Science and the Cost of Errors
From Nassim Taleb on Scientific Discovery:
What's needed is an asymmetry: the errors need to be as painless as possible, compared to the payoffs of the successes. The mathematical equivalent of this property is called convexity; a nonlinear convex function is one with larger gains than losses. (If they're equal, the function is linear). In research, this is what allows us to "harvest randomness", as the article puts it.
An example of such a process is biological evolution: most mutations are harmless and silent. Even the harmful ones will generally just kill off the one organism with the misfortune to bear them. But a successful mutation, one that enhances survival and reproduction, can spread widely. The payoff is much larger than the downside, and the mutations themselves come along for free, since some looseness is built into the replication process. It's a perfect situation for blind tinkering to pay off: the winners take over, and the losers disappear.
Taleb goes on to say that "optionality" is another key part of the process. We're under no obligation to follow up on any particular experiment; we can pick the one that worked best and toss the rest. This has its own complications, since we have our own biases and errors of judgment to contend with, as opposed to the straightforward questions of evolution ("Did you survive? Did you breed?"). But overall, it's an important advantage.
The article then introduces the "convexity bias", which is defined as the difference between a system with equal benefit and harm for trial and error (linear) and one where the upsides are higher (nonlinear). The greater the split between those two, the greater the convexity bias, and the more volatile the environment, the great the bias is as well. This is where Taleb introduces another term, "antifragile", for phenomena that have this convexity bias, because they're equipped to actually gain from disorder and volatility. (His background in financial options is apparent here). What I think of at this point is Maxwell's demon, extracting useful work from randomness by making decisions about which molecules to let through his gate. We scientists are, in this way of thinking, members of the same trade union as Maxwell's busy creature, since we're watching the chaos of experimental trials and natural phenomena and letting pass the results we find useful. (I think Taleb would enjoy that analogy). The demon is, in fact, optionality manifested and running around on two tiny legs.
Meanwhile, a more teleological (that is, aimed and coherent) approach is damaged under these same conditions. Uncertainty and randomness mess up the timelines and complicate the decision trees, and it just gets worse and worse as things go on. It is, by these terms, fragile.
Taleb ends up with seven rules that he suggests can guide decision making under these conditions. I'll add my own comments to these in the context of drug research.
(1) Under some conditions, you'd do better to improve the payoff ratio than to try to increase your knowledge about what you're looking for. One way to do that is to lower the cost-per-experiment, so that a relatively fixed payoff then is larger in comparison. The drug industry has realized this, naturally: our payoffs are (in most cases) somewhat out of our control, although the marketing department tries as hard as possible. But our costs per experiment range from "not cheap" to "potentially catastrophic" as you go from early research to Phase III. Everyone's been trying to bring down the costs of later-stage R&D for just these reasons.
(2) A corollary is that you're better off with as many trials as possible. Research payoffs, as Taleb points out, are very nonlinear indeed, with occasional huge winners accounting for a disproportionate share of the pool. If we can't predict these - and we can't - we need to make our nets as wide as possible. This one, too, is appreciated in the drug business, but it's a constant struggle on some scales. In the wide view, this is why the startup culture here in the US is so important, because it means that a wider variety of ideas are being tried out. And it's also, in my view, why so much M&A activity has been harmful to the intellectual ecosystem of our business - different approaches have been swallowed up, and they they disappear as companies decide, internally, on the winners.
And inside an individual company, portfolio management of this kind is appreciated, but there's a limit to how many projects you can keep going. Spread yourself too thin, and nothing will really have a chance of working. Staying close to that line - enough projects to pick up something, but not so many as to starve them all - is a full-time job.
(3) You need to keep your "optionality" as strong as possible over as long a time as possible - that is, you need to be able to hit a reset button and try something else. Taleb says that plans ". . .need to stay flexible with frequent ways out, and counter to intuition, be very short term, in order to properly capture the long term. Mathematically, five sequential one-year options are vastly more valuable than a single five-year option." I might add, though, that they're usually priced accordingly (and as Taleb himself well knows, looking for those moments when they're not priced quite correctly is another full-time job).
(4) This one is called "Nonnarrative Research", which means the practice of investing with people who have a history of being able to do this sort of thing, regardless of their specific plans. And "this sort of thing" generally means a lot of that third recommendation above, being able to switch plans quickly and opportunistically. The history of many startup companies will show that their eventual success often didn't bear as much relation to their initial business plan as you might think, which means that "sticking to a plan", as a standalone virtue, is overrated.
At any rate, the recommendation here is not to buy into the story just because it's a good story. I might draw the connection here with target-based drug discovery, which is all about good stories.
(5) Theory comes out of practice, rather than practice coming out of theory. Ex post facto histories, Taleb says, often work the story around to something that looks more sensible, but his claim is that in many fields, "tinkering" has led to more breakthroughs than attempts to lay down new theory. His reference is to this book, which I haven't read, but is now on my list.
(6) There's no built-in payoff for complexity (or for making things complex). "In academia," though, he says, "there is". Don't, in other words, be afraid of what look like simple technologies or innovations. They may, in fact, be valuable, but have been ignored because of this bias towards the trickier-looking stuff. What this reminds me of is what Philip Larkin said he learned by reading Thomas Hardy: never be afraid of the obvious.
(7) Don't be afraid of negative results, or paying for them. The whole idea of optionality is finding out what doesn't work, and ideally finding that out in great big swaths, so we can narrow down to where the things that actually work might be hiding. Finding new ways to generate negative results quickly and more cheaply, which can means new ways to recognize them earlier, is very valuable indeed.
Taleb finishes off by saying that people have criticized such proposals as the equivalent of buying lottery tickets. But lottery tickets, he notes, are terribly overpriced, because people are willing to overpay for a shot at a big payoff on long odds. But lotteries have a fixed upper bound, whereas R&D's upper bound is completely unknown. And Taleb gets back to his financial-crisis background by pointing out that the history of banking and finance points out the folly of betting against long shots ("What are the odds of this strategy suddenly going wrong?"), and that in this sense, research is a form of reverse banking.
Well, those of you out there who've heard the talk I've been giving in various venues (and in slightly different versions) the last few months may recognize that point, because I have a slide that basically says that drug research is the inverse of Wall Street. In finance, you try to lay off risk, hedge against it, amortize it, and go for the steady payoff strategies that (nonetheless) once in a while blow up spectacularly and terribly. Whereas in drug research, risk is the entire point of our business (a fact that makes some of the business-trained people very uncomfortable). We fail most of the time, but once in a while have a spectacular result in a good direction. Wall Street goes short risk; we have to go long.
