsuits where people try to hold corporations accountable for poisoning their children. Any value in that?

> Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.

This isn't revolutionary. But it's a perfect example.

This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.

> a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural.

OK. Great. I'm poor if I think I'm poor. Roger.

> These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans. You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?

I don't know! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!

> This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.

Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao. There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?

> I don't know [how to mitigate health disparities]! You tell me how your "potentially useful" information provides a solution. Win me over!

Huh? I didn't claim to have all the answers lol, you did.

> Yes, just like approximately everything we've learned about cosmology in the last 100 years are completely derivative conclusions from relativity lmao.

OK, cool. Let's not do more of that, then. I just said that I could see the difference between the questions, and that they're not likely to get funding elsewhere, not that we should absolutely fund more black hole space telescopes.

> There's what, <5 things we've discovered that are not completely derivative over 100 years and billions of dollars of research?

No. Not in the same class as "are poor people sicker than rich people", or "does gravity cause things to fall down". Next question.

FYI we've discovered precisely 0 (zero) things in cosmology or physics more broadly, or even material science, in the last 100 years that aren't derivable from relativity lol.

Does your tirade copy/paste to that entire field too?

>This is a completely derivative conclusion from something I learned in molecular biology as an undergrad. The only "new" thing here is saying that poor people live in environments, since we've known for literally decades that DNA methylation is affected by environment.

It's one thing to theorize a causal relationship, but informed policy-making needs actual data that can only be obtained by legwork. What aspects of the social/cultural environment are we talking about? What genes are being expressed differently? What are their estimated health or economic impacts?

It wasn’t a “theory” (at least no more than any other scientific fact), and telling me that someone found a relationship between two things doesn’t tell me that someone proved the relationship was causal.

But sure, let’s say I accept your (implicit) assertion that this genetic relationship is solid, causal and clear. How does it help solve the problem? It’s a perfect example of research that does nothing except making people feel virtuous for doing the research. Academia is loaded with this stuff, and if you point out that it’s a waste of time and money, you get indignation and faux outrage for having the temerity to “question discovery”.

Y’all keep coming back with “there are always things we don’t know!” as if this is somehow an argument for funding literally any question (and any bad methodology) that someone labels as “science”. It isn’t.

Realistically yes, science and academia are loaded with "waste". The vast majority of questions there's nothing interesting or useful to discover. The problem is that we don't know ex ante which questions fall into that category (except you, obviously, you do know this, but just don't want to share the secret sauce)

And no I think people are coming back with "there are things we don't know that seem highly relevant to understanding and improving our population's wellbeing." The two ingredients to fixing a problem are knowledge and action and it's not scientists' jobs to be doing the action part, and while one could argue we have all the knowledge we need, a reasonable counterargument is that the only way we know we have the knowledge we need is when action is taken (and successful). And we're obviously not there yet.

> Realistically yes, science and academia are loaded with "waste”

Yes!

> The problem is that we don't know ex ante which questions fall into that category

No! You’re acting like we have no idea what might happen if we make another observational study of some minor variant of the same question we’ve been asking for 20+ years.

This is not some magical ability that I have. It’s just the willingness to say that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, and not waffle on obviously derivative work, simply because that work tickles my political fancies.

> and it's not scientists' jobs to be doing the action part,

Cop out. Nobody is asking scientists to solve the problem. The request is merely to stop wasting time and money doing work that cannot possibly discover anything new, even if done exceptionally well. The Nth marginal observational study into structural determinants of disease X in location Y adds nothing to our knowledge, has no ability to add anything, and probably isn’t even done well in the first place. Yet there are hundreds of these things published every year.

The truth is that this kind of derivative research gets done not because of demand or pure intellectual interest, but because that's what the funding agencies are willing to fund. We should stop that.

> while one could argue we have all the knowledge we need,

No! There’s tons of things we don’t know. The people wasting their time on this work should be forced to investigate those questions, instead of re-treading the same tired topics.

I already described very precisely what this particular researcher's work (if true to description) would be valuable for. Quantifying the harm of things we know is bad is very important for pursuing lawsuits and writing laws. Would you like to comment directly on that claim?

And yes I agree broadly there is a lot of waste (and foreseeable/detectable waste) that falls into this category, but it seems like you're either suggesting that you know the specific targeted programs fall into this category or you're comfortable assuming that all the programs of this shape fall into this category.

> It’s a perfect example of research that does nothing except making people feel virtuous for doing the research.

You could say the same for basically any of the fundamental sciences since none of them translate to any appreciable short-term economic value. What is the point of continuing research in physics or mathematics? Math theorems don't convert immediately to industrial output. Why invest even one dollar into astrophysics instead of having people stargaze on their own dime? Should the US outsource basic research to other countries?

That result is hilarious, I really love it. If I have to guess perception of rural means they adopt what they think of as rural food and lifestyle which leads to worse health, can't say without reading the paper of course, but still its hilarious.

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