Takahiro Hoshino: An Era Where Academic Knowledge Can Be Democratized

To tell you the truth, I am a failure of a human being who gained a lot of weight due to a lack of exercise during the COVID-19 pandemic. After receiving the unwelcome diagnosis of fatty liver during a medical checkup at the end of 2020, I vowed at the beginning of 2021 that this would be the year of my diet.

So, what should I do? The internet is flooded with affiliate articles designed to make you buy specific products, and health-related books and magazine articles are full of contradictory information regarding diet and exercise methods. In what is known as the principal-agent problem—seen between shareholders and management, or politicians and bureaucrats—when a client (principal) requests work from a performer (agent), it often becomes a problem that the performer prioritizes their own interests over those of the client. If you give up on searching for correct knowledge on your own and become passive toward information, you fall right into the trap of bloggers and authors motivated by a desire for advertising revenue or attention for their own theories.

However, we are now in an era where we can investigate academic knowledge to some extent on our own. Regarding weight loss, there is a vast amount of research in the fields of sports science, nutrition, and health science, including "meta-analyses" that integrate results from multiple studies. Thanks to the open science movement, many papers can be read for free. Furthermore, for English at the meta-analysis level, various translation sites can provide natural translations. By finding and practicing exercise and dietary methods from academic knowledge that seemed effective and sustainable, I successfully lost 12 kilograms healthily by the end of last year.

Now, I assist several government ministries with the planning and training of evidence-based policymaking. In recent years, knowledge regarding policy effectiveness has been accumulating globally. For example, regarding the effects of corporate subsidies, there are meta-analysis papers showing "which types of subsidies are most effective for which industries and company sizes in which countries." I am educating bureaucrats on the fact that such information is easily accessible. With academic knowledge being so accessible, I hope we move from an era where policies are decided simply because stakeholders spoke the loudest and effects cannot be evaluated, to an era where various academic insights are mobilized from the stage of selecting policy options.

What? You want to know what kind of diet I did? I am not an expert in that field, so no comment. Above all, please feel the spirit of an era where academic knowledge is openly utilized by researching it yourself!