Or maybe, my attitude is that of someone with decades of experience actually moving the needle on problems. And with decades of experience training grad students out of exactly this kind of naive view of science so that they can go on to be extremely productive.

> And modern science has its own set of problems, one of which is that it's incredibly resource intensive

No way. Science is obscenely resource efficient and low resource. People don't realize how tight science budgets are. Like, much of the CS research in the US is supported by a single organization whose budget is $1B. Cancer research is only funded to the tune of $5B per year worldwide.

The US alone spent $15B on a worthless border wall under Trump. To put useless pieces of steel in a desert. That someone can walk around or cut in a few minutes. We spent 3x the yearly cancer research budget. Yet despite all of that, cancer survival is going up rapidly.

> Especially in the area of human health we still take as dogma things that later turn out to be almost certainly completely wrong and in the meantime have cost millions of lives. And political and economic factors still distort the scientific process at least as much as what you call "crash and burn science".

I swear, listening to people here you would think all scientists go through a brainwashing course and then attend a yearly conspiracy meeting to compare notes and never discover anything. Seriously, you have no idea how hard people work to prove everything they possibly can wrong.

I do agree that there are massive gaps and millions die because of it. I would actually characterize it as billions of dead people.

The solution is simple. Fund science and be ok with failure. The gatekeepers are not individual scientists. The gatekeepers are funding agencies. That are massively starved for funds so they need to be extremely selective. And that means being extremely conservative. They cannot bet on high-risk high-reward science, because if all their bets don't pay off, then what do they tell Congress?

> The hard work of modern science has also produced fantastic results, but I don't think it can ever fill all the gaps in our understanding of the world by itself. We need creative approaches, wild speculation and experimentation, phenomenology, and philosophical and spiritual exploration just as much as we need those millions of scientists doing the painstaking work of endless iterations of controlled experiments.

Yeah, so what can I tell you? I takes me 5-6 years to teach a new PhD student that this is totally wrong. You can't make progress by random wild stabs in the dark, philosophy, spiritual whatever, wild experiments. It doesn't work. You can't build up a coherent research program that way. You can't go from result to result in a systematic way breaking down a problem. At the end of all of that "exploration" your grandma still dies of cancer because you spent your time on wild experiments instead of real work. Seriously, those are the stakes here. Work is personal for a lot of people.

You can build intuition that way, and that's cool! I run tiny experiments all the time looking for fun things. But then you need to roll up your sleeves and do the hard part. Have a hypothesis, break it down systematically, think about mechanisms and outcomes, run controlled experiments, etc. That has to be 99% of the work, because that's how you convince people, build up a body of evidence, find new ideas, etc.