I came to the biological sciences trained as a chemist. As I began working on my Ph.D. and variously encountered papers on cell signaling research (the field that much "cancer research" would fall into) it was blindingly apparent to me, perhaps because of my chemistry background, what was going on...

Cell Signaling (and much of Biology) research is in its Alchemy phase. Now, alchemy often gets a bad rap as being completely worthless, snake-oil type stuff, but this was not the case at all. Rather, individuals were working on an area about which almost nothing was known, and (more importantly) for which the key central organizing laws were not yet revealed (for Alchemy: the atomic theory of matter and chemical bonding, for Cell Signaling: how individual proteins and small molecules interact). Furthermore, the goals were lofty and almost certainly unattainable (for Alchemy: turn base metals into gold, for Cell Signaling: cure cancer), driving people to do "rush" work. It's not that the results are completely invalid, or that the experiments are useless. It's just that everyone feels like they're so close to a solution (Alchemists were way off with Phlogiston, and I'll bet Cell Signaling researchers are similarly clueless as to what really matters) that no one takes the time to step back and synthesize the results in an attempt to understand the forest from the trees.

Cell Signaling will, eventually, have its Joseph Priestley, its Dmitri Mendeleev.

From experience, the fact that 89% of these "cancer research" papers are not reproducible almost definitely has less to do with fraudulent data and so much more to do with crazy complex experimental setups that end up probing a half-dozen experimental variables all at once (without the researchers even grasping that this is going on).

Yeah, publish or perish sucks, but what sucks more is the death of basic science research. The Alchemists eventually became Chemists because they refocused on core principles (atomic theory, bonding) and forgot about the lofty goals (turn lead into gold)...

...but try telling any politician that they should decrease cancer research funding and refocus on genetics, structural biology, and evolution research. I'd love to know how they respond.

There's something that's been bothering me about this whole thing. Not the Tesla, but the rest of the market. Is that it? Is it that easy? A guy who made his money selling a phonebook and then an online payment processor can read a few books, hire a few people out of the same industry he's disrupting and build a goddamn amazing car (electric or not)?

Why can't the existing industry do this? Why all the mediocre product that's the tail end of pumping billions of dollars into R&D staffed by largely the same folks Tesla has been hiring?

edit to be clear I'm not just talking about electric cars, but cars in general. There's a few Model S's in my area, and they're beautiful.

Y'all know that I worked for Google. On this topic, I can only say good things about the place. When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard. Many of these "social" innovations that are popping up on the market place were rejected out-of-hand at Google because it holds itself to an extremely high ethical standard regarding user data, as it actually respects them.

I was shocked, for example, when I learned that a certain social network gives universal profile access to employees as a perk. That would not happen at Google. If you looked at your high-school ex-girlfriend's email, you'd be fired immediately (and deserve it).

Social is creepy, because it's all about being defined by other people, which is ridiculous and horrible. What, so do I suck at Programming Languages because I haven't trolled my 25 closest acquaintances for endorsements? Am I really going to become more credible in Machine Learning if I get 15 strangers to "endorse" me?

The major conflict in "Social" is what I call "Document vs. Improve" (or: Exploit vs. Explore). A social app can expand the web of social connections and make it more efficient, but (a) that's really hard, and (b) there isn't a lot of short-term money in it. Or it can document social relationships that already exist, and make a shit-ton of money off the data. That's easy, but it doesn't actually make anyone's life better. Guess which one the mainstream social players favor?

What I find depressing about LinkedIn is how much it has play-by-play replicated the old, broken way of doing things. Resumes. Titles and dates of employment. Recommendations. Recruiter spam. It feels like the Wayback Machine took us to 1995.