Every time I look into those I come away thinking that Occam's Razor would suggest a different explanation: the original characterization was, knowingly or not, incorrect. Patents so frequently fail to contain sufficient information to allow a practitioner skilled to in the appropriate arts to reproduce the claims that it seems more plausible that the disappearing polymorph stories should be reclassified as "someone was caught fibbing" stories. In the replication crisis, we don't assume that the problem is that something about the world has changed, we assume that the original was flawed, and we should do the same here.
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.
I skimmed the literature on this and the ritonavir story seems legit.
There really is a peer-reviewed paper saying that there are five crystalline forms of the stuff. ("Elucidation of crystal form diversity of the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir by high-throughput crystallization", Applied Physical Sciences, Feb 2003).
It really does seem that in 1998 the more stable Form II suddenly started coming out of the factory, with lower solubility and such bad oral bioavailability that the oral capsules were withdrawn from the market until Abbott figured out a new way to make the drug. (I think they were already moving from a capsule to a gelcap and the gelcap didn't have the same issue? Just reading … this is not such a good source perhaps but lovely bare HTML: https://www.natap.org/1998/norvirupdate.html )
The whole book is an argument against growth (cf the title). More specifically, all the models implicitly assume that rising costs will never reduce demand (and thus consumption), drive the search for alternatives, or make increased efficiency economically viable. It like writing a book called "The limits to driving" and showing that pretty much every car on the road will quickly smash into something if the drivers are assumed to continue accelerating in their present direction, and no one is going to use their steering wheel or breaks effectively.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer is an introduction into systems thinking, about stocks (resources), flows (actions) and feedback loops. The book isn't an argument against growth, but an argument for the sustainability of systems, especially how to think about and model them. The boundaries of a modelled system are purely conceptional and won't exist in the real world like we'd wrongly assume, D. Meadows makes this more than clear. I think @arthurjj is reading something into it that just isn't there.
If you're curious, Meadows has addresses this common counterargument about price (time stamp directly to the relevant remark, but the whole talk is excellent):
The problem is that it's replacing (or attempting to, at least) an era of policy already led by ideology and cynicism, and all it's really adding is the contrarianism. Too many papers published in peer reviewed journals have turned out to be utter bilge, accepted only because they fit the preconceptions of the reviewers.
This would be fine if we hadn't elevated the epistemological standing of "published in a peer reviewed journal" so far that it's treated as nearly the same as "true" instead of a more accurate "something that somebody claims." It would also be fine if we never based public policy on unreplicated or cherry picked research, and always considered the possibility that even the consensus view might be wrong. (Look how many "consensus views" of the 1700-1800s are now seen as bunk.)
I'm all for evidence based policy, but for that to work we need a robust mechanism for evidence that contradicts the prevailing narrative to be heard, evaluated, and fairly assessed.
> Look how many "consensus views" of the 1700-1800s are now seen as bunk.
Even more recently than that. I am not sure whether aether theory (of electromagnetic waves) made it into 1900s but it was a consensus view late into the 1800s, the idea that some races were intrinsically inferior was a consensus view well into the 1900s, and the idea that homosexuality was a a treatable disease even more recently.
> It would also be fine if we never based public policy on unreplicated or cherry picked research
I think that the general public and politicians do not understand this. I have read claims that the British government was confused by getting conflicting scientific advice during the pandemic. It would come as no surprise to anyone who understood the implications of people using complex models of something novel.
The price of houses will fall and the price of basic services, food, etc. will skyrocket as people flee the stagnant cities and core economic activity moves elsewhere. It will never go this far of course (zero actual workers is an asymptote), but that's the way it will trend.
Because somebody needs to keep things running for the rest of us?
Seriously, we need all the bright people we can get, working on the tough problems and solving them. And we need even more basically competent people educated to keep what we have got figured out running smoothly. Life isn't some role playing game where everyone who wants to should get a turn being a surgeon or flying the jumbo jet. Competence actually matters.
The people that designed jumbo jets were people that went to Washington State University and UDub in the 60s. John Aaron saved Apollo 12 and 13 with a degree from Southwestern Oklahoma State. These are not people that were in “gifted programs” and they don’t fit what you perceive to be “gifted” (aka - able to get into one of 10 elite undergrad schools).
Sure they were. College has changed a lot, as has college enrollment; instead of the top 10%, colleges now take the top 40% or so, close to the fraction that graduated high school in the 1960s. Courses that used to be taught in high school are now taught in undergrad, and what used to be covered in undergrad is put off until grad school.
What we call "gifted" today was what we called "college bound" back then.
And don't say launch services, 'cause you're using "it's a marketing stunt" to explain why they aren't taking payloads. "It's R&D" makes a heck of a lot more sense.
Right, which is why it quickly led to the detection of dark matter...hmm.
I think a better analogy would be "that approach is exactly how we explain failing to find planets like Vulcan; we hypothesize that they are made of as-yet-unknown stuff that you can't see, touch, hear, smell, or in fact detect at all. But we know they're there because our calculations say they are."
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.