The author of this piece, John Ioannidis, MD, DSC, is one of the denizens of the tippy-top of the global thinking-about-medicine hierarchy. Here's part of his Stanford mini-bio:
John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSC, holds the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University where he is professor of medicine, professor of health research and policy, and professor of statistics (by courtesy) at the School of Humanities and Sciences. From 1999 until 2010, Dr. Ioannidis chaired the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece. He trained at the University of Athens School of Medicine in Greece, Harvard and Tufts, and also held appointments at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Harvard, and Imperial College London.And it just goes on and on. I hate him.
Dr. Ioannidis is one of the most-cited scientists of all times in the scientific literature. His current research at Stanford covers a wide agenda, including meta-research, large-scale evidence, population health sciences and predictive medicine and health....
And from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago's Chicago Booth Review, September 26:
Modern capitalism and science have evolved together since the Enlightenment. Advances in ship building and navigation enabled the Age of Discovery, which opened up new trade routes and markets to European merchants. The United States’ Department of Defense research and development agency helped create the precursor to the internet. The internet now supports software and media industries worth trillions of dollars. On the flip side, some of America’s greatest capitalists and businesses, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Bell Labs, gave us everything from electricity production to the transistor. Neither science nor capitalism can succeed without the other.
However, science’s star is now dimming. Part of this is due to political intervention, but so too has capitalism played a hand in science’s struggles. While corporations sponsor a significant portion of funding for scientific research, this funding too often comes with undisclosed conflicts of interest. Or corporate pressure may influence results in other ways.
Stanford’s John Ioannidis studies the methodology and sociology of science itself: how the process and standards for empirical research influence findings in ways that some may find inaccurate. On this episode of Capitalisn’t, Ioannidis joins cohosts Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales to discuss the future of the relationship between capitalism and science.Audio Transcript
John Ioannidis: Wrong incentives, wrong financial incentives for scientists, even in democratic societies, can be problematic.
Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean.
Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea?
Luigi: And I’m Luigi Zingales.
Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
Bethany: And this is Capitalisn’t, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.
Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?
Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t.
Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process.
Bethany: Today’s topic may seem a little bit different for us because we have a guest who is a scientist.
Luigi: Why does a podcast about capitalism want to talk about science? Because capitalism and science were born roughly at the same time, they share a common cultural foundation, and there is a mutual dependency between the two. Modern capitalism cannot exist without the fruits of science. And modern science is supported by capitalist institutions that finance laboratories, R&D, and universities.
Bethany: Their success is intermingled in complicated ways. If per-capita income today is 27 times what it was 250 years ago, and if life expectancy is twice as long as it was 250 years ago, is that due to the success of capitalism, or the success of science, or both?
Luigi: And the question is, if science is in a crisis, how does this affect capitalism as we know it? In fact, we can argue that maybe it’s capitalism itself or capitalist incentives that are responsible for the science crisis. If we think that science is guided by disinterested inquiry, capitalism is guided by profit. To what extent is this profit motive impacting science and, indirectly, the success of capitalism?
Bethany: Or to what extent is it politics that are impacting both?
To discuss this topic, we are delighted to have with us John Ioannidis, a physician-scientist who is a professor at Stanford University and one of the world’s most-cited scientists. He has more than 600,000 Google citations.
Luigi: His most famous paper is “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” which actually started the field of metascience. In it, Ioannidis argued that a large number, if not the majority, of published medical-research papers contain results that cannot be replicated.
Bethany: He also, I think, has additional work showing that citations can themselves be bought. So, maybe we should be careful about citing his citations. Anyway, there is no better person to discuss with us the topic of a science crisis and why it matters.
John, I wanted to start with some of your history. What made you an unorthodox thinker? About 20 years ago, you published research showing that most published claims were false. What do you think it is about your personality that started you down this path?
John Ioannidis: I’m not sure it’s a personality issue. It’s just the natural evolution of what I was witnessing and the research that I was doing. It was just very common to see mistakes, flaws, difficult to replicate, implausible results, very weird claims. If anything, my interest was in rigorous methods. I am the kind of person who’s more interested in methodology rather than the results. The results are interesting no matter what. I think if you use rigorous methods, there’s no good result or bad result. They’re all results to be respected.
Luigi: May I suggest that the reason is that you had to spend, I think, six months in the military service in Greece after being a doctor? I had to do one year of military service in Italy after I got my undergraduate degree, and that made me an anarchist for the rest of my life.
John Ioannidis: That’s a very interesting possibility. I hadn’t really made the connection, but who knows? Obviously, the military is a crazy world, and any notion of rationality and reason probably disappears very quickly.
Bethany: I did not know that about you, Luigi. So, see, all these years into our podcast and I’m still learning something all the time.
Before we move on to more recent history, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about COVID and what happened to you in the pandemic when you voiced some unconventional views.
John Ioannidis: It’s what happened to many people who voiced any views, not conventional or unconventional. Even the definition of what is conventional or unconventional can be challenged depending on whom you ask.
I think that many scientists very quickly realized that they either had to completely silence themselves, distance themselves—"Don’t deal with that. It’s just a crazy world out there”—or if they continued to be engaged, they took sides. So, they said, “Wait, I need some protection.” But that probably led to some huge polarizing effect.
Personally, I didn’t feel that I should seek protection from anyone. I have always argued that politics and this type of forces should not subvert science. They should not affect scientific thinking and reasoning and evidence.
I was just reporting what I found, and that made some people very happy and some others very, very angry. But it’s sad that some people would just feel that numbers had a color, that they belong to political parties, that they belong to partisan groups, that you had to find one number in order to be a good Democrat or a good Republican, a good supporter of someone. That’s very sad, but—
Luigi: I think that one of the concerns was that, of course, COVID was extremely disruptive or potentially disruptive to economic activity. The economic incentives to minimize the effects of COVID were enormous. This is where trust in science came in big time. There was a fraction of the population that did not trust the science and did not trust the results. To be honest, I think that some scientists or pseudoscientists were claiming that the damages were much lower because they wanted to continue business as usual. I think that this created a fracture in the population about this topic.
John Ioannidis: I think it’s a very complex narrative, and I think what you point out is valid. There were not one or two voices. There were zillions of voices out there, some of them more rational than others, some of them just very heavily conspiratorial-theories oriented. But many people were dissatisfied with what they saw as science or what was being sold as science or followed the science to them. They felt that it was affecting them in multiple ways that were mostly negative.
After a certain point, I think that they generalized their negative response to anything that came out of science, that science is yet another conspiracy of the powerful, against me, against my life, against my family, against my world. It’s not for me. It’s not trying to help me. It’s just trying to make money, help some big tech, some big pharma, some powerful people. It’s exploiting me, it’s killing me, it’s harming me, not for me. Science is my enemy. Very sad. Extremely sad....
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