The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

For a variety of reasons we explore in the podcast, the OA bubble is not arriving in the AI era as something as all-encompassing or healthy as imagined — in fact, it appears to be deflating and is certainly dirtier than expected. It also does not possess sufficient surface tension to repel elements of the AI bubble from mixing in — OA papers with OA citations and text are often found, and many more are suspected to exist throughout preprint servers, predatory publishers, and opportunistic Gold OA publishers.

The increasingly conjoined bubbles may share a fate in some manner, one we speculate about.

There are also some common business aspects — funding that dries up, circular financing operations, and bad actors aplenty.

Will both bubbles pop in spectacular fashion? Will they slowly deflate? Will one pop, leaving the other unharmed? Or are there another scenarios?

In any event, both bubbles appear incongruous with scientific discovery.

Where do we go from here?

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

• Article on the New York Times’ “Connections” game.

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Today, we’re talking with Elizabeth Jacobs, Professor Emerita in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Arizona. She retired in 2024 to help found “Defend Public Health,” a fiscally-sponsored volunteer network of public health researchers, healthcare workers, advocates and allies fighting to protect public health from the Trump administration’s attacks on proven, science-based policies. 

Topics of today’s interview include RFK, Jr., MAHA, public health disinformation and misinformation, supplements grifting, seeds of chaos to enable lawsuits, the importance of a new approach to advocacy, the negative valence of social media, and the proven power and safety of vaccines.

Also, we have our “Discoveries of the Week,” including an important study Jacobs mentions.

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This week, we dive into an unexpected topic — the rather bizarre Bluesky account run by Altmetric.

Altmetric has made some changes lately, including podcasts, so-called sentiment analysis, and Bluesky itself. And their LinkedIn account is much more sober than Bluesky.

But as you experience the Bluesky account, you get a feeling that something is definitely not quite right.

What is going on here? Is some part of Altmetric coming off the rails?

And, with the Impact Factor producing confusing results, is it time to look beyond current metrics?

We also have some book updates and our “Discoveries of the Week.”

• Interview with Dr. Fay-Wei Li, Duke
• Gaga Fern

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Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on drug discovery. He’s been writing a renowned science blog called “In the Pipeline” since 2002.

Lowe tackles a mix of scientific updates, political perspectives, and critiques of scientific publishing, all in an extremely down-to-earth and readable manner. He’s also the author of a 2016 book, The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry.

In a recent post Lowe described himself as an “AI Realist,” while writing a great line about current LLMs:

They are extruding an optimized slurry of words into answer-shaped chunks. To my way of thinking, these are far more removed from actual human writing than a typical chicken nugget is from a chicken walking around a barnyard — but I have to admit that there are many situations where they’re good enough.

When it comes to AI, Lowe is a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, but as the interview shows, sacrificing science at the altar of technology is not a way forward.

Discovery science, the effects of cuts on academia, and why drug discovery is and likely will remain difficult terrain are all topics we discuss.

A serious amateur astronomer and — like any good chemist — a cook, Derek’s renowned chocolate pecan pie recipe: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/holiday-organic-synthesis-chocolate-pecan-pie

It’s an entertaining and informative episode, with our “Discoveries of the Week” and our thanks for all the support you’ve given us and our nascent podcast efforts so far.

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Today, we’re talking with Roger McNamee, an entrepreneur, author, musician, and investor with a legacy in Silicon Valley that stretches from his days heading the T. Rowe Price Science and Technology Fund through the social media era and now into the crypto and AI era.

In 2019, McNamee published a book — Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe — where he outlined how his high hopes for his proteges Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg had been dashed.

More recently, he’s been reflecting on the mismatches between capital investments and revenues for large AI companies.

McNamee is a member of the band Moonalice, which performs and records regularly. He shares a fascinating story about the band, as well.

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Today, we’re talking with Jeremy Berg, a former editor of Science, former President of ASBMB, and former Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the NIH.

Earlier this year, Berg grew alarmed at the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya as Director of the NIH, and began a correspondence with him after his confirmation. For a time, he documented this via his Bluesky account, which grew massively as a result.

Striking a calm, evidence-based tone, Berg often received no response from Bhattacharya. When he did, the responses seemed to bristle with political overtones. Berg published these correspondences in late Summer in PDF form under the title, “Fifty Shades of Jay.” He continues to update the document from time to time.

We wanted to talk with Jeremy about this, and given the recent spate of announcements about Director-level “hiring in a hurry” at the NIH — including a new Director of the NLM — we also wanted to discuss other aspects of MAHA-era science defunding, firings, and hirings as the US scientific establishment is turned upside-down. We also talk about diversity issues, with a particularly interesting angle coming to light.

It’s a fascinating interview throughout, which we close with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Today, we’re talking with Nick Evans, who was in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and who recently moved to the Department of Political Science, a move he explains in the interview.

Joy met Nick at this year’s Peer Review Congress in Chicago, where he talked about his research around preprints and public policy. With a background in physics, science policy, and philosophy, Nick has a rich lens through which to view various aspects of his research topics, which includes dual-use technologies and gain-of-function in the life sciences. His book called Gain of Function was published earlier this year with MIT Press.

It’s a fascinating and informative discussion, he shadow-quotes Neil Peart, and we also get into “Discoveries of the Week,” which include coffee, cars, and deer.

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Today, we’re talking with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, co-authors of the book The AI Con, which came out earlier this year. 

Emily is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School. In 2023, she was included in the inaugural Time 100 list of the most influential people in AI. 

Alex is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry, a proponent of community-based uses of technology, and a highly sought-after speaker and expert. 

We discuss how AI hoodwinks people by exploiting their natural tendency to assign intelligence to things that produce language, how “science is squarely in the hype danger zone,” labor and structural issues related to AI exploitation and extraction, and so much more.

You can get a sense of their witty approach to tackling this by realizing that when they talk about “synthetic text extruding machines,” it reduces to “STEM.”

We also get their “Discoveries of the Week.”

Visit this page for information about contacting Emily.

Visit this page for information about contacting Alex.

For more information about their book, visit this page.

Our book — available for PRESALE — is here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-the-Internet-Disrupted-Science/Kent-Anderson/9781493094400

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