Adam Mastroianni nails it:

When people revile a degree from Harvard’s Extension School and revere a degree from Harvard College, they’re saying that the value of an education doesn’t come from the fact that you got educated. It comes from the fact that you got picked.

Alas, it is a paid post, and the more I encounter those the less I think of Substack and — this is not rational, I know — people who use it to blog. Because that is all Substack is: a blog with an optional, easy to implement paywall. I am not a fan.

The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, two American scientists for their discovery of micro RNA:

The pair began studying gene regulation while they were postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of H. Robert Horvitz, who won his own Nobel Prize in 2002.

And so the Nobel family tree grows.

From the Institute For Progress-supported newsletter, Macroscience:

Last year, IFP brought together some of our closest friends and collaborators to put together a podcast series that would serve as a beginner-friendly introduction to metascience.

The result? “Metascience 101” – a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement. We investigate why building a genuine “science of science” matters, and how research in metascience is translating into real-world policy changes.

So far so good. First guests?

Journalist Dylan Matthews sits down with economist Heidi Williams and IFP co-founder Caleb Watney to set the scene.

Bah-rump. Episode two?

OpenPhil CEO Alexander Berger interviews economist Matt Clancy and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison to talk about whether science itself is slowing down, one of the key motivating concerns in metascience.

A journalist, an entrepreneur, two economists and a policy wonk gather around the fireplace to talk science. What seems to be missing is actual scientists. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

And if your retort is that few if any scientists have metascience as there full-time field of study, well, are any of the above doing it full time? I am sure the discussions will be brilliant — I will write up updates as I listen along — but the start looks a helluva lot like an echo chamber. Hope I’m wrong!

(↬Tyler Cowen, because who else. He will also be a guest in a future episode.)

Here are a few unrelated articles that crossed my inbox this morning:

• “Studios start at $1,927”
• "$1,134: The amount I paid for my round-trip cross-country Amtrak ride"
• “A six-bedroom apartment costs about $50,000, and the maximum income for a family of four is $160,000."

The latest episode of The Talk Show was with Taegan Goddard, who all the way back in 1999 founded the blog Political Wire which is apparently a continuous intravenous drip for people interested in US politics. Now, I’ve had other preocupations back then and not being an American citizen still have little to no interest, so this blog wasn’t even on my radar until listening to the episode. But now I wonder: are there any more relevant blogs I’ve missed out on, about medicine and biotechnology in particular?

ChatGPT’s first pass was mediocre. I’ll save you the verbalist padding, but here are its suggestions in response to my prompt: “Is there a website/blog like politicalwire.com or daringfireball.net but for biotechnology?”

• Endpoints News
• Fierce Biotech
• STAT News
• In the Pipeline
• Xconomy

It’s a 20% hit rate: only Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline comes close to what I asked for. The others are all medium to big news outlets that yes, focus on biotech, but that’s not what I asked for. The second try, after I asked for more like Lowe’s, was a tad better:

• Timmerman Report
• The Niche
• The Biotech Strategy Blog
• Leonid Schneider’s For Better Science
• Science Translational Medicine Blog

That’s more like it! 80% now, and if I were feeling generous I’d give it a full 100% since In the Pipeline is, in fact, a Sci Trans Med blog. But then I asked for too much, and it hallucinated 3 more, two of which were hallucinations (BioPunk and BiotechBits, which were at least plausible names) and one was a sub-blog of Endpoints that also didn’t exist.

So, now I have two new blogs to follow (Timmerman Report and The Niche; Biotech Strategy is behind a paywall and I’ve already been following the others), and an ever-increasing urge to update the Blogroll, which has been under construction for the past five months with no end in sight.

I had Linus Lee’s blog The Sephist filed under “Paused and Defunct” for a while now, but he is back at it. Although most of the subject matter is out of my wheelhouse this mental model of Motivation as a function of Exploration (or was it the other way around) rang true — certainly truer to the scientific method than what my 6th-grader has been hearing at school.

An interesting entry to the big and ever-growing book of unintended consequences:

Chernobyl caused many more deaths by reducing nuclear power plant construction and increasing air pollution than by its direct effects which were small albeit not negligible.

(ᔥAlex Tabarrok)

Andrew Gelman has a new — and free — textbook out, Regression and Other Stories. From the cover:

Many textbooks on regression focus on theory and the simplest of examples. Real statistical problems, however, are complex and subtle. This is not a book about the theory of regression. It is a book about how to use regression to solve real problems of comparison, estimation, prediction, and causal inference. It focuses on practical issues such as sample size and missing data and a wide range of goals and techniques. It jumps right in to methods and computer code you can use fresh out of the box.

Between that, his Bayesian Data Analysis and many other freely available lectures and books, has there ever been a better time for high school students bored out of their minds by the pedestrian curriculum? But I am now just projecting to myself from 20-some years ago — I am sure high school students of today would rather spend time on their PS5, and my past self would probably have joined them. (↬Andrew Gelman)

Good quote today from Adam Mastroianni’s latest newsletter:

When I see someone salivating over the idea of a Science Gestapo, I have to marvel at their faith that authorities only ever prosecute guilty people.

Applies more broadly than science, of course.

Why haven’t biologists cured cancer? asks Ruxandra Teslo in my new-favorite Substack newsletter, and answers with a lengthy analysis of biology, medicine and mathematics. Clinical trial costs inevitably come up, and I know it is a minor point in an otherwise well-reasoned argument but this paragraph stood out as wrong:

Clinical trials, the main avenue through which we can get results on whether drugs work in humans, are getting more expensive. The culprits are so numerous and so scattered across the medical world, that it’s hard to nominate just one: everything from HIPAA rules to Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) contribute to making the clinical trial machine a long and arduous slog.

What happened here is the classical question substitution, switching out a hard question (Why are clinical trials getting more and more expensive?) with an easy one (What is the most annoying issue with clinical trials?). Yes, trials involve red tape, but IRB costs pale in comparison to other payments. Ditto for costs of privacy protection.

If we are picking out likely reasons, I would single out domain-specific inflation fueled by easy zero-interest money flowing from whichever financial direction into the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, leading to many well-coined sponsors competing for a limited — and shrinking! — pool of qualified sites and investigators. It is a pure supply-and-demand mechanic at heart which is, yes, made worse by a high regulatory burden, but that burden does not directly lead to more expensive trials.

There are some indirect effects of too much regulation, and at the very least it may have contributed to more investigators quitting their jobs and decreasing supply. They also contributed to regulatory capture: part of the reason why industry has been overtaking academia for the better part of this century is that it’s better at dealing with dealing with bureaucracy. But again, these costs pale in comparison to direct clinical trial costs.

Another nit I could pick is the author’s very limited view of epigenetics: if more people read C.H. Waddington maybe we could find a better mathematical model to interrogate gene regulatory networks, which are a much more important part of the epigenetic landscape than the reductionists' methylation and the like. But I’d better stop before I get too esoteric.