Assorted Topics for November 17, 2024
Due to personal circumstances, my post is late and short this week. I expect to be back to a normal routine by next week. But for this week, here are a few odds-and-ends topics.
The Water Fluoridation Controversy
For some reason, water fluoridation is becoming a topic of attention again. Carstairs (2015) is an valuable review of the debate through the early 1960s. Following the discovery in the 1930s that areas with small amounts of naturally occurring fluoride in the water had lower rates of tooth decay, midcentury optimism about the power of public health, and the exposure during World War II of how pervasive dental problems were in the United States, the idea of adding fluoride to the water quickly gained traction. There were several health concerns about fluoride consumption, particularly around bone health, but Carstairs argues that those concerns were sidelined as solid evidence for health risks failed to emerge.
In the 1950s, Frederick Exner and George Waldbott became leading figures in the anti-fluoridation movement. According to Carstairs, both of these individuals accused pro-fluoridation researchers of having nefarious motives and argued in sensationalist terms. Exner, for instance, described fluoridation as “totalitarian medicine” and fluoridation trials as “flagrant violation of the most sacred laws of God and man”. In 1957, they published The American Fluoridation Experiment for a general audience.
Then, in 1964, came Dr. Strangelove, in which General Jack D. Ripper claims that water fluoridation is a communist plot to sap our “precious bodily fluids”. Higgins (2015) describes how Dr. Strangelove invokes satirically paranoia around bodily politics. Even before Dr. Strangelove, as Carstairs documents, researchers in both the pro- and anti- camps were deterred from researching the issue by the highly toxic politics around it. A 2000 review from the University of York found that the quality of studies around water fluoridation was poor. A 2006 report by the National Research Council found that much of the science around water fluoridation in unsettled and discusses an unsuccessful move by the EPA to establish a lower guideline level.
However, the anti-fluoridation movement continues to be very hard to take seriously. Having spent some time with opposition to nuclear power and various limits-to-growth claims, I recognize many of the same tactics: the conflation of activism with science, the assumption that one’s opponents operate with nefarious motives, the inclination to latch on to particular claims that support a predetermined conclusion and ignoring those that don’t fit, and the use of overly-sensationalized rhetoric, among others. Even if I don’t know the issue well enough to say that it looks like BS, it definitely smells that way.
Slowing Progress in Science
Sabine Hossenfelder has a thought-provoking, though I think in some ways flawed, video on the troubles in modern science. She discusses Bloom et al. (2020), Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?, a well-known paper that I have discussed here many times. The paper documents falling research productivity, which refers to the scientific progress per researcher. Here “progress” is measured by total factor productivity, the amount of economic growth after the size of the labor force and capital deployment are accounted for. It’s not so much that scientific progress is grinding to a halt, but a vastly greater number of scientists are needed to keep up a rate of progress. In addition to looking at the big picture, Bloom et al. consider apparent falling productivity with lifespans, crop yields, and semiconductor speeds.
I regard Bloom et al. as a sold paper, but there are reasons to question whether the measurements are the most relevant. But evidence of falling scientific productivity can be found in many different ways, and the big picture is hard to deny.
Following on much of her previous work, Hossenfelder focuses on cultural problems within scientific disciplines. She has worked extensively on how theoretical physics falls down pointless rabbit holes of math for its own sake and untestable predictions, and apparently similar problems are to be found in many other disciplines. She highlights some of the populist criticism of scientific endeavors, such as the alleged examples of waste that are highlighted from the Department of Government Efficiency that is an initiative of the incoming Trump administration.
None of this is new. From 1975 to 1988, Senator William Proxmire gave out the Golden Fleece Award for projects deemed to be silly wastes of money. From 2012, that has been countered by the Golden Goose Award, which was established by Rep. Jim Cooper to highlight research projects that initially seem silly but turned out to have great social value. Going beyond sensational “shrimp on treadmills” studies, Macleod et al. (2014) found that most biomedical research spending fails to yield useful results.
While it is clear that research productivity is falling, it is not at all clear why this is the case or whether it is a solvable problem. It is also not clear (to me at any rate) how we can evaluate the efficacy of what we do spend. Yes, progress can come out of seemingly unlikely lines of inquiry, but that is hardly a convincing endorsement of how we fund research. It would be equally wrong to conclude from the fact that some lottery tickets have massive payouts that buying a bunch of lottery tickets is a good investment.
Quick Hits
There is a short explanation of why I don’t take consumer confidence seriously as a metric of how the economy is actually doing.
I recently had a few hours without much else to do, and I rewatched the Naudet Brothers documentary 9/11, which is freely available on YouTube. It came out in 2002, and it remains the best film I have seen on the subject. The film was originally intended to show the functioning of a New York firehouse, with the filmmakers embedded in the Engine 7/Ladder 1/Battalion 1 Firehouse, which is near the World Trade Center. While filming, Jules Naudet captured the only known high quality film of the first crash, and the documentary also has the only surviving footage from inside the towers.