What happens when your startup gets debunked by science?

http://www.fastcompany.com/3008066/tech-forecast/what-happens-when-your-startup-gets-debunked-science

by asanwal • 13 years ago

41 42 13 years ago

breadbox• 13 years ago

Unfortunately the all-too-brief article doesn't really answer this question (unless the answer is the usual "Deny everything and carry on".)

lutusp6• 13 years ago

> Unfortunately the all-too-brief article doesn't really answer this question ...

I think that was intentional, and that the answer is either "no one knows" or "caveat emptor". Or both.

vital• 13 years ago

I wonder, who is this science?

illuminate7• 13 years ago

The whole of objective reality.

illuminate7• 13 years ago

Well, that is what "science" is. The measure and best possible understanding of the reality in which all beings live in.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Most consumer "health" products (running shoes come glaringly to mind) are not backed by science.

They may need to adjust their marketing to not run afoul of the FTC, but I'm sure a slight pivot will suffice. They will live or die by how well they satisfy a (psychological) consumer need, not whether the product "works." Do any of the exercise products advertised at 3am ... "work"? It doesn't matter.

[Note: this comment is intended as an unsnarky statement of fact.]

tel5• 13 years ago

Depends on your customer. Many of these consumer health companies are also at least at heart gunning for reimbursement and payor customers. You're going to need to do more than a slight pivot to keep on sight with that strategy.

victoro• 13 years ago

The Atkins diet (and almost every other diet I can think of) has been debunked, un-debunked, debated, berated, and praised almost from its inception half a century ago. It has not stopped the companies that promote the diet, produce the food, and publish the cookbooks, from making money hand over fist.

With any physiological system of sufficient complexity, whether it be human digestive/metabolic systems or the neurological systems responsible for memory and intelligence, there will be opportunities for profit as long as improvement of that system is desirable and a small fraction of the population believes they have the chance to improve it and the cost is reasonable. Plus, there will likely always be "success stories" to cite simply due to the placebo effect.

We have a massive alternative "medicine" industry that supports not only the people in it, but also, ironically, the people producing the constant flow of content criticizing alternative medicine. Lumosity will be fine.

thaumaturgy• 13 years ago

Homeopathy. Next question.

People are remarkably good at ignoring things they don't like to believe. Other people are good at exploiting those people.

alex_doom• 13 years ago

But, but, you cure cancer with sugar pills!

claudius• 13 years ago

Tim Cook would need another job if that worked.

stevewillows• 13 years ago

While it may not make your mind better, you can get positive results with problem solving - - like doing a crossword each day.

xijuan• 13 years ago

When I first saw the title of the article, I thought about Lumosity. And it is about Lumosity!!! When I first saw its ads on youtube, I was like "Are you joking?... Pseudo-science trying to rip money off ignorant people?" The problem with Lumosity is that their claims are outrageous and exaggerated..

tel5• 13 years ago

Why don't these companies have a scientific strategy running alongside your product/customer/marketing/financial strategies? From a company making bold claims like this I want to see a continual string of increasingly sophisticated trials, each one giving increasingly robust indications of success. Luminosity should be fighting alongside those meta-analyses and investors should be demanding proof points in terms of p-values. Fail (scientifically) fast.

illuminate7• 13 years ago

"Why don't these companies have a scientific strategy running alongside your product/customer/marketing/financial strategies?"

Why would you devote any pretense of research and the associated costs if your customers don't care? Investors don't care as long as the money is flowing in and our regulatory agencies are toothless to deal with "health" product scammers.

tel5• 13 years ago

(1) it's clear that the regulatory agencies are gunning up to get more involved in "digital health" products which make healthcare claims and (2) it depends who your customers are. If you're only selling to b2c and can afford to never make healthcare claims then you're absolutely right. If you ever want to sell b2b (which is where healthcare dollars are at) then you'll need more.

babesh• 13 years ago

Because after one positive result that they can tout, they have everything to lose and not much to gain from negative results. They are businesses not scientific organizations.

gwern2• 13 years ago

The companies do have scientific strategies; Posit Science, for example, has a bunch of associated studies. They're an integral part of the marketing.

> Luminosity should be fighting alongside those meta-analyses and investors should be demanding proof points in terms of p-values.

How many $$$ is a p-value or meta-analysis worth?

> Fail (scientifically) fast.

That doesn't sound very profitable. How does that put more $$$ into the founders' pockets?

tel5• 13 years ago

It's product-market fit if your market includes risk-bearing customers. This is, admittedly, less a problem with nebulous mental claims and more of one when it comes to, say, claiming to prevent the onset of Alzheimer's.

I'd say healthcare companies in the behavioral/digital/connected health segments that have scientific strategies are outliers. Without regulation it's easy to justify trying to sneak by... but hard to cross to the b2b market.

hmahncke4• 13 years ago

Thanks gwern - I work at Posit Science, and that's been our approach since our beginning. When we got started, we ran an initial randomized controlled trial[1] which showed our cognitive training program improved memory, then ran a larger study[2], and then ran the largest study that had ever been done with commercially available brain training program[3]. Other research groups have gone on to show benefits in chemobrain[4], HIV associated neurocognitive impairment[5], and schizophrenia[6].

Different cognitive training programs are different - just like different anti-cancer molecules are different. Some are going to work, and some aren't.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17046669 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16888038 [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19220558 [4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22918524 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22579081 [6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19448187

lutusp6• 13 years ago

> Why don't these companies have a scientific strategy running alongside your product/customer/marketing/financial strategies?

Because the two possible sources for such science are neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscience hasn't evolved far enough to offer any meaningful evidence for or against the claims, and psychology isn't even a science as the term is defined (a discipline that supports or discards its theories based on experimental evidence).

That doesn't stop outfits like Luminosity, in fact it helps their marketing to be able to offer hand-waving claims that can't be meaningfully refuted.

> From a company making bold claims like this I want to see a continual string of increasingly sophisticated trials, each one giving increasingly robust indications of success.

Why would they do that? The drug industry doesn't do that, and they have a much higher chance to conclusively prove or disprove the value of their products. But they know better.

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

I hope this means NPR will stop pimping this garbage during their pledge drives (a $450 value) and lending what little credibility they have left to junk science. It is genuinely something that puts me off pledging... It just reminds me of their general decline in standards and terrible science reportage... And funnily enough since I stopped pledging I stopped listening pretty much, just catch it occasionally at the parents, but i digress.

I suppose the broader point I'm trying to make is they won't have to change as it is hardly like there's any scientifically literate mainstream media to hold them to account, and they've bought off the public media alternative.

rdl• 13 years ago

They definitely have gone down in quality from 1998 to now. What caused this? Trying to be more commercial?

learc83• 13 years ago

Their market changed. NPR used to be your only option when stuck in the car (for that kind of content), now you can listen to podcasts on any topic you can think of.

lutusp6• 13 years ago

> They definitely have gone down in quality from 1998 to now. What caused this?

A gradual decline in public interest in public television and radio. That, in turn, has been caused by the increasing diversity of offerings on cable and satellite TV and radio, compared to 30 years ago. There was a time when the only way to see anything resembling scientific or educational programming was to tune into public TV or radio. Not any more -- there are dozens of channels offering this kind of content now, of widely varying quality, but certainly competing with public TV.

As the number of advertisements and pledge drives on public TV has increased, the public has begun to see public TV as just another commercial-supported TV offering, nothing special. And guess what? They're right -- there's no difference.

richardjordan2• 13 years ago

I think though perhaps the opposite was part of it too. They became comfortable in their baby boomer audience (every pledge drive featuring Joan Baez being the giveaway) and they haven't really groomed a younger audience coming up. A certain smugness and belief that they were just naturally a superior option to the mainstream garbage meant they didn't put the effort in to innovate and improve their product. Where they did innovate is in sponsorships which are no different to ads nowadays - often npr-washing unsavory companies through extended "brought to you by..." then a bunch of copy worse than any ad, stated unchallenged.

I stopped listening partly because I was getting really offended by some of that stuff, and as stated above this brain science stuff really got on my wick. But also because the quality of the news in the morning was garbage. Firstly very little news, way too much human interest story. Secondly the reportage was pretty shoddy. Thirdly the analysis was facile, ill-informed and wrong way too often. Certainly not as bad as something like CNN, Fox etc. but not the quality they boast about. And when you can now get the BBC news anywhere in the world you can easily see what a poor product the NPR news has become.

I guess finally the talking heads are just so outdated. They represent a washington-insider-y worldview that has little or no bearing on reality. They're an aging media corps which still thinks things run the way they do at their cozy DC cocktail parties, genteel disagreements but we all get along. They have little to say that matches the bitter corrupt partisan nature of things in the US today. It's not that I want them to perpetuate that, but denying it exists helps no-one. Describing debates as though they're these deep seated points of principle and taking every statement at face value benefits no-one when it's easily determined, and apparent to anyone listening what's really going on.

IMNSHO

illuminate7• 13 years ago

They're literally selling hours of commercials to snake-oil peddlers.

rtkwe• 13 years ago

The font on the mobile site on Android is shockingly fuzzy and hard to read. Anyone else seeing that?

DanBC• 13 years ago

Anyone who's read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science book will realise that you can sell anything and the science of whether it works or not is irrelevant.

See, for a particularly bad example, "Brain Gym". This is a set of nonsense exercises that children are forced to do to increase mental alertness. It has some bizarre statements ('processed food does not contain water'; breathing through the nose gets oxygen to the brain faster, etc).

This nonsense is depressingly common in UK schools.

ExpiredLink• 13 years ago

The irony in this case is that 'brain science' itself is mostly pseudo science.

illuminate7• 13 years ago

Pop applications of it aren't neurobiology, sure.

What happens when your startup gets debunked by science?

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