The process is anything but simple at large companies. Even if the new hire is a complete fraud and can barely write code it'll still take an average manager 6-12 months to be able to show them the door. And it'll involve countless meetings and a mountain of paperwork, all taking away time from regular work. And then it'll take another 6 months to get a replacement and onboard them. That means your team has lost over a year of productivity over a single bad hire.
That comes after the decision that you can't fix the situation, which comes after you discovered that the hire was bad, which comes after a number of visible failures. That's a lot of wasted time/effort, even if the firing itself is simple.
Depends on the country I think - in Australia at least it seems like you can sue for unfair dismissal if you're angry about being kicked out, so HR departments only seem to get rid of someone as a last resort.
In France, for instance, you have a (typically) 6 months long no questions asked window to fire a new hire, if they prove a bad employee. Presumably, if you haven't found out in 6 months, you wouldn't find out by changing the interviewing strategy.
So much of this is hindsight bias though. There were no shortage of people with ideas and companies pursuing obesity drugs through a number of different pathways. Only in hindsight does it seem "genius" that Thomsen persisted and succeeded where nobody else did. But there are dozens, hundreds, of other smart people who were pursuing other pathways who did just as much stubborn work but didn't get a result. That's just pharmaceuticals.
Take, for example, another high profile disease - Alzheimer's. First there was the beta amyloid theory, then there was the p. gingivalis theory (this one was talked about so highly on this very forum, but ended in an equally high profile failure* of a pivotal clinical trial by Cortexyme). Now there are viral and metabolic theories. Each of these theories have a few dozen companies and armies of PhDs stubbornly pursuing a miracle drug, but so far it remains elusive.
* We also like to talk about "failures" of clinical trials, which is technically correct language, but evokes in the public imagination the wrong idea. A clinical trial failure doesn't mean there was something wrong with the idea or process (long before it ever gets there, a drug candidate would have been proven to be very effective in lab tests and animals). It's just that 90% of clinical trials don't end up working due to complex disease pathways and numerous unknown factors. It would help if we talked about "negative proofs" (i.e. proving something doesn't work is also valid), but it's not quite as catchy.
First? Isn't the beta-amyloid cabal still blocking all Alzheimer's research unless the researchers find a way to even tangentially support that long disproven theory?
Karen Ashe and Sylvain Lesné at Minnesota published a fake paper that redirected billions of research into the trash bin. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid... Amazingly both still have their jobs for life, both still publish, Ashe is still a member of the National Academy of Medicine, both are still getting grants.
This is a mischaracterization of the scope of the fraud. Lesné clearly committed fraud, but his work was not foundational. The fraud did not "redirect billions".
Yes it very much did lead to billions of wasted dollars and that's if you count us public funding alone. Tens of billions of you count non us and private funding.
The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled “amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s” has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.
The paper provided an “important boost” to the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypotheses when they faced rising doubts, Südhof says. “Proponents loved it, because it seemed to be an independent validation of what they have been proposing for a long time.”
From your description, it sounds like a large complex ecosystem (of which Lesne and Ashe were important parts) redirected billions. I think it’s a bit overselling it to say that their results alone redirected billions
As unavoidable mentioned, there are viral theories.
In Science, from July, "Can infections cause Alzheimer’s? A small community of researchers is determined to find out. Following up tantalizing links between pathogens and brain disease, new projects search for causal evidence", https://www.science.org/content/article/can-infections-cause...
I mean, that's the point - in pharmaceutical sciences there's _so much noise_ including fraud that it's really only easy in hindsight to pick out "the guy" who was the "genius". It's hard to take one story like this and make it a repeatable success.
> So much of this is hindsight bias though. There were no shortage of people with ideas and companies pursuing obesity drugs through a number of different pathways. Only in hindsight does it seem "genius" that Thomsen persisted and succeeded where nobody else did. But there are dozens, hundreds, of other smart people who were pursuing other pathways who did just as much stubborn work but didn't get a result. That's just pharmaceuticals.
Exactly.
There are plenty of examples where the opposite choice was made - argue for continued development despite high uncertainty.
The CETP inhibitors is a good one. Pfizer flushed several billion dollars down the drain with the decision to push it through phase 3.
Unfinished concrete, specifically. I would translate "brut" as "bare" or "unrefined" here. English brutality is related to French brut, but in French it means more like crude, unrefined, raw, blunt, with no particular sense of animalistic or violent.
Am a lawyer. This is correct. Drafting subpoenas, motions, applications, convincing a skeptical judge that Twitter posts are "real" evidence, or explaining how DNS records work, not to mention actually scheduling a damn hearing, then multiply that by 4 or 5 jurisdictions (therefore 4 or 5 sets of lawyers), and you got yourself easily a few years' worth of work.
It's not quite that simple. If you've ever lived in a tall building and heard/seen/smelled stories of sewer pipes backing up, well you'll know what I mean. The bottom floor of a 50 storey building needs much more sewage space than the bottom floor of a 5 storey building. Anyway, there are considerations about venting, as well as increased capacity for lower floors versus higher floors, and the whole thing has to be designed in conjunction with the rest of the plumbing anyway.
I see this sentiment a lot, and as an engineer-turned-lawyer, I've always found this to be intriguing but unsatisfactory. Certainly lots of transactional type work (contracts, estates) and maybe even basic adversarial work (parking tickets and fines?) could be greatly enhanced by AI/ML.
But I've asked clients this question and while they would love to not have to pay lawyers - if you ever put the thought in front of them and asked whether they actually want an AI to represent them in court, when stakes are high and there's a chance of losing... well, I've never met anyone who has said they willingly take that chance.
Some fields will also certainly never be AI-ified. Not a snowball's chance in hell (and I know it sounds like a cranky person talking) that lawyers and judges in criminal/constitutional trials will ever be "replaced" by AI. It has nothing to to with the possibilities of present and future technology, but everything to do with optics. Society is almost certainly never going to accept being judged and/or losing to AI and algorithms. Even if a person has a losing case they would want to make sure to hear it from a human rather than a machine.
> Not a snowball's chance in hell (and I know it sounds like a cranky person talking) that lawyers and judges in criminal/constitutional trials will ever be "replaced" by AI. It has nothing to to with the possibilities of present and future technology, but everything to do with optics.
Ha, you might like Pohl and Kornbluth's classic dystopian science fiction novel "Gladiator at Law", which I think was from the 1950s. There is a trial scene near the beginning where the prosecutor and defense spend a page or so addressing the jury box. Then (spoiler) the jury box flashes and whirs, and spits out the verdict.
I think you're failing to consider the selection bias in those who have had the chance to ask the question of. By definition your clients are people who are able to hire lawyers. They aren't the target market for robot lawyers, not for a long time.
I believe you have a rude awakening ahead.. resolve the roles in court to authority roles, and yes, none of the professionals will give up any authority; but the "work" of law, that is to study, consider, refute and prescribe, especially with citations and written works.. absolutely yes they are top on the list to be replaced by AI.
Europe and Canada approved AstraZeneca's vaccine while the FDA didn't (not debating whether it was a "good" decision, just that it did). Canada also approved of vaccine dose mixing (out of necessity, but nonetheless it was clearly not following the FDA). Plus, by and large Europe and Canada's leaders did not actively harm Covid treatment and vaccine efforts (many policy missteps, but nobody was actively politicizing the virus itself).
Relatedly, a great primer on this concept has been written up by the Bank of England and IMO is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how money is "created".
