- Richard Shiffrin et al: Illusions of Understanding in the Sciences.
A marvelous overview of various pitfalls in thinking which I will have to read again and with great care to fully understand. As is often the case, the concluding paragraph gives one a good idea of the flavor of the whole text:
At the least, the difficulties of understanding should make all scientists both skeptical and humble, knowing that ‘truth’ is an ever receding goal. We must realize the full range of possible illusions and appreciate that they occur in all approaches. We can reduce false insights and achieve better understanding by embracing diverse theoretical perspectives, research methods, and modes of analysis. This requires constant intellectual humility towards our own theories, models and methods. This recommendation unfortunately competes with forces in scientific societies that foster overstated claims and conclusions: Faced with millions of publications each year, scientists must fight for attention, readers and citations in the research marketplace, and journal editors must seek impact factors, submissions, and readers. In addition, scientists’ beliefs in overstated claims are subject to biases that occur more broadly. Thus, scientists can exhibit trust that increases beyond what is justified for mentors, friends, colleagues, same institutions and affiliations, famous scientists at leading universities and research centers, and decreases for women and minority authors. Do scientists realize the extent to which such factors operate and are they adapting to their existence?
- Jeffrey S. Flier: Drug Development Failure. [Note: ᔥMax Marchione on X. ]
The subtitle is “How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990”, and it attests to a 30-year delay in bringing these revolutionary drugs to patients, because someone at Pfizer thought they understood what was going on. So the pipeline is even more broken than I thought.
- Greg Wilson: Sex & Drugs & Guns & Code.
A series of well-referenced historical vignettes whose purpose is to bring tech-adjacent people closer to worldviews other than “the toxic strain of neoliberal capitalism favored by venture capitalists and their gushing fans in the tech media.” But you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy his notes on selfishness, corporate psychopathy or people being human in a crisis, to pick a few recent ones.