Link for those curious about this comment:
(Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction)[https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf]
We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all.
Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse.
An example from the field I’m in — biology. It’s quite likely that if you worked at it you can describe a new species in your backyard. You don’t have to go to the Amazon rainforest, there’s scientific unknowns all around you all the time.
We also have some grand principles that further unite the field, like the cell as the basic unit of organismal life, emergent properties of higher order systems, &c.
The remaining work is mostly 'stamp collecting' - looking at the details of the output of that algorithm. Of course those details are enormously complex. Kind of like mapping out the Mandlebrot Set after you already know the algorithm.
If you wanna cure cancer, resolve chronic diseases, conserve ecosystems under climate change, etc.
It’s cool to know that DNA exists and that life evolves by natural selection, but getting into the complex weeds of that fractal is where we discover that we know so little.
This is where science communication fails, the general population and even the most curious people still think that there is such a thing as "Jennifer Aniston neuron", but in reality there is "Rachel from Friends neuron" that sits at the top of hierarchy where the signalling converges and then it's highly likely it isn't the only thing it's responsible for (OR gate), but finding what is the hard question. This is speculation stated at about 20min in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ID0FQN9tg
Lithium is a great example - very effective treatment for bipolar. No one really knows why. Prescribed for decades as they've tried to figure it out because tests showed it was effective and relatively safe, just no one knew exactly what it was doing in there.
It's sort of how you can be a woodworker without knowing the cellular biology of trees, and without being an electrical or mechanical engineer who can build a table saw from scratch.
Lithium-rich mineral springs have historically been touted for their healing properties. It was first used for mania in the late 1800s, with Denmark leading the way, but little was published about the medication for more than half a century.
https://www.verywellmind.com/lithium-the-first-mood-stabiliz...
I'm a believer in modern scientific medicine, but think we often have it backwards. Before reinventing the wheel we should exhaustively test what we used traditionally. Maybe the reason we don't do much of that is that it's not possible to patent, and so there's no financial incentive to do so?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?linkname=pubmed_pubmed&from...
It also doesn't make its way into mainstream practice among GPs and psychiatrists. As an example, which mainstream practitioner would ever prescribe or recommend curcurmin with piperine for any condition, aside from alternative medicine practitioners? Which psychiatrist would recommend EPA fish oil for depression? I could go on. The research that does exist is largely ignored.
Also, the many dead ends thing is true in general for pharma, but at some point there are too many dead ends for it to be profitable even given their bankroll. This is happening a lot lately with neuro-related drug development. In the last 10 years I know Amgen, Pfizer, Novartis, Eli Lilly have all had shut downs/lay offs in their neuroscience research divisions.
Subtle, but I get it :D
There is plenty, more than enough, data to work with, and many promising/proven models to build upon, need more good theorists in the field.
Saying "but we don't know much" is just being lazy.