Decline in Disruptive Science and the Need for Critical Thinking in Research
And Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials
In some rare moments, I write shorter pieces recommending articles to my subscribers that piqued my interest and contain essential information. This time, I want to share my opinion on a timely paper published earlier this year, which deeply resonated with my observations over the past couple of decades.
Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes1,2, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’3,4,5,6,7. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances8,9. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields10,11. Here, we analyse these claims at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric—the CD index12—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics1,13,14,15,16,17. Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.
Additionally, the researchers utilized linguistic analysis and other metrics to investigate the issue further. Notably, they observed a growing prevalence of common word combinations in titles and abstracts, suggesting that these phrases had been used in earlier works. This phenomenon points to a decline in the generation of novel combinations of ideas, a concept they refer to as "combinatorial novelty."
So, in simple terms, the study shows that there's been a decline in the use of new and diverse words in scientific papers and patents over time. This suggests that disruptive and groundbreaking ideas might be becoming less common in science and technology. After the paper was published, articles such as Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why (this article remained in open access for months, and suddenly got paywalled, here is the archived version, where you can read the full article) and a more egregious titled Is science really getting less disruptive — and does it matter if it is? the may title sound pedantic but it presents a few decent points, but its closing remark is the one to pay attention to.
The end result could be disruption or consolidation — or even a paradigm shift.
As weeks go by and I continue writing articles on various topics, a paradigm shift will likely become a recurring theme. But not only veiled criticism or double-speakish news articles were published, To boost disruptive science, and teach researchers critical thinking sadly paywalled.
The decay or lack of critical thinking in research is not a recent issue; it has been steadily growing since the early 90s, with some arguments suggesting that this trend began even earlier. The situation escalated dramatically in the early 2000s when the politicization of various aspects and the suppression of certain topics started infiltrating academia. I came across a compelling 2021 article that effectively presents the case for critical thinking in research.
Why is Critical Thinking Important: A Disruptive Force
Research anxiety seems to be taking an increasingly dominant role in the world of academic research. The pressure to publish or perish can warp your focus into thinking that the only good research is publishable research!
Today, your role as the researcher appears to take a back seat to the perceived value of the topic and the extent to which the results of the study will be cited around the world. Due to financial pressures and a growing tendency of risk aversion, studies are increasingly going down the path of applied research rather than basic or pure research. The potential for breakthroughs is being deliberately limited to incremental contributions from researchers who are forced to worry more about job security and pleasing their paymasters than about making a significant contribution to their field.
A Slow Decline
So what lead the researchers to their love of science and scientific research in the first place? The answer is critical thinking skills. The more that academic research becomes governed by policies outside of the research process, the less opportunity there will be for researchers to exercise such skills.
True research demands new ideas, perspectives, and arguments based on willingness and confidence to revisit and directly challenge existing schools of thought and established positions on theories and accepted codes of practice. Success comes from a recursive approach to the research question with an iterative refinement based on constant reflection and revision.
The importance of critical thinking skills in research is therefore huge, without which researchers may even lack the confidence to challenge their own assumptions.
Since 2018, I have been openly expressing my concerns about the widespread lack of critical thinking among people at all levels, from experts to the general public. Although this is a complex issue, its primary effects are observable and logical to deduce. One widely recognized aspect within the scientific community is the existence of what many refer to as "grant mills" and "paper mills." These represent an endless cycle where researchers publish papers to secure grants, which, in turn, leads to the publication of more papers to obtain additional funding. The second significant factor contributing to the problem is politics, which has infiltrated various aspects of scientific research and decision-making processes.
From the politics and policy entrenching itself in science to the over-politicization and political radicalization, they sowed seeds of new biases and hindered the objective pursuit of knowledge. Over-politicization often leads to cherry-picking of data to align with predetermined ideological narratives, and results are often interpreted and presented in a manner that aligns with a particular political agenda. This selective interpretation undermines the very essence of critical thinking, which should be based on the unbiased examination of evidence and the willingness to consider alternative perspectives.
The last three years stand as a compelling illustration of how these issues have unfolded, undermining and impacting the global landscape. This phenomenon can be observed across all sides of the political spectrum. It's no coincidence that the strategy of "Divide and Conquer" has been a consistently effective tool utilized by elites throughout history.
Now, the conundrum of our era revolves around one of my most significant "disagreements," albeit to put it mildly, with modern science and medicine: the notion of "Evidence-Based" practices. For nearly a decade, I have been a vocal critic of evidence-based medicine, particularly due to the aforementioned political problems that significantly influence it. This issue is compounded by the use of absurd linguistic manipulation, with the evidence-based movement potentially serving as one of the original behavioral nudges. Pharmaceutical companies share the other 50% of the blame for the sad state of both science and medicine.
I highly recommend reading the full article below, as it offers valuable insights on this matter.
Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed?
Investigations suggest that, in some fields, at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up, warn some researchers. They urge stronger scrutiny.
How many clinical-trial studies in medical journals are fake or fatally flawed? In October 2020, John Carlisle reported a startling estimate1.
Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies1.
Ultimately, a lingering question is — as with paper mills — why so many suspect RCTs are being produced in the first place. Mol, from his experiences investigating the Egyptian studies, blames lack of oversight and superficial assessments that promote academics on the basis of their number of publications, as well as the lack of stringent checks from institutions and journals on bad practices. Egyptian authorities have taken some steps to improve governance of trials, however; Egypt’s parliament, for instance, published its first clinical research law in December 2020.
“The solution’s got to be fixes at the source,” says Carlisle. “When this stuff is churned out, it’s like fighting a wildfire and failing.”
Scientific fraud and medical fraud have been running rampant in recent years, from the clinical trials of the mRNA and its manufacturers manipulating and hiding data to some of the biggest names in certain fields being caught literally faking their findings and research, the most recent case being Stanford University president, the second big name in Alzheimer’s research being ousted for doing this in just 9 months.
Several close friends, whose assessments and observations I deeply respect due to their similar perspectives on how science and medicine should be conducted, have also shared their concerns about the prevalence of "manufactured and counterproductive evidence" within the field of Alzheimer's research.
Uncovering these instances of fraud and identifying the flaws in the data can be an arduous and time-consuming process.
The current state of science, particularly with the viral speed of information dissemination through social media, poses significant challenges in refuting assertions or hypotheses, especially when it comes to time investment.
Called Brandolini’s law or “Bullshit asymmetry principle” it states “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”Virality and “influencer” status. Influencer status, or how big or cultish your following can now effectively dictate the direction of discourse, trickling down to how research is written or produced, thus cascading into societal effects
Statistical “massaging” (manipulation) is rampant, data manipulation is widespread, and “photographic” manipulation is also widely abused, meaning you take pictures of your cells doing X (X being what your paper proposes) and quite literally photoshopping what you want. Above all of these lies one only a handful of people talk about. Cellular metabolic manipulation and “cell timing”.
During specific tests, such as testing for certain immunological markers or types of cells, you can literally “game” your paper to demonstrate whatever you want by both gaming the metabolism (a simplified example would be more sugar, less sugar) and especially TIMING. Certain cells will “appear” in a test within 2, 6, or 8 hours. Others, 24 hours. The impact of these manipulations can be profound and challenging to detect, particularly when emulating the conditions present in the human body proves difficult in cell line studies.
A primary example is back when “bullshit” was being produced at alarming rates, in 2021, I started to find major flaws in a lot of the propositions of many doctors, especially many “alt-covid” personalities, who would later become big influencers. It took me 5 weeks, 16 hours per day to effectively “disprove” the bullshit, to no avail, to no change. Said influencer produced a preposterous and absurdly wrong proposition per week.
A similar principle, with merely different dynamics applied to its analysis, can be used to analyze both the paper mills and the trial “hacking”, being somewhat even harder to have any palpable effect. It is mentally and emotionally draining to deal with this, when you can observe, track and measure the damage some are doing, both to science and to people, leading me to a shift from friendly interactions to a more assertive stance, and my now known acidic personality.
It is not all doom and gloom for science and medicine, I am truly hopeful that AI will help solve this issue, although it will also help increase the problem at first, since this is a structural problem, not merely a human, or psychological one. With this, some of my readers may start to understand my perspective on certain topics.
As a personal reflection, in 2020, you contemplated the idea of developing a decentralized, crypto-based platform to fund decentralized research. The goal was to enable science to regain its momentum, facilitating new breakthroughs, and particularly fostering disruptive science which I believe is essential to our future. Before enacting on this idea or even discussing it with others, I decided to attempt to forecast the potential outcomes.
As irony of fate would have it, similar to what OpenAI, Microsoft, and other AI firms are doing with “reinforcing” and “aligning” their Language Models, in my pursuit of potentially creating a decentralized funding system for scientific research I was about to create the very thing I sought:
The next pandemic and widespread use of synthetic biology.
(The central theme of one of my next two articles).
Thank you for your support and for reading my work !
It is pretty telling that some of the best, often breakthrough or disruptive scientific papers in the last few years go little to no attention. Sometimes I find myself reading remarkable papers, truly novel and the little windows on the side showing "total reads 50", or a few hundred max.
Depressing.
Three dramatic areas in which research went down a completely wrong "rabbit hole" and wasted huge amounts of resources and time are in:
—Cancer research focusing on genetic damage of chromosomes and gene abnormalities instead of the mitochondria and cellular energy production.
— The-heart-disease-caused-by-cholesterol and the resulting Statin drug fiasco. A corollary is the promotion of the very unhealthy high-carb, low-fat diet, and the demonizing of healthy saturated fats and promotion of toxic industrial seed Omega 6 oils.
—T2DM Diabetes treated as a "chronic, incurable, and progressive disease" of elevated blood glucose instead of a curable natural response to too-high a consumption of carbohydrates (especially fructose!) combined with a sedentary lifestyle and suboptimal nutrition (including too much Omega 6 fatty acids), AND frequent snacking, especially on high-carb/high industrial seed oils junk foods.