Beware of Problem-Solvers That Benefit from Never Solving a Problem

I’m currently reading a book by Azra Raza called The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. Raza is a lymphoma expert, and she caught my attention because I heard her complain on a podcast that the drugs we treat lymphoma with today are essentially the same ones she was using in the seventies. Raza is also a harsh critic of the way we do cancer research in America – and with good reason:

To develop treatment strategies for so dense a disease by attempting to duplicate its complexity in tissue culture cell lines or animal models has been an unmitigated disaster. The failure rate for drugs brought into clinical trials using such preclinical drug-testing platforms is 95 percent. The 5 percent of drugs that reach approval might as well have failed since they prolong survival of patients by no more than a few months at best. Since 2005, 70 percent of approved drugs have shown zero improvement in survival rates while up to 70 percent have been actually harmful to patients.

…For the next quantum leap, fundamentally different strategies have to be developed. The two immediate steps should be a shift from studying animals to studying humans and a shift from chasing after the last cancer cell to developing the means to detect the first cancer cell.

Raza’s point is that Big Pharma ends up sponsoring much of the research into cancer and they want scientists to help them find drugs that will extend life at the end stages of cancer, almost all of which have very minimal benefits but still cost staggering amounts of money. On the other hand, she makes the point that if we really want to help people with cancer, our research needs to be focused on detecting cancer AT THE VERY BEGINNING, even before you hit Stage 1 cancer. After all, that’s when potential treatments should be most effective and it’s also, theoretically at least, at a point BEFORE you have to start cutting parts of the body off or poisoning it with chemotherapy.

She has been beating that drum for quite a while, but there’s just no funding for it. Why? Well, Occam’s Razor says it’s because Big Pharma makes most of its money from treating people long-term, not curing them. It reminds me of this cartoon version of Superman villain Lex Luthor coming up with an inoculation that would cure Muscular Dystrophy and working on a way to slow it down so he can make more money off a lifetime treatment:

This bleeds over into the philosophy behind our whole medical system as well. Don’t get me wrong, our hospitals have lots of talented doctors and nurses that really care about their patients. Additionally, if you have an acute injury, like a broken leg, you get stabbed or you have a heart attack and need immediate treatment, there’s no better place to go than the American medical system.

The “but” here is that our medical system is focused like a laser on dealing with symptoms but isn’t that great at targeting the root causes of a problem. Do you have a symptom? They’ll give you a pill to handle it. If that causes a problem, then their fix for that is…another pill or maybe two. If you want to figure out how you got there in the first place, the American medical system is in many cases, generally unhelpful.

Again – and this is no reflection on all smart, talented, caring professionals who got into medicine to help people – it’s hard to help noticing that hospitals make a lot more money treating you than curing you.

How about “Big Food?” On the one hand, you want them to provide you with nutritious food that will help you be healthy and in good shape, but what’s their goal? To keep you eating as much of their product as possible. Read these excerpts from this New York Times article on Ozempic and tell me if despite putting out all those “health food products,” “Big Food” really wants you to be healthy and in shape or whether they’re literally willing to see you die earlier to improve their profit margins:

Big Food is practiced at spotting perverse openings for new products in our faddish drives for self-improvement. In 1978, for example, Heinz bought Weight Watchers, added products like cheesecake, and made a tidy profit. That acquisition heralded a trend of health-conscious rebranding that peaked in the 1980s and ’90s. Nestlé started Lean Cuisine, and Chef America began selling Lean Pockets alongside its Hot Pockets. (The difference between the two was roughly 30 calories.)

...Dullness has its uses, too. Companies make products like potato chips, popcorn, and mac-and-cheese meals bland on purpose to bypass “sensory-specific satiety,” the feeling when strongly flavored foods become less desirable as they are eaten. Big Food plumbed behavioral research for clues to how the brain’s reward system reacts to sugar and salt, using it to keep products tickling the “bliss point,” the height of delight. But there is no equivalent bliss point for fat: Fortunately for the industry, people tend to want as much fat as they can get. Scientists can engineer fats to melt at precisely the right temperature in the mouth, sparking the release of dopamine while creating an impression of “vanishing caloric density.” A Cheeto, disintegrating innocently on the tongue, tells us it contains fewer calories than it does.

...Given Big Food’s track record, it’s likely that the companies will succeed at finding products Ozempic users crave. But what if they’re too successful? I asked Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction if she believed it could be possible for food companies to engineer, intentionally or not, compounds that would make GLP-1 drugs less effective. Avena told me it was plausible. The food industry, she pointed out, has cabinets of formidable reward-triggering compounds with which to experiment. Companies could end up counteracting the drugs to some degree in their efforts to make foods more rewarding, she said.

What’s the difference between Big Tobacco, which knowingly produces products that slowly kill people, and the modern “Big Food” industry? In my opinion, absolutely nothing.

Of course, this isn’t all about politics, as Andy Ngo on Twitter pointed out with this tweet about a homeless man who overdosed in Portland:

Do you think it’s unfair to call them the “Homeless Industrial Complex?” I sure don’t. Especially in a world where California has spent 24 billion dollars since 2019 on the homeless only to have the number of homeless in the state GO UP by 30,000 people during that timeframe. Who do you think got fired for that in the government? What about among the NGOs that could be better said to ENABLE THE HOMELESS in California than help them? Nobody. What they did was WORSE THAN NOTHING, but a lot of Democrats had their salaries paid and claim they were “doing something compassionate” about homelessness, so do they really view it as a failure?

Similarly, think about the professional race hustlers in America like Eric Dyson, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the leaders of Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, Joy Reid, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi. First of all, the idea that anyone asks them about racial issues in the first place is completely ridiculous because if it involves a non-liberal, their answer is going to be, “Yes, that’s racist.” That’s THEIR JOB. None of them are particularly smart or intellectually interesting (and yes, I especially meant to say that about Ibram X. Kendi, who gets called an “intellectual” although his “ideas” are just standard anti-white and anti-Jewish racism dressed up with Berkeley faculty lounge lingo). All of them just call things racist for a living. Well, so do you think any of them want racism to end? Of course not, because that’s how they make their living. That’s why no matter what, they’re always going to see racism everywhere, all the time.

We also can’t forget about the ultimate entity that benefits from creating problems, which is the government. In fact, many of the major problems this country has are a result of government policies and what is the solution that’s always offered to these disasters created by the government? Giving more money and power to the government.

“Healthcare sure is expensive since we passed Obamacare. Guess we need Medicare for all!”

“Wow, inflation sure has been bad since the Federal Reserve printed all that money. That’s probably the fault of corporations. You should have the government crackdown on them!”

“The government keeps spending more money every year. We need to raise taxes on the rich to pay for all of it!”

“Rent sure has gotten expensive in San Francisco and New York City since those cities implemented rent control. No worries, all that needs to be done to fix that is putting money into a government program to create more housing.”

“We’re going to deliberately leave the border wide open, but if you let all the illegals that snuck into the country become citizens, we promise to start enforcing the border after that!”

“The government has already spent all the money that people contributed to pay for their Social Security when they got old. That’s why the government needs to raise taxes on the rich to make sure there’s money to pay people!”

We live in a low-trust world for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that it’s full of organizations, corporations, and politicians that have a perverse incentive to make sure the problem they’re trying to solve never goes away. If you ever have trouble figuring out why the obvious solution to a problem isn’t being pursued, it’s entirely possible that the people pursuing it will lose their jobs if they happen to embrace that solution.

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