Globally Rational

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McCain’s top VP prospect, Bobby Jindal, apparently believes that Intelligent Design is “the very best science.” When talking about the subject, he mentioned that “The way we’re going to have smart, intelligent kids is exposing them to the very best science and let them not only decide, but also let them contribute to that body of knowledge.”

So apparently, he seems to believe that we not only need to teach Intelligent Design in schools (as he mentioned earlier in the speech), but that kids should be able to “contribute to that body of knowledge.” I’m curious… since when are we allowed to “contribute” to Intelligent Design theories? I was always under the impression that the Bible (and other religious texts) are non-negotiable… how can kids contribute to the body of Christian knowledge?

He also mentioned that he doesn’t want “any facts of theories withheld from [his kids] because of political correctness.” Personally, I was always under the impression that we keep religion out of public schools for reasons much more important than “political correctness.” I thought that we lived in the “Land of the Free” where you could get through school without being subject to a certain mandatory religion.

Sure, we can teach our kids religion… I’m not opposed to religion as a concept. But this is the sort of education that should be restricted to personal homes. If you want to teach your kids to be Hindu or Mormon or Baptist or Muslim, it’s not my problem… but if you want to feed a certain religion to my kids, it’s suddenly a big deal. Kids go to school to learn facts based on empirical evidence, not to learn a certain prophet’s interpretation of the truth.

Are you ready to see Bobby Jindal as the next Dick Cheney?

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Yesterday, I wrote about how we’re incentivizing scientists to stop innovating. In that post, I promised to suggest some solutions today. Here are some things we can do to foster increased scientific innovation:

• We should require institutional research boards (IRBs) to include more scientifically knowledgeable personnel, so that decisions can be made by scientists instead of lawyers. Also, IRBs should be required to publish their membership - like several universities are already doing (i.e. Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.) - so that they have an incentive to hire more qualified people. According to one of my commenters yesterday, many top-class universities do have more qualified IRB members; however, this is not true at many large non-top-tier public universities. This will solve problems #1 and 2 (see yesterday’s post).
• As I wrote once before, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) should become the only source for publications. This will eliminate many slowdowns caused by a scientific journal’s in-press time. As long as the peer-review system is kept intact (I also have a plan for this, but it’s outside the scope of this post), there is no drawback. This will solve problems #3, 4, 5, and 8 (see yesterday’s post).
• There should be a specific minimum wage scale for scientists with PhD’s. Right now, it really doesn’t pay to become an academic researcher; most potential researchers end up going into industry, going to pharmacy/dental/optometry/podiatry/medical school, becoming engineers, or doing something other than science. This will solve problem #6.
• NIH and NSF should objectively score/rank all researchers in terms of the quality of their research (it doesn’t have to be a precise score; they can just get titles such as “expert” and “newcomer”). This way, tenure committees can look at these ranks instead of requiring an arbitrary number of publications, thereby solving problem #8.

I think that if we implement these regulations, it will drastically improve scientific productivity and, consequently, our overall society. Any objections?

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In today’s world, a culture of innovation is integral to advancement at the same rate that we’ve seen in the past century, especially in the medical field. Unfortunately, some scientists have done a few unethical things in the past; because of this, we’ve decided to severely restrict all scientific research. Here is how we’re giving our scientists incentive to restrict themselves:

• The members of Institutional Research Boards (IRBs), which supervise all human-related research, are often (but not always) lawyers and not scientists. This gives them an incentive to reject anything that they think might become a legal liability, without any knowledge of the scientific background. For example, one of my projects was recently rejected because nobody had ever done it before, so they couldn’t be sure that it was safe (despite the fact that any knowledgeable doctor/scientist could tell you that there were no risks involved). In summary: they wouldn’t let me do it because nobody has done it before… if that’s our attitude, then how will we ever move forward?
  
• The IRBs are deathly afraid of interfering with patient care. They once rejected my research proposal because I needed to analyze the patients’ snot (yes, their snot) . Normally, the nurses just throw it away… but I couldn’t get IRB approval to analyze the trash.
• As I wrote previously, the current peer-review system, because it is run by private journals instead of a public library (which the National Institute of Health is working on, but they don’t have enough political support), takes months or years to make “novel” research available to the scientific community. This slows down every process, since my research (which takes a year to publish) is usually based on somebody else’s research (which takes a year to publish), which is based on somebody else’s research (which takes a year to publish), and so on.
• Because of this slowdown, researchers have a strong incentive to wait until they have a lot of data before they publish any of it. This means that a very simple experiment must be repeated many times before it can be shared with other scientists; I have my name on one important paper, for example, that was written in 1997 but still hasn’t been published because the lab doesn’t have the resources to repeat one insignificant (but expensive) experiment. If we could just put our data into a public library of science, then other scientists could use it in their research… but the private journals want control over all information.
• This slowdown also causes many different scientists to perform the exact same experiment because they don’t know that anybody else is doing it.
• The National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation are always low on manpower and money. This is because to train a good scientist, it takes about 12-16 years (4 years of undergrad, 4-6 years of grad school, 4-6 years of postdoctoral fellowship) and they end up getting paid less than a person with an MBA, which is much easier to get. If we raised scientists’ salaries, we’d have much more incentive for people to go down that track… but that would require more tax money.
• Pursuit of tenure is the main incentive for young scientists to succeed in their research. Unfortunately, most universities only offer tenure to people who publish a lot of papers and the quality of the research is less of a factor. This causes scientists to spend their effort on easy, quick research instead of slower, more important projects.
  I’ll cite the example of my boss: after he became a professor, he came up with a great idea and decided to pursue it. He published a few groundbreaking papers and filed a patent, but was denied tenure because he failed to publish the minimum of 12 papers in his first 7 years. Now, his patent has brought the university $10 million in the last three years (no other patents even brought $500,000 last year) and will bring at least another $40 million over the next 10 years. If he’d pursued the expected plan instead of trying to get his invention off the ground, that $50 million would have ended up going to a drug company.
  Because of those first 7 years, he is no longer eligible for tenure.
• Most researchers are always competing with each other for grants. For this reason, they have a strong incentive not to share their research with other scientists until it’s published… they’re afraid of their ideas being stolen.

Most of these problems are caused by rules and regulations. The rules are written like that because they want to avoid any possible legal/ethical problems and because they want to save money wherever possible. Tomorrow I’ll write about my proposed solutions (I promise that tomorrow’s post will be shorter).

EDIT: Click here for the post with the proposed solutions.

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About 200 years ago, the mathematician Thomas Robert Malthus famously wrote an equation predicting that the human population would soon reach the planet’s ecological carrying capacity, causing many of us to die off because of the lack of food and resources (just like what we have often seen with other species). He expected it to have already happened well before 2008 (especially because of the rapid population growth of the last 200 years), but we’ve managed to stave it off thanks to the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing more and more articles suggesting that the hunger crisis is on its way to reaching epidemic proportions.

The UN is expecting that this lack of food will kill about 100 million of the world’s current residents, suggesting that we’re on the brink of a cap in our population. When everybody tries to share an inadequate amount of food, nobody gets enough… so this could lead to bigger problems in the future. As growth continues in some parts of the world, the increased number of mouths to feed will eventually mean that we’ll see the mass die-off that Malthus predicted. It seems like we’re following either the orange or the green trend on the graph (see right), since such a huge negative shift couldn’t possibly be on the same order as the red line.

The Malthusian catastrophe is not unexpected; we’ve expected it for a long time, but we managed to delay it with new technology. The biggest question has just been the timing of the effect, an it seems like we’re on our way there now. Odds are that it won’t directly affect you, since you’re obviously well-off enough to be reading this in your spare time, so we probably won’t bother to do anything about it. Recently, for example, Sam’s Club and Costco set a purchasing limit of 4 bags of rice per customer per visit… which is 3 more bags than I’ve ever bought.

We need to ask ourselves if we care enough to really do something about this.

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Anybody familiar with the US medical system would completely support New Zealand’s junior doctors in their recent strike. After all, American resident physicians (our counterpart to the Australian “junior doctor”) are overworked (recently, the government limited the work week to 80 hours) and underpaid (~$40,000/year) despite the fact that they’re licensed physicians. They also get no vacation and no time to themselves. I think it’s about time that they expect more.

Here’s why you’d be wrong: Junior physicians in New Zealand make twice as much money (~$88,000/year) in much less time (50-60 hrs/week) than their American counterparts. They also get 6 weeks of vacation every year and 2 weeks off for conferences. They’re going on strike, without much regard for the 1,000 patients who will be left without medical care thanks to the already understaffed hospitals, for 48 hours. The reason is because their colleagues in Australia make a little bit more money than they do.

Here are some reasons why the resident physicians in Australia deserve more money than those in New Zealand:

• Australia’s cities have a higher cost of living than New Zealand’s.
• Australia’s per-capita GDP is 40% higher than New Zealand’s, meaning that an average Australian makes 40% more money than an average New Zealander. Why should doctors be an exception?
• It’s harder to become a doctor in Australia now, as most Australian schools are moving towards graduate medical programs rather than undergraduate programs.
• Citizens of both countries are allowed to freely travel (and work) in either of the two, so any physician in New Zealand could work in Australia if he/she was able to get a job… if they’re in New Zealand, that means one of two things:
  (1) They don’t want to go to a more expensive country just to make more money.
  (2) They can’t get a job in Australia because they didn’t do well enough in medical school.

The junior doctors in New Zealand want a 40% pay increase over the next 3 years. Apparently, they believe that they should make just as much money as people who are in a more expensive country and spent more time in school.

If that’s how things will go, then American resident physicians are the one who really deserve a raise… here, we have the highest cost of living (of the three countries), the most difficult medical admissions process (requiring a full 4-year bachelor’s degree before you can go to med school), the most demanding medical school curriculum (medical students rarely have a social life), and the longest residency work hours (70 hrs/week).

Not surprisingly, New Zealand’s medical curriculum doesn’t include a class in economics.

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I recently put up a guest post on another person’s blog about my perspective on global warming, as one of the rare scientists who actually enjoys writing about issues. Click here to check it out.

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I think we can all agree that the advancement of science, especially medical science, is of paramount importance. So why is it that the National Institutes of Health, among other similar institutions, are always low on manpower and money?

I think that the NIH needs to establish a nationwide (or, preferably, global) network of peer-reviewed scientific journals. At the moment, all we have is private journals that take months or years to get “novel” research out into the public domain. It is such a long and complicated process that many researchers don’t even bother to report small findings, so other researchers end up repeating tests that have already been done. Meanwhile, some important research ends up fading into oblivion because the private journal has private business-related issues; for instance, one project that I was working on in 2005 had been complete since 1997, but hadn’t been published because the reviewers didn’t like my boss (and so they were being unnecessarily nitpicky). That paper still hasn’t been published, and the results could have been very important if they had been reported.

Because of these sorts of pressures, researchers are increasingly motivated to make a paper perfect before they try to submit it. This means that they often perform unnecessary tests (which have already been done, but they just repeat them to make their paper seem better) which waste time and cost money. If NIH created a public system for publishing quality research, all of these problems would be eliminated, allowing the general body of science to advance much farther and faster. So why hasn’t NIH done this yet?

Well, to give them some credit, there are people who are trying to make it happen. But at the moment, the private journals are still intermediates in the process… currently, they are trying to implement a policy where NIH simply takes recent (1 year-old) journal articles and re-publishes them in a free online database. Although this is a step in the right direction, it still doesn’t solve the problem of unnecessary delays in research. Our problem is that NIH is afraid of the private journals. They don’t want to force them out of business, so they haven’t created a public domain.

My rebuttal is this: if we can streamline a public peer-review system, the overall scientific improvement will be drastic. This will allow everything to happen so much faster that it will help us save millions of lives. Are we really willing to sacrifice those millions of people in exchange for a few hundred jobs?

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