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title: C- Effective synthesis is necessary for innovation and scientific progress
enableToc: false
tags:
- claim
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Authored By:: [[P- Joel Chan]]

The advanced understanding from an effective synthesis can be a powerful force multiplier for choosing effective studies and operationalizations,[^1] and may be especially necessary for problems where it is difficult or impossible to construct decisive experimental tests. The issue of mask efficacy for reducing community transmission is a powerful example of this; as [[R- Face Masks Against COVID-19]] put it, 

> "The standard RCT paradigm is well-suited to medical interventions in which a treatment has a measurable effect at the individual level and furthermore, interventions and their outcomes are independent across persons comprising a target population. By contrast, the effect of masks on a pandemic is a population-level outcome where individual-level interventions have an aggregate effect on their community as a system. Consider, for instance, the impact of source control — its effect occurs to other individuals in the population, not the individual who implements the intervention by wearing a mask...Even then, ethical issues prevent the availability of an unmasked control arm (27). The lack of direct causal identifiability requires a more integrative systems view of efficacy. We need to consider first principles — transmission properties of the disease, controlled biophysical characterizations alongside observational data, partially informative RCTs (primarily with respect to PPE), natural experiments (28), and policy implementation considerations — **a discursive synthesis of interdisciplinary lines of evidence which are disparate by necessity**." (p. 3, emphasis ours)

To illustrate the power of synthesis for accelerating scientific progress, consider the example of Esther Duflo, who attributed her Nobel-Prize-winning work to the detailed synthesis of problems in developmental economics she obtained from a handbook chapter in [[R- How to Find the Right Questions]]. Indeed, scientific progress may not even be tractable without adequate synthesis (as theory), even with advanced methods and data:[^2] as Allen Newell famously said, "You can't play twenty questions with nature and win."[^3] 

[^1]: [[R- Theory Before the Test]], [[R- Replication Communication and the Population Dynamics of Scientific Discovery]], ,[[R- Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses]]
[^2]: [[R- Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor]]
[^3]: [[R- You cannot play 20 questions with nature and win]]