I don’t think that believing in root causes motivate such interventions. Complex systems with feedback loops don’t necessarily have root causes.
To the extend that big pharma throws objects in the air to see whether they fly, it’s because they millions they spent to evaluate whether the object is a good candidate are not enough to analyse the existing literature to get to root causes.
In addition to big pharma we have billions going into Calico to reason in a structured way about where to attack aging.
A system with feedback loops generally equilibrates on roughly the timescale of its slowest component, so in that case we’re using “root cause” to refer to that slowest component. See Homeostasis and “Root Causes” in Aging.
… millions they spent to evaluate whether the object is a good candidate are not enough to analyse the existing literature to get to root causes.
I don’t think that big pharma actually makes all that strong an effort to understand root causes, nor are they particularly incentivized to do so. The way their market is structured, even a marginally-effective drug can be sold at a high price, with lots of marketing, and lots of people will use it because there just aren’t good options and people want something. It’s the signalling theory of medicine. Even to the extent that pharma companies are incentivized to hunt for root causes, it’s the sort of problem which is inherently hard to hire for—someone who doesn’t already understand how to structure such investigations won’t be able to distinguish actual competence from a top-tier PhD. Much easier to invest in p-hacking plus marketing.
(They do have an incentive to look like they invest in understanding root causes, though, which is a great use for those top-tier PhDs. The executives probably even believe it.)
A system with feedback loops generally equilibrates on roughly the timescale of its slowest component
When it comes to illnesses, the system frequently is not in an equilibrium. Alzheimers in particular gets worse over time till the person is dead.
I don’t think that big pharma actually makes all that strong an effort to understand root causes, nor are they particularly incentivized to do so
Clinical trials are very expensive. To the extend that you can spend a few million to choose promising candidates for your clinical trials, big pharma is incentivized to spend that money.
FDA approvals aren’t as easily P-hacked given that you need multiple studies that come to the same result as academic papers.
It might be true that currently neither big pharma nor Calico employs people who are actually well qualified to run the exploration, but that’s similar to employing someone who’s bad at airplane design to design your new airplane.
People who fund billion dollar trials normally demand that they be run by relatively cautious people. That conflicts with the need for innovative models.
The good news is that there’s wide variation in how expensive trials need to be. The larger the effect size, the smaller the trial can be—see the TRIIM trial.
I don’t think that believing in root causes motivate such interventions. Complex systems with feedback loops don’t necessarily have root causes.
To the extend that big pharma throws objects in the air to see whether they fly, it’s because they millions they spent to evaluate whether the object is a good candidate are not enough to analyse the existing literature to get to root causes.
In addition to big pharma we have billions going into Calico to reason in a structured way about where to attack aging.
A system with feedback loops generally equilibrates on roughly the timescale of its slowest component, so in that case we’re using “root cause” to refer to that slowest component. See Homeostasis and “Root Causes” in Aging.
I don’t think that big pharma actually makes all that strong an effort to understand root causes, nor are they particularly incentivized to do so. The way their market is structured, even a marginally-effective drug can be sold at a high price, with lots of marketing, and lots of people will use it because there just aren’t good options and people want something. It’s the signalling theory of medicine. Even to the extent that pharma companies are incentivized to hunt for root causes, it’s the sort of problem which is inherently hard to hire for—someone who doesn’t already understand how to structure such investigations won’t be able to distinguish actual competence from a top-tier PhD. Much easier to invest in p-hacking plus marketing.
(They do have an incentive to look like they invest in understanding root causes, though, which is a great use for those top-tier PhDs. The executives probably even believe it.)
As to Calico, my understanding is that they mostly throw black-box ML at large biological datasets. That’s not a very good way to work out the gears of biological systems, although it is very shiny.
When it comes to illnesses, the system frequently is not in an equilibrium. Alzheimers in particular gets worse over time till the person is dead.
Clinical trials are very expensive. To the extend that you can spend a few million to choose promising candidates for your clinical trials, big pharma is incentivized to spend that money.
FDA approvals aren’t as easily P-hacked given that you need multiple studies that come to the same result as academic papers.
It might be true that currently neither big pharma nor Calico employs people who are actually well qualified to run the exploration, but that’s similar to employing someone who’s bad at airplane design to design your new airplane.
People who fund billion dollar trials normally demand that they be run by relatively cautious people. That conflicts with the need for innovative models.
The good news is that there’s wide variation in how expensive trials need to be. The larger the effect size, the smaller the trial can be—see the TRIIM trial.
Yes, that would be an equilibration timescale of infinity. The “slowest component” never reaches equilibrium at all.