Prove or disprove: A Nobel Prize winner’s approach to science

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In 2018, Dr. Jim Allison was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering an effective way to attack cancer through immunology. In his lab, Allison urges researchers to get rid of the idea that they can prove something with science. All they can do is fail to disprove. Jim Allison is the subject of Jim Allison: Breakthrough, a documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson that brings filmmakers and scientists together to tell the story of a Nobel Prize-winning cancer discovery that changed the world. In cinemas September 27th, 2019.

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JIM ALLISON

Jim Allison is the subject of Jim Allison: Breakthrough, a documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson that brings filmmakers and scientists together to tell the story of a Nobel Prize-winning cancer discovery that changed the world. In cinemas September 27th, 2019.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JIM ALLISON: It's hard to explain how a lab works actually but what I do is all these years is try to build, try to recruit people who are curious and care about science and are committed and just have to know. And you have to put up with a lot of failure because If you don't you're probably doing boring stuff that anybody can do. You need to be out there on the edges where it's going to be more harder and darker behind what you're doing.

That's the whole point after all. And so you just have to be ready to spend 10 years on something making incremental steps along the way. You also have to know when to give up. I wouldn't say never, never give up until you've got enough to know that you're not just wasting the rest of your career on beating your head against the wall. In my lab I've been lucky at times to have people who are just full of ideas and we have ideas and we kick them around, we talk. Everybody I train — and don't do it in a nasty way but anytime anybody gives you a hypothesis you come up with another one that fits the data equally well. That's your job. Somebody at a lab meetings says, "I think this means that," you know, somebody gives their data and you say, "Okay, What do you mean? What do you conclude?" And I say, "Anybody else? Can you give me another conclusion for that?"

I mean that's the whole thing, right? How do you get the right one. It takes commitment but in my lab and in Berkeley days occasionally the lab would pull together with some key people. We worked together, we talked all the time, we partied together, we went sailing, we went drinking and listened to music or whatever. It was just work, play, work, play until it all got so mixed up you couldn't tell anymore.

Well it is important although there are times when it seemed that there was no life outside the work because everything revolved around it. I mean not everything, not completely. Like I say, we had just little spontaneous groups would build in the lab or people who just enjoyed each other and their ideas so much. You do have to get away from it every now and then and clear your head if nothing else. It does take — it's a slow process. But, you know, when you find it — to a scientist the real key of the realm is knowing something before anybody else on the planet knows it and really knowing something and hopefully something important. That's a selfish little secret.

It's hard. I mean it is hard particularly you keep, you're doing something that's right over the hill. There's no – Jerry Jeff Walker's song is I've got one eye on my lady and one eye on the open road. You're always looking down for the next thing. I guess the thing is when you can't see what you're doing now gets you down that road then what's in the way. Can you go anywhere? You can't just keep saying I'm going to do this next experiment and it'll get me over the hill. You can do that for a while but then if you can't think of the proper experiment that really not only gets you over the hill but tells you what path to take when you're over it then probably.

I mean I know I'm being vague because it's kind of, you can't give you hard things. It's just more of a feeling. I'm doing this — and the data tells you. I mean it's just back to the same thing. You look at the data and see where it's leading.

Steven Pinker: Are guns to blame for America’s homicide rate?

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One of the reasons we don't know whether limiting access to guns would effectively decrease the homicide rate in America is because the Congress passed a law that bars the Centers for Disease Control from conducting such related studies.In the United States, gun rights are a sacred cause of the right and are protected vehemently. As Steven Pinker says, "anything that might compromise the right of everyone to have a gun is squelched." The word "anything" seems to even include research. A lot is at stake — people's lives — by not conducting research to find out how to control gun violence in America. We need to keep politicians accountable to the people, and pressure them to enact policies founded on solid research. This first means though that such research is no longer suppressed.

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STEVEN PINKER

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

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TRANSCRIPT:

STEVEN PINKER: One of the big puzzles when it comes to understanding violence is why the American rate of violence is five to ten times higher than that of other wealthy democracies. There are countries that have spectacularly high rates of violence mainly in Central America and North and South America and in Southern Africa. But it's funny to see the United States not quite up there but much higher rates of homicide than our peers in the British Commonwealth and in Europe.

Now the ready answer is well, that's because we have all those guns. And that is part of the answer but it's not the total answer. Because even if you subtract out all of the gun homicides in the United States and you just look at all the murders committed with ropes and candlesticks and knives and so on. The United States still has a higher rate of homicide.

But and we also don't know for sure whether the favorite remedy of many people on the liberal left, namely tougher gun control, would have an effect in lowering homicides given how many guns are already out there. The United States has more guns than people so restricting the sale of future guns is a small measure. Maybe it does but no one really knows for sure. And we do know that the United States itself had quite a spectacular reduction in violent crime starting in the 90s and again in the 2000s. It certainly wasn't because massive numbers of guns were taken off the streets. Quite the contrary. So there's a lot we don't know but tragically and boneheadedly the U.S. Congress passed a law that the Centers for Disease Control was not allowed to study gun violence as a public health problem. Now that is insanity. That is an example of political interference with conductive research.

In the United States gun rights are a sacred cause of the right and anything that might compromise the right of everyone to have a gun is squelched. I've talked about many of the threats to academic freedom from the campus left but the political right is far more pernicious because they actually have power. I mean academics, it's often said that academic debates are fierce because so little is at stake but when it comes to government a lot is at stake and the suppression of research on gun violence is an example of how the right is also guilty of suppressing freedom of inquiry and it's one of the reasons why we really don't' know how best to reduce gun violence in the United States.

How Nike and Adobe revolutionized their business models

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Digital has rendered many older business models less relevant. Because of this, many established companies are undergoing fundamental restructuring so that they are better "pivoted" for the future. The higher-ups at companies are constantly looking for ways to take advantage of trapped value — where there's something you can do that adds more value for your customers or that allows you to respond in a way that your competitors can't match.When it comes to effective restructuring, it's important to stay attuned to the changing behaviors of your customers.

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RITA GUNTHER MCGRATH

Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, is one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth.

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TRANSCRIPT: One of the things that digital I think in particular has created that's new for a lot of people is it's both opened up new possibilities but it's also made older business models less relevant. And so one of the things you see established organizations having to do is fundamentally change their business models. Now some people call that pivot so some of my colleagues over at Accenture actually call Pivot to the Future. It's a big book that they've just written which I think is pretty smart.

What they're looking at is as a company how do you take advantage of trapped value where there's something you could be doing that adds more value to your customers or that allows your customers to respond in a way competitors really can't match. So if you think about companies that have fundamentally changed their business model this is hard. This is really not easy.

One of my favorite examples and I'll give you a couple of companies that positioned themselves appropriate to see an inflection point. And I should also mention this isn't a case of being prescient or making predictions. It's a case of taking early investments so that when something changes you're there and you're aware of it. And typically these are at the edges of your environment.

So, one example of a company that was pretty courageous in how they went about this was Adobe and Adobe picked up on this notion that we were all changing our behavior in terms of how we consume software in particular. We were going from a world where everybody bought shrink wrapped software and upgraded every couple of years to a world where people kind of paid for software as you need it. So the software as a service model.

And Adobe made the incredibly bold decision to shift from the one business model to the other. This was not easy and their customers didn't like it either. I mean 5,000 of Adobe's customers signed a change.org petition saying please don't do this to us because they really didn't like the idea of the new model. But as we see now that turned out to be pretty smart because that opened the door to all kinds of new customers for Adobe. So you can be an Adobe customer now for $9 a month and it's very inexpensive.

They had one set of key metrics, one set of ways of rewarding people, one set of things that drove success. When you switch to selling software as a service now you've got a whole different set of metrics. And, in fact, their CFO who I give enormous credit to spent months basically training Adobe's analysts in how they should be looking at this different business model.

He said look, you've got to understand we're going from a world where we get all the money upfront and that's our income for 7 to 12 months versus a world where we're going to get little bits of income every month. And what you should be looking at is things like how many users stay with us and what's monthly recurring revenue. They did this long before this became widely understood among the analyst community. And I think they did that because it's so hard for people to reconsider what their key metrics are when you've gone through one of these big inflection points.

Another company that I think has been slowly and carefully taking advantage of an inflection point is Nike and Nike started what we today call the direct-to-consumer or D2C market years and years ago when they first started partnering with technology companies like Apple. You remember the Nike+ Plus iPod campaign that ran years and years ago. Well that was really a first baby step toward what we now realize is a revolution in the way consumers are interacting with retailers.

And today we talk a lot about companies like Bonobos and Dollar Shave Club and Harry's. But Nike really but ahead of that curve in a big way but they did it slowly and carefully. Today about 29 percent of all of Nike sales go through their direct-to-consumer channels.

Talking politics: A Thanksgiving guide to divisive conversations

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As American families gather around the table for Thanksgiving, there's no guarantee that everyone will have the same views when it comes to politics. This means that there's a lot of potential for conflicts to blow up as we pass one another the pumpkin pie. The best approach is to not shy away from important conversations — yes, talk about politics. However, try to do so in a way that preferences understanding. In other words, instead of trying to change their position — as you beat them over the head with a drumstick — try to understand where they're coming from. Chances are, just by asking them questions you will learn something new that you haven't considered before. That alone, intellectual humility, is something to cherish this holiday season.

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DEBRA MASHEK

Debra Mashek is the executive director of Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan non-profit organization that promotes open inquiry in higher education. Mashek was previously a tenured full-professor at Harvey Mudd College, where she studied close relationships, community building, and collaboration.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Scientists’ brains are wired to see differently

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There are many people who have discomfort engaging with a scientific perspective of the world — for some, for instance, it conflicts with what they were taught during their religious upbringings. We can all gain a greater view of life — the cosmos — by getting to know scientists, especially when we're at an impasse in our lives. Scientists' view of the world retains a "distance" to it — it's observational, fact-driven. This helps with finding consistent principles in nature.

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NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia. He is the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose Directorship of the Hayden Planetarium. His professional research interests are broad, but include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. Tyson obtains his data from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as from telescopes in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and in the Andes Mountains of Chile.Tyson is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. His contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid "13123 Tyson".

Tyson's new book is

Letters From an Astrophysicist (2019).

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What factors shape a culture of innovation?

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When workers are afraid to take risks, or do things differently, then the culture of an organization is hampered in its ability to incubate fresh ideas.Innovation is a byproduct of a bold purpose — that is, it's a byproduct of an intrepid mission that organizational members can personally relate to.When workers feel their work is meaningful, they are willing to work harder and to go the extra mile in terms of generating ideas and finding solutions to problems.

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DAN SEEWALD

Dan Seewald is the Founder and CEO at Deliberate Innovation and designer of the Deliberate Innovation System™, which combines rigorous innovation techniques with the inspirational practices used in coaching high-performance athletes.

He did his graduate studies at New York University in political economy and entrepreneurship and has a B.S. in Accounting from the College of New Jersey.

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Self-liberation and the watershed moment of coming out | Sally Susman | Big Think

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The biggest decision of Pfizer executive Sally Susman's life was to come out as gay in 1984, when society was not as accepting as it is now.

She was told she would never have a spouse, a career, or children; those were the fears told to her by the people who loved her most.

Defying that prediction became her personal north star, and 31 years later she has done it. Susman used that truth-telling moment of coming out as a way to focus her ambitions and plant the seeds for her future.

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SALLY SUSMAN

Sally Susman is Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Pfizer. She directs Pfizer's global communications and public affairs activities, as well as heads the firm's corporate responsibility group. Earlier in her career, she spent eight years in government service focused on international trade issues.

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TRANSCRIPT

SALLY SUSMAN: Probably the watershed moment in my life and the biggest decision I ever made was to come out. I came out in 1984, which is a long time ago now and things weren't as accepting as they are. And when I told my family that I was gay it was said to me that you would never have a spouse, a career or children. And it wasn't that they were trying to give me a hard time. It's that they were worried about me and those were their realistic fears at the time. What happened in that moment all those years ago is the seeds of those things were planted deeply within me and I felt it was my life plan to have a spouse, a career and a child.

Knowing that was what I needed to be secure and safe and happy and prospering was very clarifying and once you go through a truth-telling moment like that with yourself you'll never go back. And so coming out has been, I think, the greatest, most liberating thing I've done in my life. I have a wonderful young adult daughter, a career that means the world to me and today is my 31st anniversary, so I feel incredibly lucky that I had that challenge early on that gave me a personal north star for what I needed to achieve in my life.

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How to keep up with Digital Literacy.

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Amazon has set aside $700 million to retrain 100,000 of its employees. That's an incredible thing—a company that is already at the forefront of tech is helping its employees catch up. What does that mean for the rest of us?Developing digital literacy in your organization's workforce is of utmost importance. How will companies stay ahead of the competition if they don't understand how emerging technologies, like blockchain, can be implemented?"Stay current" should become an organizational motto; it's about the disciplined pursued of understanding how technology can change the work you're doing today.

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TONY SALDANHA

Tony Saldanha is a Fortune 25 executive in the Global Business Services (GBS) and Information Technology area. During a 27-year career at Procter & Gamble, Saldanha ran IT and GBS in every region of the world, helping create a multi-billion dollar best-in-class operation. He currently provides advice to boards and CEOs in Fortune 500 companies on digital transformation, especially on internal business operations.

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TRANSCRIPT:

TONY SALDANHA: We all know it's almost impossible to keep up with the incredible amount of change that's happening in the digital world. I want to share a quick illustration. About four years ago when I started down this journey of trying to digitally transform P&G's multibillion-dollar global business services operation I went out and talked to a hundred different organization startups. And in that context I talked to a group of guys that were actually working on blockchain—this was about four years ago—and I asked them a question: How would you apply blockchain to Procter & Gamble? And they said 'Well, we're not quite sure. We think this is something that's more applicable to bitcoin at this point in time.' And so I kind of filed that away in my memory as interesting but not ready.

I went back three months ago and they had dozens of examples, all the way from how you use blockchain for coupons to advertising to accounting and all within the space of three months. So here's the issue: If I as a technology person find it difficult to stay abreast of this incredible change that's happening how does the average person who is a professional in accounting or finance or marketing, how do they keep up with the changes in technology? And that's where we came up with this discipline idea for staying current. Staying current isn't about becoming a technology programmer. Staying current is about the disciplined pursued of understanding how technology could change whatever it is that you are doing today. So, for instance, if you're a teacher, understanding where digital technology could change the dissemination of information, the organization of classrooms, the ability to coordinate across different geographies—that's how technology, digital technology, can change training. And that's really all you need to know. You don't have to become an artificial intelligence programmer.

This is one of those reasons why I love the recent tendancy of companies to recognize that digital literacy and retraining of their workforce is such an important thing. We read a month ago that Amazon's going to set aside $700 million to retrain 100,000 employees. When I read that I almost fell off my chair because arguably Amazon is one company that has the most digital skills and they were thinking of retraining their employees. That is why this is such an important thing. It doesn't matter if you are the most tech-savvy company in the world today. The question is: How do you keep up? And so you have leading companies including Amazon -- AT&T did the same thing a few years ago where they set aside a billion dollars to retrain their workforce. Loblaws, the Canadian retailer, has set aside a quarter of a million dollars to train their workforce. It's absolutely important to follow a very disciplined approach to retraining your employees.

What is intellectual dark matter?

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You're probably familiar with the concept of physical dark matter, but what about intellectual dark matter?In a similar way to the universe's dark-matter makeup, our vast body of knowledge contains a significant amount of information that can't easily be described in words.If knowledge was passed down only through writings or direct experience, society would crumble.

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SAMO BURJA

Samo Burja is the founder of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm that specializes in institutional design and strategy. Bismarck draws on Samo’s foundational research into the social and material technologies that provide the basis for healthy societies and functional institutions.

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TRANSCRIPT:

SAMO BURJA: Knowledge rests at the foundation of our society. Knowledge of how to build things like cars, airplanes, nuclear reactors, computers, but also knowledge how to build the companies and governments that allow for things such as cars, airplanes, and nuclear reactors. A failure of these social technologies ultimately results in a failure of the material technologies at hand. A lot of this knowledge, both the physical and the social knowledge is, however, not readily apparent and not easily describable in words. We live in a society that's dominated by bureaucracies. Bureaucracies that have evolved and where people follow rules and procedures that are written down. The vast universe of tacit knowledge, however, shows that there exists an intellectual dark matter all around us that we can't put into writing, can't put into words.

Intellectual dark matter is perhaps very similar to physical dark matter. Most of the mass in our universe is invisible, at least to telescopes, but we know it's there. We know it's there almost certainly because the galaxies are spinning too fast. The stars would fly apart were there not this 85 percent of invisible mass. Looking at society today if we only saw what was written down, what was explicitly laid out, what was explicitly documented on Wikipedia, for example. This could never hold together. This is why we know that intellectual dark matter is out there.

To understand intellectual dark matter you have to understand tacit knowledge and you have to understand technical debt. Technical debt is when someone else solves a very difficult problem be it in code or a manufacturing process or perhaps a philosophical puzzle. You're relying on their solution without even understanding their solution. You're taking these facts and already-built pieces as a given. And on top of them you build something else. It's, in fact, possible to lose this original knowledge. You then end up simply relying on this black box technology that's no longer around. A classical example of this is perhaps that to manufacture a Saturn V engine in say the Apollo rocket would today require a major reengineering effort by NASA.

The thousands of subcontractors that built the individual pieces of the engine even if the engine blueprints are around, those companies are no longer around, and the components would not be built to the same tolerance. So the technical debt that exists in an ecosystem of companies and other organizations and especially very skilled individuals can be very difficult to replicate, can be very difficult to document properly. The second type of knowledge is this knowledge that can't really be documented. How do you describe in words the exact right way to spin during a dance or the exact right way to, you know, throw a basketball into a hoop?

These things matter immensely. A world class surgeon is notably better than a mediocre surgeon for reasons that are almost impossible to put into words. A lot of our great scientific advances arrived out of us formalizing, using mathematics, the implicit and unstated understanding of how the physical world around us behaves. Say how an object falls to something that could be made visible, transparent. In a very real sense every step you might take in transforming the intellectual dark matter of our society into visible intellectual matter. Stuff that's written down that is formalized that is perhaps recorded in video is a step that reduces the fragility of our society.

Before you write an open letter, make sure it meets this criteria

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Open letters are welcome in an academic environment, but they should meet certain criteria to be considered valid.

While scholars are always encouraged to share their critique of a published work or body of research, they must engage with the same ethical principles as expected in other scholarly discourse.

The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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Debra Mashek is the executive director of Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan non-profit organization that promotes open inquiry in higher education. Mashek was previously a tenured full-professor at Harvey Mudd College, where she studied close relationships, community building, and collaboration.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DEBRA MASHEK: A question that comes up about open letters or letters of denunciation. So if a scholar had said something in her or his work or if it's been used in a way by an external organization that some other set of scholars objects to those scholars are absolutely welcome to share their critiques. But a couple of conditions should be met. First of all, the scholars who choose to put their name on that letter should have actually read and understood what the original source material was saying. Ideally they should also be within the same subject area so they have the expertise to interrogate those claims with authenticity.

There was one recently. Noah Carl was a postdoc fellow at Oxford and his work had been used by some outside organizations. And before you know it this letter comes out denouncing his work signed by hundreds of scholars. We went through and spot checked and most of those scholars were actually not within his area of research. This letter came out so incredibly quickly that I question whether the people who chose to share, to actually put their names behind the claims of the denunciation letter had done the difficult scholarly work of reading and thinking about what Carl had actually said in his work. And then some of the claims in the letter actually didn't line up with what we were able - when we did our close reading of what was in his work we weren't able to see justification for those claims.

Letters are certainly a form of scholarly engagement. It's a way to raise concern and critique, but we need to engage in those with the same ethical principles we would in other scholarly discourse.

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