Processed Gossip Is Not Gospel
Assumptions about the purpose and ambit of medical journals are all wrong
One of two machine learning bros who founded “the AI for Research” said it in 2022:
We really built this for people like ourselves. We are technology professionals who secretly wish that we were scientists . . . but don’t have the time or attention span to read scientific papers.
This was Christian Salem, who played backup quarterback for Northwestern University from 2012-2016 and graduated with a degree in economics. His cofounder Eric Olson played right tackle at Northwestern and earned a master’s degree in predictive analytics.
- Olson later worked as a data scientist at DraftKings, while Salem became a product manager for the National Football League.
The difference between “reading scientific papers” and “being a scientist” is huge at nearly every level. We’ve discussed it plenty, but in addition to the functional and purposeful differences, doing science can be dangerous — historically, scientists have been suspected of various cultural or political infractions, beaten, and even killed, even to this day. Field work is often frightening. An investigation was recently opened into some suspicious deaths of US scientists, for example.
Most scientists don’t produce scientific papers, and read them only when and if they truly need to, especially after training. Groups to encourage engagement with a selection of papers — journal clubs, mainly — still thrive in academic teaching settings, but even then, they are mostly for the eggheads and their trainees, not for the lunchbox scientist.
- The founder of OpenEvidence (Daniel Nadler) is described as a “Canadian-born technology entrepreneur, poet, and film producer.” He has no scientific degrees. The same goes for Sam Altman. These are storytellers who can transfix a market with stories of hope, fear, greed, and techno-utopianism. They are fabulists and raconteurs, not scientists.
- Even Altman’s technical skills have been publicly questioned, and I would bet Nadler might struggle in a coding competition.
But even if words could be magically transmogrified into science, are the words in journals even the right ones? Or do these interlopers also have journals all wrong?
Are they seeking the gospel when all we’re offering is secular gossip?