The Mistrust of Science
<i>I suppose you could try opening new universities but my sense is that a cultural shift back is already underway on university campuses, it&#x27;s just in a nascent form at the moment.</i><p>I&#x27;m European, and I&#x27;m pretty sure that my definitions of left and right don&#x27;t match yours (I&#x27;m pretty sure the definitions aren&#x27;t even constant within my own country)... Could you elaborate on this shift, or what exactly is meant with left-wing vs right-wing research findings?<p><i>Ah but tremon! I did selectively disallow computer science!</i><p>Yes, I noticed. If I were uncharitable I&#x27;d say you were hedging your bets.<p><i>If you&#x27;ve ever walked into a Church (cue solemn organ music) and refrained from chatting to your friend about whatever Richard Dawkins said this week</i><p>So you&#x27;re arguing that US universities, which should be prime locations for open discourse, are actually dogmatic, oppressive power structures. That&#x27;s fair, I guess, and not an assertion that I can refute. I can only tell you that that characterization does not apply to the North European universities I have seen.<p><i>Are Alzheimers or Cancer(s) treatments at this level of effectiveness?</i><p>It took us more than 100 years of proactive treatment to get to that level of effectiveness in combating polio, and polio was known as a contagious disease for centuries before that. Alzheimer&#x27;s didn&#x27;t get classified as a separate disease until 1977. Science doesn&#x27;t do miracles; using Alzheimer&#x27;s as an example of &quot;failure of science&quot; is showing really unrealistic expectations.<p><i>fundamentally you&#x27;ll get a different reaction from a patient with polio</i><p>Polio has never been 100% deadly. Alzheimer&#x27;s is, and cancer can be (lung cancer still has only a 10% survival rate).<p><i>Experts in these areas are very worried about the big picture.</i><p>Can you expand on these worries?<p><i>If the majority of &#x27;medical discoveries&#x27; are unreproducible, then maybe most of the practitioners are not actually doing science.</i><p>It&#x27;s good that you included &quot;maybe&quot;, because that does not follow. Yes, there is much shoddy science. Medicine really is not unique in that aspect. Verification studies are not valued, so they&#x27;re not performed. The lack of independent verification also makes the primary researchers lax. But luckily, the best solution to shoddy science is more science. If all the people decrying the state of overall &quot;science&quot; would spend just as much time arguing for more replication studies, the world would be a much better place.<p>For the rest of your objections: yes, progress is incremental. It always has been. Before we put a man on the moon, we had people in low orbit, then high orbit. Before we sent humans in space, we sent other animals. Before we sent animals, we sent only a rocket. And since we&#x27;ve been to the moon, we have succesfully landed probes on asteroids. We have performed soil analysis on Mars. All of those steps were just as incremental as the lunar landing.<p>Finally, in my view the lack of apparent progress since the 1980&#x27;s is because of state divestment around that time. Many government-sponsored research benefits were privatized around that time, which meant that the benefits of the research ended up in a few rent-seeking silo&#x27;s (big pharma being one of them).