moldbug

This is a better argument for you than for Haskell. I wasn't disputing that there's a set of people who can intuitively command an incredibly recondite black box they don't (yet) understand - or that that set includes you. What I will argue is that that set is small, making it very hard to produce a critical mass of Haskell users despite the tremendous academic subsidies Haskell has received.

Imagine you're a helicopter pilot. That it's easy for you to fly a helicopter doesn't mean it's easy to fly helicopters. If we compare the set of people cognitively able to use PHP, to the set cognitively able to use Haskell, I don't think we're far from comparing car drivers to helicopter pilots.

Of course that's false -- but once a Haskell program is typed and compiled, there are much larger chances that it will work first time compared to, say, Java.

Indeed. (I'm not just agreeing for rhetorical purposes - this really is true.) Inasmuch as the programmer isn't perfect, however, he spends his time chasing not runtime errors - but static type errors.

I can present LR parsing in a lecture as well. However, if you had to understand LR parsing to write an HTML 5 app, there would be a lot fewer HTML 5 apps.

By "debugging" I didn't just mean tracing. I meant one of the most basic tasks of the programmer - interpreting and responding to error messages. Is there a single error message shown or explained in LYAH? If so, I missed it.

This is germane because, when a type system works perfectly, it appears magic by definition. When it issues you an error, however, you have to understand what went wrong. It is sometimes possible to do this without understanding the black box, but the skill is again recondite.

I refuse to believe that Haskell programmers are so godly that their programs work the first time they're typed in.

I'm just saying that there is no such problem when it comes to learning, say, PHP. Or any other "townie" language.

So is the imposition of this arcane body of knowledge, "PL theory," whose DNA obviously originates not just in the academy but in the freakin' math department, and which has no relationship to any other body of knowledge commonly held or needed by the working programmer however 31337, essential to HOT-FP? Or could it be in some way dispensed with? If so, that would sure help out the mules on the way home, so to speak...

Learn You A Haskell is a classic case of (b). As a tutorial it's completely successful, and how? It tells you that you can learn Haskell without learning PL theory. It also neglects to tell you how to debug you a Haskell (without learning PL theory). But once you type in the examples, I'm sure you can figure it out.

A lot of people are smart enough to program on top of mysterious black boxes. That is: a lot of people are smart enough to work past this UI problem. Moreover, the smartest people can learn Haskell by rote and then gradually, through intuition and experience, learn to grok the black box. This is not to say, I think, that it's not a problem.

Of course you could just learn the theory. I'd say anyone who can graduate with a math degree from an Ivy-class university can do it. Is you a member of this set? Find out by reading the Wikipedia page for Hindley-Milner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner

I'm sure there are simpler explanations of H-M (Haskell's type inference algorithm). But they're not on Wikipedia. I sent this link to a friend of mine with a PhD in astrophysics from Caltech. "Which seems easier to you?" I asked. "This, or special relativity?" You can probably imagine his response.

So, wanted: a higher-order typed functional language whose type system is easier to understand than special relativity. Or of course a proof that such a device is impossible :-)

Statements like this prove the systemic abuse of statistics that is pharma regulation. You've - quite unconsciously, no doubt - reversed the definition of proof, asserting that failure to prove a positive is equivalent to proving a negative.

Of course you don't believe this. But your institutional jargon automatically generates the lie. Orwell had a point.

Today's viable drug is a survivor in a winnowing process in which any of a thousand screwups - often mere failures of trial design - can kill it. Moreover, while some of these are corporate errors (not the drug's fault), many of the design failures are institutional and uncorrectable.

For instance, testing cancer drugs of the "magic bullet" type against late-stage tumors is utterly ridiculous, as these genetic Cthulhus are the last place anything targeted is likely to work on. But this is the only place our testing paradigm is viable. The drunk looks under the lamppost for his keys, again and again.

Advanced genotyping might reveal that a certain tumor has five pathways for evading apoptosis. Five different molecules are needed to shut them all down. In an individual trial, each molecule fails. It thus - to use your language - "proves ineffective."

We are past the days that you can find compounds that mold poops out, and use it to cure 90% of humanity's ailments.

It's a commonplace assertion that most of these older compounds (certainly aspirin and penicillin) would fail an early toxicity screen and never get close to a mouse, let alone a patient.

I have no idea whether this is true. But if it is, Western medicine is objectively in the same position as NASA: it can no longer do the things it did 40 years ago. Welcome to Trantor.

I'd feel much better about it. Because I know that they'd have been killed in the front line by a shell - not in the Paris latrines by cholera.

My father's father fought in the Battle of the Bulge. They weren't pussies back then, you know.

How would you feel about your grandparents being used as a few more numbers to confirm that a drug is not, in fact, effective or safe in treating prostate cancer?

Typically when you're trying to "confirm" something it means you think you know it anyway. No, I don't think any p-value is worth dying for.

Your turn. Honest question: here's a story by a UK woman who jumped for joy to learn her cancer had spread, because it meant she could get into a trial:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9193018/Back-to-work-after...

How do you feel about this situation? Is it by any chance a little too "Tuskegee" for your sensitive ethical vibrissae?

Five years! I know that's fast by industry standards. Why, it's only one more year than it took us to win World War II. Also, for a full measure of the OODA loop, you should start counting from when the target was discovered.

The way you conceptualise a cancer patient's plight is also insulting and grotesque. They are not nihilists willing to try anything, who we can gladly sacrifice in our pursuit of cure. They have family and friends, and they really want to go their granddaughter's wedding next month and if you harm them with loosely justified bullshit science, you haven't helped anyone.

"Insulting and grotesque" is apparently in the eye of the beholder. I actually find this attitude pretty insulting and grotesque.

Some patients, it's true, are very comfortable being paternalized. Both my grandfathers were killed by the present standard of care in prostate cancer, "watchful waiting." They were both men who would have died rather than challenge an authority figure. And die they did.

I'm afraid the problem is that my standards of both intelligence and honesty are much higher than yours.

Our society has far too many scientists churning out what Kuhn called "normal science." Look at all the scientists in the '70s and '80s who performed fantastic feats of normal science to sequence some gene or other. Science and society in 2012 are precisely as advanced as they'd be if all these researchers had been driving cabs.

Well, aren't the rules of science the scientific method? Which anyone can use?

Anyone can use a paintbrush, too. Not everyone can paint a Picasso.

In fact, 28 days is a standard recommended limit for drugs available over the counter. It is fairly hard to do damage to yourself, with those sorts of drugs, in that time - but after that you really need the advice of a doctor who understands all of the risks involved.

I can't believe you just said "understands all the risks involved." On the basis of mouse studies and some completely uncontrolled, non-blind 6-year longitudinal study. Or meta-analysis. Or whatever.

Is this the best information we have or can get? Sure. Are the words understands all appropriate? No, they are not.

Aiming for this kind of certainty, and constantly, unconsciously boasting of it, is how postmodern medicine works itself into a box where it's completely unable to think. The information available in this case is shite. But the decision still needs to be made.

Look, I'm not an idiot. I know it takes 10-20 years to develop a drug. But I also know that many of the drugs we use now were developed before any of these processes existed. Aspirin anyone? Penicillin?

All of the processes and techniques used by the present-day pharmaceutical industry are predicated on the cultural assumption that, as I said earlier, it's better to let a thousand patients die of neglect than kill one with a drug. In fact, three orders of magnitude may be understanding the asymmetry - it might as well be six.

Once you learn how to do things incredibly slowly, incredibly expensively and incredibly carefully, you're going to be completely ignorant of any way in which they might be done "fast, cheap and out of control."

Very much a parallel situation is the nuclear industry. Does it really take 20 years to design and build a nuclear reactor? Done the modern American way it does. And indeed, there's a much better argument for nuclear overregulation than cancer drug overregulation - still not a good one IMHO.

There's plenty of experience from military programs, even from the other side of the Iron Curtain, that tells us it's not that difficult, slow or expensive to build a nuclear reactor. But if you ask any nuclear professional, you'll be asking someone who knows in great detail how to build reactors the ultra-paranoid way. As far as he's concerned, that's the only way to do it.

Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry knows how to execute effectively with a short OODA loop. The knowledge and experience would have to be created, certainly at the cost of errors and lives. That's a far cry from saying that it cannot possibly exist.

Think about the way weapons are tested and deployed, not in the play wars we fight now but in a real war like WWII. Many, many soldiers in WWII died from unanticipated weapons failure. But if weapons hadn't been developed with the tightest possible OODA loop, we'd have been fighting Tiger tanks with cavalry lances.

We're not fighting a "war on cancer." The military psychology is entirely absent. We're playing a game. As an earlier poster said, "it's an exciting time to be a cancer biologist." Is it an exciting time to be a cancer patient?

Mostly gains in infant mortality, plus antibiotics. We're coasting on the mid-20C golden age of medicine. Modern medicine is great - postmodern medicine sucks.

Replace "50" with 20 or even 30 and ask the same question.

Sure. If you're stupid. Science isn't for the stupid. There is a common if implicit belief that systematic methods will allow the dull, or worse the dishonest, to advance the frontiers of knowledge. No - the rules of science need to be made for those both brilliant and honest. Everyone else has plenty of other games they can play.

Aristotle had a nice word for the intellectual quality it takes to learn from sample sizes of 1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis

You say this like it follows.

I can too. I can read the label as well, which says to take it for no more than 28 days "without the advice of a doctor." Presumably this is the period for which it's been studied.

The idea of doing a double-blind study of the various systemic effects of a decade of induced achlorhydria is... absurd. How can you say it's understood? It's not understood, at all, either by my standards or yours.

So, without perfect information - I decide. I don't like the fact that all my ancestors for 100 million years had HCl in their guts, and I don't. I do like the fact that I'm not in the process of getting Barrett's esophagus and my abdomen doesn't hurt all the time.

Weighing risks and deciding without perfect information: fact of life. Trying to outlaw this process: like legislating that pi equals 3. Classic failure mode of the utopian 20th century.

See above for comments on statistics.

I didn't see this message the first time. Truly remarkable comment. Am I trolling?

I'll answer with a text from 1863, by the English historian James Anthony Froude:

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry the judicious questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would at present be found.

Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance; new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of the Tudors.

If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been thousands and tens of thousands.

I suppose it's trolling to remark that Doctor Butts has made quite a comeback. Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=Xc0YHClRwA4C.

This is exactly the problem: statistics. In a problem where every case is unique, any use of statistics is an abuse of statistics.

The roots of Western medicine are arguably pre-scientific, and certainly pre-statistical. We knew and could do a lot of things before we knew what a p-value was.

If what "advancing knowledge" means to you is "accumulating p-values so I can publish papers," this kind of experiment can produce no information whatsoever.

If what "advancing knowledge" means to you is "we think we know what's going on and we think we can do it better next time," the answer is very different. Of course this is what most people, indeed most industries, mean by "learning." We don't have to know absolutely that we know - we don't have that luxury. Instead we need to get things done.

Modern scientific medicine is supposed - no, required (with the increasingly narrow exception of surgery) - to learn only in the first way. Guess what? It doesn't seem to be learning much. Or at least, much of any use. Maybe medicine isn't as much like physics as we'd thought.

it is it is for the case of "oh shit, I just killed a million people because we didn't investigate long term effects".

And you're lecturing me about Godwin's law?

For what it's worth, long-term effects of OTC non-cancer drugs aren't investigated for shit. I'm permanently achlorhydric from permanently solving my GERD with daily omeprazole. As recommended by actual doctors. What the hell is the effect of taking omeprazole for a decade? Who the hell knows?

And that is where your theory really fails; because you are trading an unknown collateral now, for an unknown collateral in the future.

Did you ever read Asimov's Foundation? Remember the bits set on Trantor? Your whole mindset is straight out of Trantor, I fear - and it's certainly not exclusive to you.

Yeah, and I'm sure our regulatory infrastructure will catch up sometime in the Obama administration. That is, the Malia Obama administration...

If this time frame were possible this would be ideal, however, unfortunately each of these steps (if they are possible) takes significantly longer than an evening, and typically far longer than a patient has.

Then speed them up! You might have heard the story of Steve and Gorilla Glass:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_Glass

You're not going to tell me the actual chemical reactions are slow. It's all human labor. The speed of any organization is limited by the schedule on which results are demanded - compare the Manhattan Project to the new Bay Bridge.

This is a risky game. How do I (the scientist) know which drugs were effective? How do I know how they'll react with one another? If my focus is Steve, then do I really want to risk killing him through an unexpected cross reaction of my 30-40 untested drugs?

Yes, because Steve knows he's at risk of dying anyway. Being an intelligent person, Steve compares the risk of dying from neglect, versus dying from treatment, as apples to apples. Do you?

There are (apparently) 1210 billionairs in the world. So say they all get cancer and get this team of doctors - if any of the patients survive then some aspect of the treatment worked. If they don't some aspect failed. It would be impossible to determine which is which.

It would be impossible to determine which is which by the present statistical standards. Ie, it would be impossible to absolutely absolutely 10^7 know which was which. It might be possible for an intelligent person to make a good guess, however.

This is how technique advances in any technical field that can't be reduced to pure mathematics. If you're limited to advancing on the basis of perfect truth that absolutely * 10^7 knows it's right (even if when tested in practice, it's 90% irreproducible), you can barely advance at all. Guess what - we're barely advancing at all.

A combined focus of translational and basic research is essential, with a frequent and effective dialogue between the two.

The best way to have a frequent and effective dialogue is to make basic researchers part of the teams treating patients. The distinction is imaginary, anyway.

This was I believe the case for Steve, but not even for Steve could they do personalized drug development as described. They couldn't even try drug candidates which other developers and/or researchers had abandoned along the way - an enormous library of molecules, if properly collated.

Ultimately, your argument assumes the rate of discovery will be constant. You need to consider the research in the broader picture. Cancer is a genetic disease (in terms of pathological origin, not necessarily in hereditary terms). It cost the (publicly funded) human genome project $3bn to sequence a human genome in about 12 years. Now it costs $5000 in a week or so, and both the cost and the time is coming down.

It's a separate discussion, but you're actually making the argument against investing in basic cancer biology. Rather, all the investment should be in sequencers, etc.

Reason: consider the studies you did with the tools of 10 years ago. What was difficult then is trivial now. So in what way did it contribute to what you know now? In no way, which makes it useless - if you hadn't done the work then, expensively, you could do it now, trivially. Now, consider the studies you'll do with the tools of 10 years from now...

Of course, the practical effect of funding cancer biology is to fund tools development. But it's a somewhat indirect way to accomplish the objective...

Translation: "just how difficult it is to be absolutely absolutely absolutely * 10^7 sure we're not selling quack medicine."

The treatment of Steveoma is effective if Steve gets better. If not, it isn't. The sample size is 1 by definition.

Obviously, if Steve gets better and he's taking 30 drugs, no one has any way to know which of the 30 worked, which were unnecessary, and which were actually counterproductive. But you still know more than you do when you started - you know that something worked. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And your idea that somehow embracing quackery will lead to effective cancer treatments is just frankly insane.

I love being refudiated in the morning!

You might or might not be familiar with the term "OODA loop," originally developed by fighter pilots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

If the war on cancer was a dogfight, you'd need an order from the President every time you wanted to adjust your ailerons. Your OODA loop is 10-20 years long. If you're in an F-16 with Sidewinder missiles, and I'm in a Wright Flyer with a Colt .45, I'm still going to kill you under these conditions. Cancer is not (usually) a Wright Flyer with a Colt .45.

Lots of programmers are reading this. Here's an example of what life as a programmer would be like if you had to work with a 10-year OODA loop. You write an OS, complete with documentation and test suites, on paper. 10 years later, the code is finally typed in and you see if the test suites run. If bug - your OS failed! Restart the loop. I think it's pretty obvious that given these institutional constraints, we'd still be running CP/M. Oncology is still running CP/M.

Most cancer researchers are not even in the loop, really. For one thing, 90% of your research is irreproducible:

http://www.pharmalot.com/2012/03/many-cancer-studies-are-act...

Even when the science is reproducible, your cell lines and mouse models are crap and bear little or no resemblance to real tumors. You know this, of course. But you keep on banging your heads against the wall.

What would a tight OODA loop look like? Imagine I'm Steve Jobs, with infinite money, and I have cancer. Everyone's cancer is its own disease (if not several), so the researchers are fighting one disease (or several), instead of an infinite family of diseases. They are not trying to cure pancreatic cancer - they are trying to cure Steveoma.

Second, they operate with no rules. They can find an exploit in Steve's cancer genome on Wednesday, design a molecule to hack it on Thursday, synthesize it on Friday and start titrating it into the patient on Saturday. Pharmacokinetics? Just keep doubling the dose until the patient feels side effects. Hey, it worked for Alexander Shulgin.

Moreover, Steve isn't on just one drug. He's got thirty or forty teams attacking every vulnerability, theoretical or practical, that may exist in his cancer cells. Why shouldn't he be attacking his cancer in 30 ways at the same time? He's a billionaire, after all.

Not everyone is a billionaire. But if you do this for enough billionaires, the common elements in the problem will start repeating and the researchers will learn a repertoire of common hacks. Eventually, the unusual becomes usual - and cheap. This is the way all technology is developed.

Of course, someone might screw up and a patient might die. You'll note that a lot of cancer patients die anyway. Steve got a lot, but he didn't get this - why not? It would be illegal, that's why. Sounds like something the Nazis would do. Nazis! In our hospitals! Oh noes!

The entire thrust of our medical regulatory system, from the Flexner Report to today, is the belief that it's better for 1000 patients to die of neglect, than 1 from quackery. Until this irrational fear of quack medicine is cured, there will be no real progress in the field.

The entire process we call "drug development" is an attempt to gain six-sigma confidence that we are not practicing quack medicine. Especially for cancer, do we need all these sigmas? And are we obtaining them in an efficient way? I can't imagine how anyone would even begin to argue the point.

What is the source of this phobia? It is ultimately a political fear - based on public opinion. Its root is in the morbid, irrational fear of poisoning. But it also has a political constituency - all the people it employs. In that it has much in common with other "anti-industries," like the software patent mafia.

There's a great anecdote about Jessica Mitford from the '50s. Mitford had spent years writing an autobiography and, during this process, had constantly been passing drafts around to all her commie-princess friends. Of whom as you'd imagine there was a great number. Finally she got an agent, whose name I forget but I'm sure was a big New York queen of some kind, who shut her down and forced her to finish the book instead. "It's like parading around all day," the agent told her, "in your underwear."

The system has only been self-hosting for 7 or 8 months. Until November the parser was still de facto impure. The packet decoder has never been tested and isn't even in the kernel. String syntax is nonexistent, the prettyprinter prints pure dog crap, Nock 6 was an aesthetic disaster so Nock 5 is actually Nock 7 but with the calling convention reversed, persistence is nonexistent, stack overflow recovery is nonexistent, profiling has succumbed again to bit rot, HTTP is completely untested, etc, etc. I could explain all these things to you, or I could finish putting my clothes on.

Obviously it's on a public repository and all the code is PD. Crap you can even build the thing if you like. You can even fork your own kernel and try to compete with me! Don't expect any documentation, however. If I don't answer my email I don't have to accept patches. If I don't read my email I don't have to answer it.

Lesson 1: your research project is not an open-source project. Until it's done.

Lesson 2: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

That said, if you want to see some very odd-looking code:

https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/jupiter/sys/20...

Scroll down to the RSA implementation around line 2500. You won't learn anything. And why does a self-compiling compiler need an RSA implementation, anyway?

Hayek and Marx are history and literature. If you're not supposed to talk history and literature at the workplace, you may be in the wrong workplace.

Hayek is a second-rate figure both as writer and thinker. The only Austrians worth reading are Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises. I would read all of Rothbard before I read any of Hoppe, and all of Mises before I read any of Rothbard. I would not read Hayek at all.

What's cool about Dabney and Fitzhugh is that you could be expelled from any university in the country if someone found them in your dorm room. I wouldn't want them on the shelf at work either. Even Carlyle is pushing it in both contexts.

You certainly can't say that for Mises and Rothbard, even - not to mention Henry George and Karl Marx. About the only thing more innocuous than Henry George and Karl Marx would be a pile of old National Geographics, if screened for tits.

What is the difference? The difference is that when you invite investors to invest in your new location-based social network for morticians and coroners (or whatever the fsck), you are making an actual go at a business. Whereas when you invite investors to invest in your new programming language, you are conning investors.

Conning the government means making flagrantly bogus and absurd claims in your grant applications. Please bear in mind that all your competitors will be doing this. If you don't intend to play by the same rules, you need some other way of stabbing your competitors in the back before the finish line. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I am descended from a long line of Beltway bandits. I recognize the patterns and practices of the tribe at once. Indeed I recognized it in my first week at Berkeley, when they sat us down and gave us the basic lecture on what it means to have a career in "science" today.

I believe the numbers given were that half of us first-year grad students would finish, half of those would find teaching jobs, and those who found teaching jobs would be dividing their time three ways: 1/3 teaching, 1/3 research, 1/3 grantwriting. I found this broadly credible and still do.

So, that's only 1/3 of your day spent as a professional liar (and/or backstabber). You might as well try to spend only 1/3 of your day as a professional crackhead, whore, etc. But hey, it's worth a try.

As for trolling - absolutely! Laugh while you can, monkey-boy...

Come on, you don't think you can shock people with Karl Marx, do you? In 2012? Try some Maistre, Carlyle, Froude. Maybe even George Fitzhugh or R.L. Dabney. Here, this'll get you started: http://books.google.com/books?id=an2LWYTh2ewC

No, I thought someone was going to fund me because my adviser is well-known and prestigious within the field.

Maybe you're not such a bad bureaucrat after all! But I meant not while you're in grad school, but after. Of course, if you stick with your mafia, and it's a good mafia, you can keep the party going. Perhaps. Definitely make sure you don't alienate your betters.

Even the successful industrial programmers I know, unless they became millionaires off a start-up, did not actually make enough money to "settle down" out of working and "found your own little university of one."

Yeah, that's what I mean. Dedicate yourself completely and unreservedly to the foul, foul art of money-grubbing, and/or money-saving. Or possibly money-stealing. Anything is better than either conning investors, or conning the government. Have you considered growing pot?

(I won't say this worked perfectly for me, but it did give me time to write my purely functional operating system. Unfortunately this took longer than expected and I'm now kinda broke. And I really can't turn my daughter's closet into a grow-room. So, we'll see if anyone thinks they need a purely functional operating system... Kickstarter, here I come.)

Your problem seems to be that you haven't considered the possibility that academia is even worse. Academia is even worse. (I dropped out of the Berkeley PhD program in 1992 - specialty, OS and languages. From what I can tell, academia has only gotten worse since then.)

I could produce a parallel list of bullet points, but I'll just say three things. The only reason to go to grad school is because you want to be a professor. The only reason to be a professor is because you want to be a bureaucrat. Do you want to be a bureaucrat?

Even if you want to be a bureaucrat, there's no guarantee that you'll be good at it. Good bureaucrats don't write posts like the one you just wrote. They don't antagonize anyone, ever, in any way. They would rather lie - and they do. Are you good at that?

One of the things you'll discover in academia, for instance, is that the most appalling faux pas you can commit is to say anything bad about your colleagues' research. "Colleagues" meaning, of course, only whatever little log-rolling grant mafia you've wound up joining. You're perfectly free to criticize its enemies - though not the endeavor as a whole. Oh, you didn't want to join a mafia? You think someone is going to fund you just because you're smart and have cool ideas? Strange ideas you have there, kid.

I understand what you want CS research to be. CS research isn't what you want it to be. CS research is a gigantic government bureaucracy. Nor is it unique. Science itself is a gigantic government bureaucracy. Do you think it's not deceptive? Systematic deception is its very lifeblood.

Can science of the sort you're looking for exist? Of course it can exist. You can find it very easily. All you need is a time machine. Set the controls for at least 40 years ago.

Otherwise, the simplest way to do the kind of research you want to do is to decide quite consciously to give yourself over to the salt-mining industry in the most mercenary possible way, spend a decade making as much money as you possibly can (and spending as little as you can), and (if you succeed) found your own little university of one. It's not Victorian science, either, but I'll tell you it's a lot closer than Berkeley.

The US dollar is a centralized system. US financial regulation is in effect worldwide (except now Iran, I guess). If you have a decentralized system dependent on a centralized one, it's a centralized system.

Bitcoin is not dependent on the USD for its operations, just for its value. The day after MtGox (for instance) is indicted, everyone will be selling and no one will be buying. Also, all payment processors everywhere will cut off all Bitcoin exchanges everywhere.

(Everywhere excluding Iran, I guess. Is Bitcoin big in Iran?)