Ruxandra Teslo, a genomics PhD, writes about biology research, drug development, FDA bottlenecks, and the culture of science and ideas.
Commenters cite it in discussions of why medicine and cancer research are slow, arguing intelligence is not the bottleneck and regulation is a larger one.
This and Sam Harris realising that all his fellow travellers were both evil and stupid is my fave source of schadenfreude at the moment.
I think Scott had a subscriber only post a couple of weeks ago that was tiptoeing in the direction of admitting that all his BS concern about woke universities helped get us here but I can now find no trace of it (though I'm not a subscriber so that may be normal).
edit found it:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords
Still not read it as it's paywalled, but there's a response that suggests "the edgelord were right" implying Scott has started to realise the edgelords were wrong (though of course he can't just say that simply so it's all very vague):
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-edgelords-were-right-a-response
Elaborating a bit - brain is hard to study since you can't easily take a biopsy of it (from a living person at least), and various brain scans are not great at identifying the stuff we care about.
The slow acting nature of it means also you have to wait a long time to see results of clinical trials; also because early stages are easy to miss that also means you are stuck studying people who are already pretty senile and thus might be beyond the point where you can make a big difference.
Ruxandra has a nice piece, focused on cancer, but the reasoning is basically the same here: biology is just really hard. Sometimes we get lucky but in general it's a long, slow slog.
[1] https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/why-havent-biologists-cured-cancer
For the state of new cancer-killing drugs and bottlenecks getting them approved, see also the top few posts on https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive
The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amodei-on-ai .
> The bottleneck isn't research funding, it's getting past the FDA
Incidentally, that's the first point on his proposals to make the industry more healthcare first (slide 15)
He also links this https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-bureaucracy-blocking-the-chance
See also this article by a genomics PhD about how intelligence is not the bottleneck in medical research.
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the-main-bottleneck