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Trials and errors: Why science is failing us (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...trials-and-errors

science

shared by Benno Hansen on 10 Mar 12 - No Cached

Because scientists understood the individual steps of the cholesterol pathway at such a precise level, they assumed they also understood how it worked as a whole.
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In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism.
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although people talk about causes as if they are real facts -- tangible things that can be discovered -- they're actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a "lively conception produced by habit".
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causal explanations are oversimplifications
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our theories about a particular cause and effect are inherently perceptual, infected by all the sensory cheats of vision
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searching for correlations is a terrible way of dealing with the primary subject of much modern research: those complex networks at the centre of life
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scientists have mostly managed to work around this mismatch as they've continued to discover new cause-and-effect relationships at a blistering pace. This success is largely a tribute to the power of statistical correlation, which has allowed researchers to pirouette around the problem of causation. Though scientists constantly remind themselves that mere correlation is not causation, if a correlation is clear and consistent, then they typically assume a cause has been found -- that there really is some invisible association between the measurements.
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the reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns
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all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations
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a cause is not a fact -- it's a fiction that helps us make sense of facts
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a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot
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the average cost per approved molecule will top $3.8 billion (£2.46 million) by 2015. What's worse, even these "successful" compounds don't seem to be worth the investment.
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We assume that more information will make it easier to find the cause
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Our habits of visual conclusion-jumping take over. All those extra details end up confusing us; the more we know, the less we seem to understand.
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a small subset of "nonspinal factors", such as depression and smoking, were most closely associated with episodes of pain
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Given the increasing difficulty of identifying and treating the causes of illness, it's not surprising that some companies have responded by abandoning research.
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We live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we can't understand or haven't considered or don't think matter.
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Although our reliance on statistical correlations has strict constraints -- which limit modern research -- those correlations have managed to identify many essential risk factors, such as smoking and poor diet.
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the R&D to discover a promising new compound now costs about 100 times more (inflation-adjusted) than it did in 1950. It also takes nearly three times as long.
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even when we know everything about everything, we'll still be telling stories about why it happened
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