The Illusion of Average: Renewing Research Infrastructure

This talk is the third of three New Tools seminars.

By seeking out information on “averages,” researchers, funding organizations, and the public forgo vast amounts of information and risk building policies on plausible but misleading information. Imagine if, rather than discarded, information on individual and contextual differences were more systematically incorporated into the evidence-base. In what ways might research need to change to enable this alternative approach?

In this third of three talks, we discuss ways to overcome the barriers to breakthroughs in innovation uptake. We ground the discussion in the tension between robust causal inferences vs. generalizability of findings from a single research study. Next, we present plausible general principles for devising or amending program and research funding announcements. We then consider how those principles might have made the Women’s Health Initiative (an example of the kind of investigation that could be undertaken with a precision-medicine perspective) different at the program level. To highlight the need to refresh legacy regulatory processes to better embrace innovations and insights from citizen-led science, we explore the case of OpenAPS, a patient-led community that has “hacked” available technologies to create their own closed-loop artificial pancreas. The OpenAPS case explores challenges and opportunities to acknowledging, vetting, and approving of such alternative innovation pathways within the current scientific enterprise. We close this final talk in the trio with implications for project selection, management, and curation of research programs.

Talk 1: The Illusion of Average - Implications for Scientists (scheduled for Friday, Sept. 9) 

Talk 2: The Illusion of Average - An Open Science Approach to Research (scheduled for Friday, Sept. 23) 

Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes

202-446-0380

cspodc@asu.edu

http://cspo.org/cspo-in-dc/