Any regular reader of Value Walk knows that despite my opinion that Taleb is arrogant, he is one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Taleb has three books, but The Black Swan is the best (one of the best books I ever read), and is required reading for all Value Walk readers. Below are some recent musings from Nassim Taleb.
The Industrial Revolution
Terence Kealey, who we mentioned was not a historian and thankfully, not an economist, in The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, questions the conventional “linear model”— for him, universities prospered as a consequence of national wealth, not the other way round. He even went further and claimed that like naive interventions, these had iatrogenics that provided a negative contribution. He showed that, in countries in which the government intervened by funding research with tax money, private investment was decreased and moved away. For instance, in Japan, the
allmighty MITI (Ministry for Technology and Investment) have a horrible record of investment. I am not using his ideas to prop up a political program against science funding, only to debunk causal arrows in the discovery of important things. The Industrial revolution, for a refresher, came from “technologists building technology –academic science did not influence them”, or, what he calls “hobby science”.
Controlled experiment can easily show absence of design in medical
research: you compare the results of top-down directed research to randomly
generated discoveries. Well, the U.S. government provides us with the
perfect experiment for that: the National Cancer Institute that came out of
the Nixon “war on cancer” in the early 1970s. Morton Meyers, a practicing
doctor and researcher, writes in his wonderful Happy Accidents:
Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs:
Despite the Herculean effort and enormous expense, only a few drugs for the
treatment of cancer were found through NCI’s centrally directed, targeted
program. Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant
extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer
drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the
discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the
Vinca Alcaloids –a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed
research.
We did not realize that cures for cancer had been coming from other
brands of research. You search for noncancer drugs and find something you
were not looking for (and vice versa). But the interesting constant: is that
many of the results are initially discovered by an academic researchers who
neglects the consequences because it is not his job --he has a script to follow.
Or he cannot connect the dots because he is a nerd. Meyers uses Darwin as
the ultimate model: the independent gentleman scholar who does not need
anyone and can follow a lead when he sees it.
(fitback to some academic researcher)
Mustard gas in Bari in 1942, a classified information
{list of medicines}
Le Fanu
p 179 – The therapeutic revolution of the post-war years was not
ignited by a major scientific insight, rather the reverse: it was the
realization by doctors and scientists that it was not necessary to
understand in any detail what was wrong, but that synthetic chemistry
blindly and randomly would deliver the remedies that had eluded
doctors for centuries.
(He uses for example the sulphonamides identified by Gerhard
Domagk].
Full link here-http://fooledbyrandomness.com/birds.pdf
