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The problem is the "regulatory capture" part, not the "capitalism" part, in my view. What we have now is capitalism + rules that serve a small percent.
To me capitalism versus socialism are kind of red herrings. The real issue is creating and nurturing competition, which is kind of orthogonal to those issues.
It's completely predictable to end up with "crony socialism" just as much as "crony capitalism".
The way I see it, the appropriate goal is increasing and maintaining competition. Sometimes this means government protection of human capital pools through welfare and social programs, sometimes this means actually regulating a market to increase competition (net neutrality), sometimes this means introducing government services to compete with private services, sometimes this means privatizing things, sometimes it means deregulating...
I also think fairness is another big problem; nominal value and actual value (of labor, goods, etc.) are often different. So in either system you will end up with individuals (you can call them free-riders or psychopaths or whatever) who will take advantage of loopholes, errors, biases, and misspecifications in the system for their own gain. E.g., to me the fundamental problem with income inequality isn't that there's variation in income, it's my sense that that income variation is unfair, in the sense that some people's contributions are being undervalued, or others' are being overvalued, or that there are unrecognized benefits from public services (e.g., net neutrality vis-a-vis ISP's right-of-way grants, government bailouts of financial firms), etc. that aren't being fairly compensated or recognized in regulation.
I worry a bit that framing the debate as capitalism versus socialism only perpetuates problems. The problem is really corruption and fairness.
If an industry is benefiting unfairly from regulatory capture (e.g., in the form of patents, or physician groups, or whatever), focusing on capitalism versus socialism per se only allows the beneficiaries of that capture to come back with accusations of "liberal communism", and then no one is talking about the capture or the corruption, which is the actual problem, and then it continues.
As for Matlab, I think the big turnoff for me is its closed-source nature, which is maybe a more serious problem than you're giving it credit for. I also think that things like Python, that are more general-purpose, integrate much better than Matlab into other systems (e.g., web systems--you might not think it would matter if your estimation program doesn't integrate into a web app easily, but I didn't either and now I'm very sensitive to it). This is partially due to the open-source nature of things like Python, which lends itself to competition and experimentation, but also it being a more general-purpose language (this latter point is another sticking point with Julia, although wouldn't apply to OCaml).
This OCaml library is really beautiful, actually. I looked into OCaml several years ago for this sort of thing, and if it had been around then, I might have invested more in it at the time, and kept using it. I'll have to revisit it.
http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
Also, to be fair, the willpower hypothesis that was discredited is really about ego-depletion, the idea that willpower is (or reflects) a finite resource that is used by an array of neuropsychological processes. It's not that crazy of an idea, as there are many limits in human behavior and physiology.
Now, you can argue about what outcomes are good or bad, but that's a different issue.
In any event, these things aren't as different from other areas of medicine as you think.
For example, you're full of microbes at the moment. Some of them might make you feel a little off sometimes, some of them might make you incapacitated, and sometimes it might depend. The decision to seek care and/or intervene is a subjective decision, based on your subjective appraisal of how you're doing, and a provider's appraisal. Does that mean that infectious disease medicine is subjective?
Subjectivity enters into all medicine at some point, via ethical decisions about whether and/or how to intervene. Because ethics involves some level of subjectivity, it's unavoidable.
2. A behavioral record is no less objective than a biological one. Facebook and Google make a ton of money this way; if you want to offer a biological alternative, no one is stopping you.
There's good psychiatrists and bad psychiatrists, good and bad psychologists, and the pharm industry has done a lot of good for society as well as harm.
I'm not even sure where to start. Take, for example, psychologists: a lot of whatever progress has been made in mental health comes from psychology (quantitative measurements, moving away from monolithic, homogenous diagnostic categories, lots of research, even neurobiological research--hell, the head of federal mental health research recently was a psychologist with a neuroscience research focus); the pushback is often from entrenched MD political groups who play off the "trained doctor" stereotype. Pharm research, too, often complains about the overly simplistic disease models, but are required by the FDA to follow them in clinical protocols, further entrenching them (a different former head of NIMH has complained about this). Psychiatrists often are screwed by the health care industry, trying to care for the most ostracized segments of society (see the recent GOP health care bill, which basically gutted mental health care services completely).
These sorts of discussions are always frustrating, because they're full of armchair, backseat scientists who are all too-happy to declare bad science, etc. without any solutions themselves. Behavioral health is a very challenging subject, and slapping on physics, chemistry, or mech engineering as some kind of perfect model just doesn't work. The irony is that it's more challenging than those fields in a lot of ways; if someone could just drop down from their physics throne and solve all the mental health problems, it would have been done already. It's been tried, believe me, and what usually happens is they grossly underestimate the complexity of what they're getting involved with.
I've been really excited about Edward but when I tried it for a project last year I could never get it to come together in the right way. I got the sense that it wasn't quite ready for prime time yet, although very promising. My memory of it was that a lot of claimed flexibility in how to specify models wasn't really implemented fully. The experience also turned me off of TensorFlow a bit. But that was a year ago, so maybe it's improved?
I ended up doing it in Stan in part because I was more familiar with that, and it worked out fairly well.
Just a personal anecdote.
The difficult situation is one where you develop genuine feelings for someone that you work with every day, intensely, day in and day out. When the attempt of both parties to refrain from a relationship itself becomes an issue that you console each other over, ironically sending you into a relationship.
Or what if the woman approached the man, aggressively so? This does happen. Maybe not so difficult, but a different dynamic, and maybe a different reason to refrain, that turns this piece on its head.
Although well-intended, there's a certain sexism in these kinds of stories, a kind of "knight in shining armor" for the modern age. I realize that in most cases the issue is male -> female attention, but sometimes it is female -> male, or [fe]male <-> [fe]male, and it seems like we tend to assume everything is the same.
I'm trying to figure out what concerns me about this piece, because I'm not sure I have a problem with its content. I'm thinking it's not really what's written in the piece, but the subtext, context, and assumed reasons for writing it, and what to generalize.
I guess I worry that in trying to deal with the massive problem of sexual harassment, the actual messiness of other situations becomes stereotyped and painted over. And then we get blowback.