In this eye-opening conversation, Malcolm and Simone Collins expose the myth of "trust the science" in today's world. What people really mean is "trust the peer-review bureaucracy"—a system that's only about 50-70 years old, riddled with failures, and openly admitting its own decline.

They dive into the landmark 2023 Nature study showing scientific papers and patents have become dramatically less disruptive since the mid-20th century (decline 90% in disruptiveness for papers). New ideas are incremental, not revolutionary. Metrics like the H-index (invented 2005) and citation farming reward safe, iterative work over bold breakthroughs. Real progress? It's happening outside academia—through tight-knit communities of independent researchers, Substacks, patrons, and informal networks (think biohackers, geneticists like Emil Kirkegaard, or sex/arousal researchers like Aella).

They contrast this with historic "hold my beer" science (e.g., self-experimenting spinal cocaine for epidurals), discuss why bureaucracy killed disruptiveness, and explain why renegade cliques (in genetics, governance, crypto, history) are already replacing rotting university systems. Bonus: thoughts on journalism parallels, prediction markets for kids, and why mainstream media/academia memory-holes inconvenient truths.

If you've ever wondered why innovation feels stalled despite more scientists and funding than ever—this is why. The old system is dead. The new one is already here.Timestamps below. Like, subscribe, and share if you're tired of bureaucratic "truth."

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today.

Today we are gonna be discussing something that I have brought up in episodes in the past, but it is one of the largest and most systemic fundamental misunderstandings of how our world currently works. That is common in society, which is. How truth is determined and the belief that the system that we have for determining what is true is an old system.

That it is a vetted system or even that it is a system that hasn’t been in constant failure since it came out. It’s a system that itself says it is not working. And here we are going to be talking about the academic system as we understand it right now, when somebody’s like, well, trust the science.

They want you, they’re, they’re, they’re trying to get you to believe that what they’re saying is like, trust the scientific [00:01:00] method, trusted the thing that gave us cars and railroads and industrialization and computers. But what they’re actually saying is trust is this very specific, pure review system and academic bureaucracy for sorting information.

And I wanna point out to them that, that very same bureaucracy they’re asking us to trust they’re, the, the, the height or one of the, the most respected magazines is nature, right? Nature did a landmark study in 2023 on this very issue and we’ll get to it in a bit, but basically they show that since this system has been in place, scientific research has only declined.

It has just been getting worse and worse and worse every year. By

Simone Collins: what measure? By. Its ability to be replicated by,

Malcolm Collins: By its ability. Disruptiveness is [00:02:00] what they were looking at. So like genuinely new rather than iterative ideas.

Simone Collins: Ah, okay. Okay. Like germ theory and antibiotics, that kind thing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, you also see you know, research like the, the cost of research.

So basically the research you get per dollars has been going down dramatically. We’ll go over. This system basically was put in place in the 1950s and in pharma, new drugs per r and d dollar hald every nine years since the 1950s. So it’s, it’s, it’s accumulated getting worse the further we go from the inception of this system.

Simone Collins: That’s horrible. And

Malcolm Collins: the other funny that no Halfing every nine years

Simone Collins: is, I mean, I’m, I’m sure a lot of that’s bureaucratic morass. I bet AI is really going to disrupt that, but also to a certain extent, for example, in the United States. You almost are prevented from getting a new drug introduced without spending a certain [00:03:00] ridiculous amount of money because of the regulatory morass that you’re bogged down by with the FDA.

Malcolm Collins: don’t think this is regulatory issues. It correlates way more with the implementation of citation, the citation system, I guess I’ll call it,

Simone Collins: really,

Malcolm Collins: and we’ll go over how that system works, the various variants of that system that have come. Mm-hmm. And people might be surprised how new. So the system that is used most frequently today to judge professors this is the H index and the G index.

Okay. These systems were invented in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. So around the time you and I were graduating from high school. Like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, that’s when the system that underlies pretty much all of current academia’s hierarchy was invented.

Simone Collins: Right. ‘cause you actually mentioned these, these systems to me only this today, and I knew that citations [00:04:00] mattered to researchers.

I didn’t know that they were tied to their ability to get tenure. And I looked it up and you were right, and I was shocked that. That was one of the most important factors, and it wasn’t just like organizational fit and the extent to which you contribute to the advancement of your field and to which you are able to get, for example, grant money to your department for the university.

I figured that would matter more, even though it’s not necessarily like the best thing in the world at, you know, at least it’s more practical.

Malcolm Collins: What I find so ironic is, you know, there’s that like Redditer who’s like for science,

Speaker 4: As you know, tomorrow is Peace Day and nobody is as excited for the big celebration as I am. I’m not scientifically possible.

Speaker 2: . I’m a super scientist. My father was a super scientist. His father was a super scientist, and his father was, no wait. No. I think he was a milliner. Either way. I’m just not impressed with your tricks.

Malcolm Collins: You know, and then they’ll have like a doctor membrane [00:05:00] here. And the irony is, is the ones who say that the ones who worship what they consider quote unquote science mm-hmm.

Are actually worshiping something of an inversion of what was practiced by the type of historic scientists that would’ve shouted for science before pulling a lever or something like that. Right. Like the, the Frankenstein scientist.

Speaker 3: It’s lie. It’s.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They actually hate that. Form of science. Mm-hmm. The you know, biohacker lab in your house.

So, you know, sharing

Simone Collins: and it, it was those people who gave us so many of the medical and otherwise interventions. Like light bulbs, like, epidurals that make such a huge difference in our lives.

Malcolm Collins: Dive with epidurals recently. Explain how those are invented. Oh,

Simone Collins: yeah. I mean, I asked the anes anesthesiologist giving me my spinal when I was getting my latest [00:06:00] C-section.

Like, Hey, how are these invented?

Malcolm Collins: He’s attempting to learn Simone pathologically here. I love it.

Simone Collins: Well, you, you’d rather, when they’re sticking a giant needle like into your spinal cord, not think about the fact that they’re doing that. So, yeah, I’m asking other questions. But they, they like checked and they looked it up and they’re like, oh yeah, I remember it was these two guys, and they’re like.

They were experimenting with, with different things and they they just decided to experiment on each other using like, you know, giant, huge gauge needles. ‘cause at the time they didn’t have smaller needles, but I think what it was, was they tried injecting just cocaine directly to their spinal cords.

‘cause what could go wrong? But they were just, they did it on themselves. It wasn’t like, I have a theory about this. We’re gonna test this on lab bias for like the next 10 years. They’re like, Hey man. What would happen if we just put this directly into our spinal cord?

Malcolm Collins: You wanna try to stick this in our spine

Simone Collins: with giant needles?

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: that is, that is fine. That’s the type of thing that [00:07:00] they’re imagining when they say,

Simone Collins: yeah, it, it wasn’t, yeah, it, it was hold my beer. Like, that’s the kind of like attitude and that

Malcolm Collins: is, it’s funny. Same type of redditer who will say that unironically on Reddit is the same person who freaks out at us for doing like polygenic selection or like, germline gene editing on humans.

They’re like, how dare you edit human DNA, that that’s, that could do something new that would be dangerous. Have you sought approval from the authority before flipping that switch? You know, and I, I. I want to get into when they say for science, what they actually are worshiping is a provably failed. And the, and when I say provably failed, I mean the system itself has said,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: this has failed.

This is

Simone Collins: not working.

Malcolm Collins: Our own metrics.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: A provably failed bureaucracy, not actual science or the scientific message. So let’s get, get in here. [00:08:00] So the system that we call the, the academic bureaucracy right now, that basically, and the reason I say like this determines truth within the urban monoculture.

This real...