My first job out of college 10 years ago was in a lab focused on Alzheimer’s research. Our Principle Investigator made an art of writing grant applications for studies that would appear to be in line with mainstream theory, but were really intended to test theories he actually thought were worth testing, presented in results as an “interesting” aside. He believed the amyloid theory had been conclusively disproven.
He explained to me that people like him work for decades, quasi-retire into positions accepting grant applications, and have a conscious or unconscious agenda to preserve or validate their life’s work. His money quote was “science is like the Catholic Church, a lot of nice sentiments but full of people”.
I don’t have any evidence or examples, but I suspect this dynamic is not limited to Alzheimer’s research.
Another anchor to research not mentioned in the article is how much sponsoring universities take from research labs. To put a university endorsement on our research, which is needed to be credible, the university took half (half!) our grant money.
This has been my experience more-or-less as well. Any graduate student that does anything even alzheimer's adjacent at the school I used to work at absolutely had to have a certain two researchers on their dissertation committee and they would 100% not let you progress without throwing a bone to beta-amyloid in your proposal (along with heavily pushing you to pander to some of their personal pet theories).
It's a sunken cost fallacy at this point, people have build entire careers on the beta-amyloid stuff and they will NEVER accept an alternative because it would make them irrelevant. These same people hold a lot of power in the field.
It's the same with autoimmunity. Some researchers are obsessed with genetics. But it's mostly about self misclassification due to infections and dysbiosis. Luckily, some top journals have started accepting this, but it's still an uphill battle against the establishment:
Old Nero-ophthalmologist diagnosed me with Sjogrens because I mentioned my symptoms always improved for several weeks following a round of antibiotics. He has noticed that’s a common trend in Sjogrens patients.
He’s never heard of the marshal protocol, just something He had noticed.
Can’t find a single doctor that will take the infection theory seriously.
a Year later I can’t get a prescription to even try it.
My vit D is very low. Modern med just say take supplement.
Mars shall protocol says that’s just feeding the infection. Supposedly bacteria loves vit D.
Love to find a doctor that doesn’t automatically dismiss me for bringing it up.
As shown in my references above, Ro60, a potentially causal autoantigen for Lupus and Sjogren's has been linked to commensal bacteria. The study is published in Science Translational Medicine, which is a high end journal, and quite conservative. Plus other studies have reproduced equivalent results.
So these doctors should both update their knowledge and also give you the benefit of doubt.
There is a growing network of doctors that treat multiple sclerosis with high vitamin D doses. Look for the Coimbra Protocol. They also deal with other autoimmune patients. While their protocol is quite experimental, and it poses some safety concerns, it might be helpful to get in touch with more open minded MDs.
Vitamin D influences so many immune pathways. I tend to think most of the effect comes from altering T regulatory / effector ratios. Others argue for regulation of HLA elements. Irrespective of that, low vitamin D is a big risk factor for many autoimmune disorders so I would question that statement.
Yes. Or dysbiosis, i.e. your own commensal bacteria, fungi and phages going out of control in different ways. The consequence of this in both cases is that your immune system mis-classifies some of your own tissues as non-self and attacks them (autoimmunity). See introduction in:
The reason is that both pathogens and your own microbiome mimic your tissue components. Especially proteins. They want to avoid being recognized as non-self, either to infect you or to keep their symbiotic relationship.
Hence, in some scenarios it's hard for the immune system to classify a virus or a commensal as foreign and the mimicked tissue in your own body as self at the same time.
The first reference in my previous post explains it well. Viral mimicry is quite old and well established in the literature both as an infection strategy and as a cause of autoimmunity [1-3]. But microbiome (commensal) mimicry is surprisingly unexplored, except for a few recent studies. Some are those I referred to in my previous post.
Note in many ways tumors are also an immune problem. They should have been caught by the immune system. There is growing evidence that this is also related to mimicry and dysbiosis.
I have subscribed to the theory that humans are first and foremost a host for bacteria, and that whether that relationship is symbiotic or dysbiotic is largely a factor of how happy your bacteria are.
What you said is very intuitive however not entirely true.
Let me explain:
Bacteria are happy no matter what as they (as community of different bacteria) can adjust to content of the human gut; i.e. when we feed simple sugars (in contrast to fibre that is a polymer made of many sugars) some microorganisms will be more than happy to go on simple sugar-diet that requires less energy to consume it. However it can disregulate metabolic network of microbiome that has been co evolving with fibre based diet rather than simple sugars. Early humans consumed much more plant based fibre and therefore we hardwired our human metabolism and twicked immune response to co exist with microbiome that consumes fibre.
Let me give you an example: when microbiome gets fibre from our diet it returns us side products of fibre metabolism including short chain fatty acids (scfa). They(scfa) stimulate many receptors in our body and keep us healthy.
So in summary: microbiome will adjust its metabolism to what is available and will be always happy given there is any food. Microbes can even consume our own mucosa when we starve or when we die.
It is more about keeping the community of microbes at homeostasis (in contrast to dysbiosis). Keeping them on diet that we used to feed them for hundreds of thousands years of our co evolution even preceding primates appearance. Our bodies depend on side products of microbial metabolism of what we used to feed them and definitely not of what western like diet feeds them nowodays. We live in the world of disregulated microbial metabolism. It disregulates us, our own metabolism, our brains, our immune responses, almost all tissues. We cause dysbiosis of the global ecosystems on the planet. This is reflected in the dysbiosis of our own gut. We are degenerating our microbial shield and degenerate our and other species.
I'm afraid we still know little about dysbiosis, but most decent findings are in the literature. I'd encourage you to take a look at good recent papers. Once you get used to the jargon, you will start learning a lot.
Furthermore, as presented below recent study has linked microbial metabolism of sugar, dysbiosis and antigen-specific immune responses to insulin.
This is the first study that identifies precisely the cause of autoiimmunity in type 1 diabetes.
Posts like this one are exactly why I keep coming back day after day to this forum. Thank you for this amazing informational share.
I've long wondered if infections are behind many of the unexplained mid and late life disorders. It's exciting to see that it's finally being recognized as a credible explanation in the literature. As someone with a family member suffering from autoimmune, I'm hopeful that this trend will continue and result in antigen mediation therapies that can help.
Worth mentioning that the family member I am thinking of developed these symptoms within a year after getting a bad stomach/GI infection.
Just to clarify, it's both infections OR dysbiosis (your own commensal bacteria, fungi and virus going out of control).
The infection + molecular mimicry theory of autoimmunity was already quite well established in the 80s, but commensal dysbiosis + molecular mimicry is only starting to emerge now, and it's likely to be even more important. See section 1 (introduction) of this paper for a whole overview:
Your dermatologist doesn't know any better than you in this case, though I think he's wrong to be dismissive.
This stuff about the gut-skin axis has only been coming out the last 2-3 years, although there are a few lone researchers who have been thinking this for decades.
For myself, I experienced roughly 80% reduction in symptoms after switching to a strict vegetarian diet two years ago, and it's stayed that way.
You might want to look into trying an elimination diet. There are quite a few resources online for this and gist of it is that you cut out a whole bunch of food types that have been known to cause issues with some people. After a few weeks of that you add back in a single group of food every few days and check if any symptoms return.
Some people have had luck using this method to find issues that doctor visits weren't able to surface.
"I suspect this dynamic is not limited to Alzheimer’s research."
Agreed, I think it is a universal problem in science.
I have an illness that has been curable for decades now, but this cure is treated with hostility by the medical establishment. I look forward to the day when the cabal of my illness collapses. Hopefully then I will be able to talk about what happened without people getting angry.
looks like that day isn't today, given the downvotes xD
in fairness, i think people have a hard time taking claims like this seriously without a little more information, due to its superficial similarity to those of a "crackpot". (but while the _precision_ is pretty poor on the correctness of "crackpot" theories, the _recall_ is pretty much 100%)
"One common theme in the chronic Lyme communities is that people who go into remission tend to attribute their response to whatever technique, supplement, or medication they were trying at the time."
Once people form a community around a particular therapy the community will never admit that the therapy was wrong.
On the other hand https://equilibriabook.com/ gives shocking examples of how the medical establishment was wrong even though all the information was available and an individual could do much better not following mainstream medical advice. That can happen when the incentives in the research institutions are misaligned.
Even more information wouldn't really help. 'Crackpot' is something of a shorthand for an idea that disagrees with consensus research position. The only tool an average person has to determine an idea as truth or fiction is whether it lines up with the current professed norms; so for a technical forum like HN ideas that disagree with the standard research position can only be ignored due to lack of evidence.
> The only tool an average person has to determine an idea as truth or fiction is whether it lines up with the current professed norms; so for a technical forum like HN ideas that disagree with the standard research position can only be ignored due to lack of evidence.
The manner in which someone presents their ideas is a decent secondary indicator. Common red flags include being evasive about what disease they're referring to, being unable to demonstrate where the mainstream theory fails, being unable to point to any good experimental evidence that even hints that the crackpot theory may be an equal or better explanation, not being able to anticipate and have a good answer for the most obvious questions raised by the crackpot theory.
Thank you for the feedback regarding how I come across. Next time I will try to include more specific detail in the OP that hopefully does not upset people. I've found that a vague introduction protects me from down-votes, but perhaps there is a way to talk about some details without that happening.
The illness is chronic mercury toxicity and the treatment is chelation therapy. I know a man who reversed his dementia with chelation therapy. He's an older guy that would get lost in his own neighborhood.
Steven Fowkes, a chemist, has done a lot of work in presenting the some of the latest research regarding Alzheimer's and how it relates to mercury toxicity. A good start is his Quora answer here: https://www.quora.com/Why-havent-we-made-progress-in-a-cure-...
You're really not helping your case by citing two people who come across as even more shifty. Piling on more low-quality evidence like this just raises more questions and doubts, and gives the impression that you either cannot identify credible evidence or that none exists.
> It [his cure for Alzheimer's] isn't a proven reality so if you're looking for double-blind clinical studies of this you're gonna be disappointed. But if you're willing to suspend your disbelief and try something as simple as giving your family member without Alzheimer's disease something like coconut oil and B-complex vitamins and see if it works, you may be very pleased.
Suspending disbelief should not be a requirement to make a persuasive argument about a scientific subject. This guy just smacks of snake oil salesman through and through.
There's a lot more to it than that. Did you watch the series of videos? The underlying mechanism of how mercury can induce β‐amyloid production and tau phosphorylation has been discovered.
No, I did not watch all the videos. It seems like they/you are proposing a hypothesis that mercury poisoning is responsible for a significant percentage of Alzheimer's cases? And reading between the lines on your other posts, you seem to believe that mercury poisoning is a factor in your own illness due to your perception of chelation therapy being effective for you?
Correct. Although, instead of saying a "significant percentage" I would just say "some", because there is no way of knowing if mercury is the sole cause at this point.
I think mercury is a major factor in many illnesses, and the root cause of mine. I did have some serious memory issues for a while, and my ability to focus was so bad that I could not watch a TV show. There are tens of thousands discussing the same kinds of symptoms and how they disappear with chelation.
I think the source of mercury exposure, duration of exposure, intensity of exposure, where the toxicity eventually settles in the body, and genetic factors all play a role in the symptoms that an individual suffers from. That is why one toxin can cause such a wide range of illnesses. The "radium girls" who were poisoned working with radium in factories is a good example of this.
I posted the videos because they are easier to understand. The underlying mechanism of how mercury can induce β‐amyloid production and tau phosphorylation has been discovered. Here's a paper that discusses the same ideas: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1471-4159...
And I'm not sure why you describe Boyd Hayley's work as low quality. The man has published a huge amount of work, much of which was funded by the NIH.
Ultimately I think the highest quality evidence is the actual curing of sick people. I know my claims of being cured and of others being cured are hard to believe. If you saw first-hand the transformation we went through then you would know we are on the right track.
> And I'm not sure why you describe Boyd Hayley's work as low quality.
I'm not saying his work is necessarily low quality. I'm saying that attaching his name to work makes it less credible from the outset, because his reputation is so thoroughly tarnished be things like his anti-vax positions. Likewise for Fowkes and poor credentials and track record. If you want to convince someone whom you've already given reason to be quite skeptical, you need to be able to provide citations from experts whose Google search results are free from such obvious self-inflicted problems.
Having experienced something that seems to be similar, imagine that you are working on a web server. It is very slow sometimes. Your project leader is absolutely convinced that the problem is due to multiple requests being made to the DB at the same time. He has been lobbying to rewrite the DB layer for some time now. He hates the archetecture that was left to him by the previous lead developer and is absolutely sure that if he rewrites it, it will be much faster and easier to work with.
Unfortunately, you've been profiling the code and you've found that the there is an inordinate amount of time being spent allocating a date. It seems like the code is pathologically looping around and hitting that date code hundreds of thousands of times for every request. You've tried showing your lead the code that's causing the problem. He doesn't really understand it. He doesn't trust code profiling either. He already knows what the problem is and he's not interested in hearing any more. He ridicules you for having this stupid theory that allocating a date is slowing down the DB.
It's not that keeping the poor behaviour is benefitting him in any way. It's more that the new solution is not his solution and he's got a lot riding on his solution being chosen (justify his code rewrite). He's kind of staked his reputation and career with the company on his solution. If it turns out to be something else -- especially something he's already ridiculed, he'll be toast. He wants to get into management and management is all about politics and being right all the time (ever hear the President say, "Wow. I was certainly wrong about that!" -- and you can pretty much insert just about any President there... not just the obvious one ;-) ).
That's the way I see it anyway. Doctors, just like computer programmers work with complex systems where they are more likely to be wrong than right. I never trust people in these positions who don't know how to be wrong. But they/we are often placed in positions where we are not allowed to be wrong -- and some people handle those situations better than others.
> It's not that keeping the poor behaviour is benefitting him in any way. It's more that the new solution is not his solution and he's got a lot riding on his solution being chosen (justify his code rewrite).
It might also be worth to add that he might have been subjected multiple times to alternative theories that were refuted, and in his eyes this new outlandish theory isn't even the most credible one on that list.
The benefit is in punting off complicated case quicker, because the insurance pay out is the same, regardless if you spend 30 seconds or 30 minutes on the patient.
There is often nothing you can do to help anyway, but you can certainly bill 250 bucks every 5 minutes, and many, many do so.
In fact, some physicians will not even accept complicated cases, especially if they involve chronic pain treated with opiates, thanks to the hysteria around overdoses today.
And that is the reason why universal healthcare will fail, and why the NHS has a private tier, and routinely pays for treatments outside of the UK, done in private hospitals.
> And that is the reason why universal healthcare will fail, and why the NHS has a private tier, and routinely pays for treatments outside of the UK, done in private hospitals.
This does not logically follow from what you said at all. The NHS has not "failed", nor does it have a private tier - it commissions some treatments from private clinics for purely political reasons. These treatments are still completely free to the patient.
An NHS hospital isn't receiving insurance payouts, so it has an incentive to treat people quickly and efficiently, with complete cures being preferred over long-term management when possible.
1) I should've said the UK has a private tier for clarity.
You will get to see a private consultant a lot quicker, than the very same physician via NHS referral.
Quite literally you could wait months, or pay a few hundred and see the same exact person in a couple of days. In fact, when paying private - the private consultant himself will be treating you, vs. when on NHS - it will likely be his students/trainees that will be hands-on.
NHS hospitals are on a fixed budget, but of course cost controls means nothing - only putting patient interest first /s.
2) As for the insurance payouts - that was regarding systems where physicians bill on fee-per-service model, the most predominant setup in the US:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20467910
I don't blame it on science. The principles of science are deliberately invented to get around this problem. Blame it on human behavior.
It's unfortunate to say that the very tenants science tries to eliminate are actually normal parts of human behavior. Our actions, logic and reasoning are dominated by emotion and an attempt to hold onto power. Status seeking and religious bias are normal parts of human behavior.
The irony of it all is that we hate this type of behavior but are seduced by it nonetheless. A good analogy is the Dark side of the force.
One thing I've seen people fall for is that they think they're immune to this bias by being aware that it exists. Nothing is further from the truth. We are all victims of bias and we are all not immune because to be biased is to be human.
Yeah, ketamine is used as a sedative and painkiller in people who don't tolerate opioids. It's used off-label in low doses for treatment of depression and chronic migraines -- though is almost always administered by a doctor in a structured theraputic regimen.
The success of an approved drug like ketamine in treating depression and chronic migraines has opened the doors for studying other hallucinogens.
Going into details will just invite more down votes. You can look through my older posts if you really want to know. I talked about it a bit when I first created this account.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome treated by chelation therapy. His hypothesis is that mercury poisoning caused it.
OP is not an anti-vaxxer but was accused of being one because they blamed mercury.
OP also had bone fractures and fascia disintegration.
OP also had tense forearm muscles (?) described as 'rock hard' due to RSI.
I don't know why you're being so vague about it. It's likely you're being downvoted for the vagueness rather than anything else. Still, he has an email listed if you're curious.
Thanks for the summary. (edit: although I do not think CFS is an appropriate diagnosis as it doesn't even come close to describing all the symptoms.)
I led with the details on a different account. My karma was destroyed and afaict my posting privileges were revoked for posting too frequently with explanations. I don't think you understand the huge amount of anger that some people have towards people like me saying mercury caused this illness.
Leading vaguely and easing people into the details prevents my karma from being destroyed. I'm not sure how else to handle this except by not talking about it at all, but the only way I can make meaning out of my experience is to help others with the same illness, so I will continue to do so. I found the cure from posts like the one's I make now. I'm paying it forward.
Haha, I'm familiar with the rate-limiter and ban. Anyway, just to clarify, I didn't mean to diagnose anything up there ; just summarize your comments. I know you didn't say that I did, but just mentioning it here for the third parties.
Thank you for the context, but I wouldn't defend yourself in this thread: you already have one person narrating your posting history, and another cursing at you (in seeming rage) for not oversharing.
Who would have thought that, on HN of all places, a request for privacy would be interpreted as a license for abuse?
When you claim to have superior knowledge than the medical establishment and allege that there's a "cabal" in opposition to your miracle cure, you cannot expect to be taken seriously while withholding information. That's a very clear "put up or shut up" situation.
What's the problem with chelation therapy? I mean, okay it might not help and hypothesis may get disproven, but why not just take it? It doesn't seem to be either very expensive or very dangerous/have very strong side effects from what i can quickly google up?
There's definitely a crackpot subgenre of selling people on expensive chelation that they don't need. The idea of "cleansing" and "detoxing" supplements (which don't really do anything much but maybe make you poop) has bloomed into selling people chelation (which does do stuff, but only if you are poisoned by heavy metals).
It's not antivaxx, but it's antivaxx-adjacent, and awful stories like this is what people think of when someone promotes chelation against the medical consensus.
Probably because a lot of the antivax scare was around thimerosal in vaccines (which is a mercury compound). Logic was: mercury is known to be poisonous, thimerosal is a mercury compound, thus vaccines must be poisonous.
I've seen this analogy a lot from people who think they're obviously much smarter than the antivax idiots. It's completely, horrifically wrong. Much of mercury's reputation for toxicity actually comes from mercury compounds very similar to thiomersal, which are in general a lot more dangerous than the elemental form. Amongst other things, they're the reason that eating large amounts of fish causes mercury and the culprit in the Minamata Bay mass poisoning. You can hold a pool of mercury in your hand with basically no ill effects, but as little as a single drop of one of those mercury compounds on your skin can kill.
Now, it turns out that the very small amounts of thiomersal in vaccines were probably safe. This was by no means obvious at the time. Mercury poisoning is nasty - the symptoms can appear long after the initial exposure, range from death to subtle neurological effects like changes in behaviour and loss of IQ, and appear at relatively low exposures. Also, there just wasn't all that much modern research into thiomersal or its metabolite ethylmercury.
i was able to clear it with long term abx but they were not iv - iv exacerbates matters for me (still not sure how). the cocktail that worked for me was long term Biaxin (claritbromycin) accompanied by Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine). i have gotten better from severe neurocognitive Lyme (encephalopathy) from this cocktail twice now, and the one time i went off of it i relapsed within 1 - 2 months. i can’t explai. why it works, but i am fairly good evidence that it does.
sadly there is still a lot of hostility to even this treatment due to hesitation around long-term antibiotics, and recovery takes months - making it difficult to observe. and i think only a few doctors are aware of it as an option.
Lyme may be a complicating factor, but I do not believe it is the root cause. I won't go into details because it will just invite more down votes. You can look at my older posts if you really want to know more. I talked about it a bit when I first created this account.
“science is like the Catholic Church, a lot of nice sentiments but full of people”
That’s a great quote. Pretty much any activity that humans are involved in are at risk for this type of behavior. Egos get involved and objectivity goes out the window.
https://www.researchhub.com/about is a project I'm helping get off the ground which hopefully can help this problem, by eventually replacing the traditional journals. Still early days (just beta launched).
At some level, any system for evaluating research will have to rely on peer assessment. And some amount of groupthink is inevitable with peer assessment.
But the ResearchHub model of open collaborative assessment could have provided more incentives and visibility for research that deviated from the beta amyloid hypothesis.
It sounds like gatekeepers were a large problem here... i.e. peer reviewers for journals or grants that were insistent on beta amyloid. Disentangling dissemination from assessment (as preprints are doing) will help bring contrary findings to the light.
We also need to make all assessment public. Rather than basing the validity of a study on a few anonymous unpublished reviews, let anyone provide feedback and increase the sample size and diversity of assessment. Finally, add some incentives for contrarians who advance unpopular hypotheses that time proves correct.
Anyways, lot's of thoughts, but I agree a radical shift in how scientists communicate could help get to the root of the hivemind described in the article and by @cockatiel_day.
Looks like a perfect example of the dynamics Kuhn brilliantly described in his famous "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". That's one book that everyone needs to read.
The article is not quite updated. Biogen did end their phase 3 trial of the amyloid-beta antibody Aducanumab early, citing lack of efficacy. A closer look at the numbers however appeared to reveal that they shouldn't have. And Biogen is now filing Aducanumab for approval by FDA. [1]
All in all, there is no question that amyloid-beta is a key part of Alzheimer. Already Alois Alzheimer, when first describing Alzheimer's disease, noted amyloid-beta plaques as a key pathological finding. Amyloid-beta plaques are a characteristic of the disease, and a proper Alzheimer diagnosis requires the presence of amyloid-beta plaques.
Many variants of early-onset Alzheimer are caused by mutations either directly in APP (the precursor to amyloid-beta) or genes intimately involved with APP-processing (e.g. PSEN1 and PSEN2). These mutations often cause extreme levels of amyloid-beta and amyloid plaques.
Raised levels of amyloid-beta and amyloid plaques is a necessary condition for Alzheimer's disease, both early- and late-onset. But it's clearly not a sufficient criteria: many people have brains full of plaques and amyloid-beta, but little or no cognitive decline.
So the problem with Alzheimer's research is not so much the understanding that amyloid-beta is a significant part of the story, but rather focusing on it as the only part of the story and the only conceivable solution.
But in 2019, evidence pointed the finger elsewhere: at
Porphyromonas gingivalis, a type of bacteria involved
in gum disease. Research ... suggests that beta-amyloid
is a symptom, not a cause of the condition. Instead, it
may be the toxins released by P. gingivalis, called
gingipains, that result in the brain damage that brings
on the disease.
Cortexyme is currently conducting a clinical trial to test an experimental drug that block gingipains. Their hypothesis coincidentally also explains why Alzheimer prevalence differs among ApoE genotypes.
(I posted the story earlier today [2], but it didn't end up on the front page.)
> All in all, there is no question that amyloid-beta is a key part of Alzheimer.
You are responding to an article that very much puts it into question. You should read the article, it's not long. But it'll give some quotes:
“The amyloid hypothesis has been one of the most tragic stories [in] disease research,” said neurobiologist Rachael Neve of Massachusetts General Hospital.
And
Making it worse is that the empirical support for the amyloid hypothesis has always been shaky.
Rachael Neve seems to believe, that APP (amyloid precursor protein) has a pathological role through other means than its degradation to amyloid beta, suggesting instead that it may have receptor-like properties [1]. Mostly, as I understand it, from arguments of structural similarity. It's interesting, but I know of very little solid evidence pointing that way. (And the article I could find was quite old)
I think suggestions that amyloid beta is part of cellular defense, and that its "designed" to stick to foreign bodies/pathogens, preventing them from spreading in the brain, is more interesting.[2] Early-onset Alzheimer would then be caused by amyloid beta being released erratically, while many of the late-onset Alzheimer cases might be driven by amyloid beta in addition to some underlying inflammatory process.
The amyloid hypothesis, strictly interpreted: that amyloid beta is highly neurotoxic through plaque formation and is the sole cause of neurodegeneration, is also known to be dubious and not explain many observations very well. But that doesn't really challenge that amyloid beta plays a significant part in the pathology. [3]
FDA usually puts some quite strict limits on the amount of p-hacking and general shenanigans they allow in clinical trials. But there's no approval yet, and no data to look at, so it's too early to judge.
Anyway, usually Alzheimer trials are a jumble of noise. The cognitive measurements are imperfect and patients are improving and deteriorating randomly, taking a very different disease course than you'd expect from textbooks. Finding a signal in the data, even for a working drug can be quite hard. I could just as well believe that Biogen ended the trial hastily because all competitors had failed and they didn't do a thorough analysis.
Derek Lowe's comments on the reboot were understandably a bit skeptical:
> [W]hile the new larger EMERGE data do look like there’s a dose-responsive effect in the primary measurement (the CDR-SB scale) and three secondary dementia scores, the ENGAGE data actually show worse than placebo for CDR-SB at the higher dose (see slide 19 in Biogen’s presentation). They’re also worse than placebo in the MMSE scoring, but both the ADAS-Cog13 and the ADAS-ADL-MCI scales show apparent dose-responsive improvement. I have no idea why four different dementia rating systems should give such different results, and to a first approximation, no one else seems to have a good idea, either. So we’ve got the EMERGE/ENGAGE difference to explain (you’ve seen Biogen’s explanation, higher dosing later in the trial), and the variable results within the ENGAGE trial itself. And who are these high-dose patients in the ENGAGE study that Biogen says line up with the EMERGE trial? Ed Silverman at Stat quotes an analyst saying that it looks like fewer than 100 patients out of the whole set. That reminds me a bit of Biogen and Eisai’s tease of “We’re seeing positive data!” during the clinical trials, which also turned out to be based on a smaller number of patients than one would want when making a call on Alzheimer’s efficacy.[1]
He's written a fair amount about Alzheimer's,[2] and it's been an informative and useful commentary (at least for me).
Different dementia rating scales may give different results because the study is underpowered for the effect, and/or Aducanumab is only effective in a subset of patients.
There is something to suggest that the latter is the case. The MMSE score usually becomes low relatively late in dementia. The questions are easily solvable for most non-affected people [1] and the cognitive impairment must be quite severe for a significant drop. ADAS-COG on the other hand is more sensitive, especially in early disease [2]. It would be plausible then that patients in an early dementia stage treated with a higher dose, respond, while patients in a later disease stage can not be treated using Aducanumab. (Maybe it even has a paradoxical detrimental effect in late-stage dementia, who knows?)
I would hope that they dig down in the data and find an objectively identifiable subpopulation where there appears to be significant effect, and rerun a phase III trial on that subgroup. Even if they only can treat a subset of Alzheimer patients, that's a very significant breakthrough.
> Different dementia rating scales may give different results because the study is underpowered for the effect, and/or Aducanumab is only effective in a subset of patients.
Though if a couple thousand people is underpowered for the effect, that's not a great sign for the drug.
The major and established beliefs in science usually have some fringe competition/opposition. You can only tell in hindsight whether it's "a cabal stifling valid criticism" or "scientists refusing to waste time on distractions".
It's all a matter of degree. Exploitation vs exploration in search theory.
How many failed clinical trials for amyloid reducing drugs does it take to see a significant possibility that we might need to explore other ideas?
People will happily invest other people's money in trials that will likely fail if it's the leading academic theory since they can shift the blame (lack of skin in the game). Academics will have built careers on amyloid research and so will destroy opposition, subconsciously controlled by their egos looking to protect themselves.
The incentives are not aligned to use the best exploitation, exploration ratio that might be used in the ideal case but instead heavily weighted towards exploitation ignoring negative results from clinical trials for extended periods of time.
This is an extremely important point. Since I was a grad student, there have been at least 5 monumental "findings" in physics:
1. A spinning top weighs less if it spins one way than if it spins the other
2. A "fifth force," IIRC it was linked to baryons
3. The climate is warming, not (as people thought) cooling
4. Superconductivity can be achieved at high (liquid Ln2) temperatures
5. Fusion can be achieved at low (room) temperatures ("cold fusion").
6. Homeopathic properties of water
7. Faster-than-light travel of neutrinos
In each case there was a rush for confirmation- tons of excitement in the field, etc. Some were confirmed; some debunked; some remain controversial. I read somewhere that Google is working on cold fusion?
And its physics, where I believe that it is cheaper to try weird experiments. Even if the equipment costs are high, you can probably book 5 minutes on it to let a grad do something seemingly silly.
In pharmacy even a simple trial on mice may take months, which translates to $$$. Not even mentioning how expensive (and hard to get approved) a trial on humans is. I can understand the desire to focus on the "promising" approaches while dismissing what looks like a distraction.
The price of the experiment depends, of course, on the experiment. The point is there was an initial excitement as well as initial skepticism. Then there were investigations. The community eventually accepted the preponderance of evidence. To try to do an experiment now for faster-than-light neutrinos I would imagine would be hard, because everything we see seems to indicate that the speed of light is a hard limit (of course, there is a lot of stuff we can't see, at least directly...). But to convince people to fund an expensive experiment for it would be difficult because the framework that supports the idea that it can't happen is nice.
It's as you say: once you have a basic working model it doesn't take conspiracy theory to see other avenues being blocked.
The particular point the article makes, however, that journals reject articles because of no prior publications in good journals is infuriating.
The article also mentions that funding has been limited; so hard choices had to be made. But it does seem curious that the cause was so widely believed before they could even make a solid diagnosis of the disease without an autopsy examination of the brain.
AFAIK at no point in time were there more publications predicting cooling than publications predicting warming. It was just the popsci media that almost exclusively predicted another ice age.
Thank you very much for that link. It even points to the magazine my 10 or 12 year old self took to be authoritative as getting it wrong! Next you're going to tell me there's no Easter Bunny!
I wasn't old enough to have access to original journals (nor the ability to understand them) in the 1970s, but Science News was considered a trustworthy source, as was Scientific American, for the layman.
EDIT: Frondo's link (sibling comment) points out how Science News got it wrong.
I'm not blaming- I'm simply pointing to anomalous results, outside of the accepted paradigms. They weren't shunned for this result. If what they had found had been confirmed, others would be free to publish more theories/experiments along those lines. However, I would bet that it would be hard to publish a theory now that had faster-than-light propagation.
Hi-Tc was verified and is well accepted (but the theory of SC overall is being revisited). The homeopathic properties of water was debunked by....James Randi.
Cold fusion is a result that is interesting in that at least as of a few years ago there was still an active group of researchers- they even had a conference- but most scientists AFAIK don't believe the initial results and are highly skeptical of any way to create useful rates of fusion at room temperature.
Despite what you may hear in breathless news articles, there was no point at which a substantial number of physicists believed (1), (2), (4), (5), (6), or (7). In some cases it was basically 99% against. People weren't rushing to "confirm" these findings, as if they were true by default -- they were rushing to check them, which is extremely different.
Lol. You're splitting hairs: confirm/check/verify all mean the same in this context. It was exciting, controversial and thrilling. I was there.
Of course the default mode was skepticism. Even for (3). But you are fooling yourself if you don't think these things were the main topics of conversation. It had a lot to do with the reputations of the scientists involved. Fleishman and Pons were very well respected, for example, so while people question how they lived through the experiments (based on expected byproducts), they were pretty sure something new must be going on.
A "depth-first" search is a poor choice because it takes a lot of resources fully test any given "cure". A "breadth-first" search (as you are suggesting) is a poor choice because there are simply too many things to try. It has to be something in between, and researchers use heuristics to decide which branches to pursue. Sometimes they focus too much on the wrong branch.
There are too many possible alternatives that may lead to a cure.
What about homeopathic cures? I think it is snake oil, but some people think it is useful. If you try everything possible, you should try it. But it would be a big waste of money and allocation of patients and medical doctors. And also, there are many homeopathic recipes, so which one(s) should you try?
What about radiation? A huge amount of radiation may help or may he harmful. I think it's harmful, but at least it can cause a real effect. Should we include that in the list of everything possible?
Antibiotics? I don't think it would work, but it solved stomach ulcers after year of traying other treatments. Which antibiotic?
Exercise? There are some studies from time to time, but I think most of them have the causation link backwards. I think we should make less studies in this field, but nobody asked me.
I can add more and more alternatives. Some are ridicules, like nuns prayers, some may be legit like CRISP9. There are more possibilities than the current level of funding and patients available for clinical studies, so someone has to choose the more promising alternatives and hope they made the correct guess.
A super interesting article, but the title is pure clickbait. In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous.
Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that.
In some sense this all started from the very beginning, from when Alzheimer's disease (AD) was first described: In 1911, Alois Alzheimer found plaques in his dementia patient's brain. [0] These plaques are what researchers would focus on for more than the next 100 years.
Much later, the protein giving rise to the plaques (APP) was discovered and there seemed to be good evidence for a causal role: Mice with mutated APP developed AD.
Quoting the article:
"""
By the mid-1990s, a now-defunct San Francisco biotechnology company, Athena Neurosciences, created the first genetically engineered mice with a mutated, amyloid-producing human gene. The animals’ brains filled with amyloid plaques, and their memories were destroyed. The mice were hailed as a “model for testing therapeutic [Alzheimer’s] drugs”
"""
So we should really take this story as a cautionary tale. There was, however, no conspiracy or "cabal". These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track. In a way, they were, since hereditary Alzheimer's is caused by APP mutations, it just turns out that this isn't as important as other ways of developing the disease.
> In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous.
I think that narrative is correct. We can't fix the problem if we don't discuss it. The whole "I believe in science" thing (which you seem to be pushing) is really quite silly.
Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). I think this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of scientists are hangers-on, i.e. not capable of doing original research. These scientists are terrified of people who can do original research since it makes them look bad (and feel bad, it's actually depressing to think about all the people out there who are way smarter than me).
You can imagine funding schemes that attempt to account for these issues. "For every dollar of funding for interpretation A, earmark 25 cents for alternative interpretations". View science as a market, something beyond our powers to predict, then diversify your investments.
I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but I think the politics of the funding game just reflect a fundamental problem for which I don't see an obvious solution:
Science has to be conservative, in order to protect the integrity of the record of published findings. This can lead to a situation where a field gets stuck in a local optimum from which progress is no longer possible, because things that don't seem to fit are dismissed as implausible.
But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about!
At the end of the day, the question is: can we somehow induce these necessary paradigm shifts more quickly? I really don't know.
> But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about!
I think this framing is inaccurate. The alternative ideas aren't necessarily less plausible. The process by which science is funded does not accurately determine plausibility in my view. It's heavily swayed by factors it should be independent of like fads or sounding good to the proposal evaluator (who may not be an expert in the field) but having deeper issues.
To quote from a book I have about writing grant proposals:
> [...] writing a grant application is unlike writing a scholarly manuscript for publication in a prestigious professional journal. In the former case, your target audience is likely to be 1) a reader who is not particularly knowledgeable in the area of your proposal (except in a very general sense); 2) an individual who is overworked, tired, hassled, and intent on getting through the required reading as quickly as possible; and 3) someone committed to reading your proposal only because he or she has to.
science doesn't have to be conservative at all, so why presume it? most (advanced) knowledge is tentative anyway, so why not take the strategy of accepting it all while it's uncertain? negative results are just a valuable as advances, and contradictions are just areas begging for more research.
what you really seem to be asking is "why can't science be more efficient?" and science shouldn't be more efficient. it should be wholly less efficient. we should have more people searching in the dark for the implausible.
conservatism wants the safe and sure, and science is, and must be, anything but.
When people say that science is conservative, what they mean is that it progresses slowly and cautiously to built up certainty. Science is a tradition that typically progresses incrementally and is revised incrementally (I should say, there are many scientific traditions that proceed this way, not some single, grand, capital S "Science!"). When anomalies occur in the experimental results, it takes a while for them to be digested in a way that leads to model revision and then broad acceptance. Now, that isn't to say that people can't explore unexplored avenues or explore alternatives. They should, but that doesn't contradict the idea that the sciences proceed conservatively. Otherwise, you've got chaos, not science.
In any case, you're typically going to profit much more by learning from a meticulously examined and fleshed out tradition than you are by starting from proverbial scratch. Science wants certainty which it why, when done properly (aye, there's the rub!), it goes to great lengths to verify things. Conservatism, contrary to widespread misconception, is not about stagnation, but about being careful and responsible with the stewardship of your hard won inheritance.
you're idealizing science and literally begging the question[0], in this case, making an a priori assumption that science must proceed conservatively and then trying to rationalize that position.
conservatism unduly burdens science by overly valuing correctness over exploration. science advances on the latter, not the former.
be wrong, it's ok. it only adds to our scientific knowledge. we can't even know when we're wrong without a grueling many attempts at being right.
Scientific funding is a political game only to the extent that the politics are not contradicted by evidence. For example, no matter how good you are at scientific politics, you're not going to get the NSF to give you $1 billion to test whether the Earth is flat, or if gravity is actually caused by little fairies pushing us all down toward the ground.
Why? Because, at least for public scientific funding, it is bad politics for funding committees to look like they value politics over evidence. It opens up a big lane for other scientists to attack them.
If you have 3 groups all studying the same phenomenon, all proposing very similar studies, politics will in part affect who gets that funding. In retrospect, this can look overly conservative and even corrupt... but we must have the discipline to recognize hindsight for what it is.
In real time, trying to make funding decisions with little to no hard evidence for the right course of action, it is scientifically valid to use whatever evidence is available, even if it's something as nebulous as a reputation or a hunch.
Science has a reputation for producing hard evidence and knowledge, but the practice of science exists far out, on the edge of the unknown. The whole point of conducting scientific research is to explore what we don't know. By definition, evidence is scant there.
So what if a group proposes a hypothesis that seems really far out there, or even contradicts existing evidence? It's true that they will be less likely to get funding regardless of their connections.
Is it wrong that radically new ideas and approaches have a steeper hill to climb? Not necessarily; they have worse priors. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's true that paradigm shifts often start out looking radically new, but it's also true that most radically new ideas end up being wrong.
Setting aside some funding for crazy ideas is not a bad idea, but it should not be very much... it certainly won't be enough to preempt any hindsight disappointment. There will always be a chance we'll look back and say "I wish we had funded those (seemingly crazy) researchers earlier."
If you're talking about "politics" in this sense, then yes, I agree with what you're saying. However, I think the person you're responding to is saying "politics" in terms of inter-group and inter-department relationships.
Egos, arrogance, and insecurities run rampant in academia. Science, like any other fields, are not above these issues, which does hurt "good science."
I was also talking about "politics" in terms of inter-group relationships, not electoral political parties.
What I meant by "public" is that the funding decisions are publicly reviewable in some way; i.e. other scientists can see and judge the funding decisions after the fact. As opposed to going to a company or rich person for private funding, which is less common but does happen.
> Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa).
That's not necessarily true. There are people who are excellent at both, but I suppose in practice they are relatively rare. The best recognize research as a cooperative human endeavor, and human elements like bias, ego, etc. can never fully be extricated.
Not sure why you are being down-voted, most research is done in teams, and the likelihood is that a good team has a person who is good as writing grants applications, and having such a person enables them to maintain a team.
You’re talking about scientific academia, not science. Much of science occurs outside of academia. Military and industrial scientific R&D, corporations’ basic-research labs, independents, etc. It’s only in scientific academia that these “strictly adhere to the popular scientific paradigm in order to get published” worries exist.
They fund universities like anyone else. Yes, there is some internal research, but even in fields like math, where NSA probably does a lot of internal reseach, you still have classified top-secret research performed in public universities.
As the article explicitly shows, private medical research very much follows academic thought, because of the same incentives that makes public funding a political game.
There is in fact no fundamental difference between a manager deciding what projects to take on and a bureaucrat deciding which projects to fund from public money - in both cases, the person doing the decision is not using their own money, and they don't have the full qualification to make the best scientific decision. Even if they do, they are held responsible by people who do not (upper managers / higher level bureaucrats), who will evaluate them more on the process they followed than on actual results (especially as results are likely to be far off).
Even though 'a company is putting its own money behind the research', it's still people who don't own that money taking the actual decisions. Even start-ups are usually not using 'their own money', but investors' money, with the investors taking the role of grants approvers.
> Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa).
I'd be interested in a compare and contrast with AIDs research. Same time frame but AIDs researchers threw everything but the kitchen sink at it and made progress.
You got to wonder one field was dominated by status seekers with fat ego's and the other people working on a disease that mostly afflicts people no one cares about.
I would say that the antagonism between politics and truth-seeking goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and people who specialize in one tend to hold the other in contempt (or at least suspicion).
Science is about being right and politics is about a plurality of people working together. In the name of cooperation, politics prefers vague language that is decidedly un-formal whereas science gravitates toward mathematical precision. Both are necessary, but I'd say we're leaning too far into politics these days.
> science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary
Just one data point, but in my experience in academia that was almost exactly how I found it. The exception that it wasn't a team sport because there's only space for one first author.
My feeling is that the recognition and 'impactfulness' tied to being successful in academia are antagonistic to conducting unbiased research.
I completely agree with your second sentence, but also with the OPs statement that there is no conspiracy to suppress correct results. There is intense competition to be right. There is intense competition for funds, so being perceived to be promising is hugely important. But at the end of the day I haven't really ever seen any explicit attempts to suppress uncomfortable results.
I agree, that's fair. I don't think it's an explicit conspiracy. However there are some practices that do end up suppressing results. One particular example is that lack of publication of negative results because there is no incentive for doing so. You can imagine a scenario where similar experiments are repeated over and over again in different laboratories because no one writes up the negative result. After all what's the incentive? Not so bad for a few wasted weeks of PhD students time but potentially more damaging for large drug clinical trials?
Ben Goldacre's bad science is a great book on this topic. He's an entertaining speaker too. He describes a solution to that particular problem which is registering a clinical trials beforehand.
Absolutely, but that's a form of self suppression, rather than a cabal of others suppressing results.
Science is incredibly broken in many ways. I think the big underlying culprit is the prevailing ideology that every human activity is best organized as a competition for scarce resources.
It's a good idea: have a fully-open repository where negative results can be documented. With the ability to tag on if a negative result is replicated.
Then gradually re-enculture review boards to expect any given author to have a substantial number of results published to said repository, if they're actively performing research.
> "...but also with the OPs statement that there is no conspiracy to suppress correct results. There is intense competition to be right. There is intense competition for funds..."
Can you resolve / flesh this out more? If the desire for funding is a key driver of behavior then it would seem most anything is possible, including conspiracy or related nefarious activites.
Humans, especially those with big ideas and big egos, in pursuit of fortune and fame have been known to bend and break the rules.
If you watched the NBA the top 5% of players/top 5 teams get 90% of the media attention. The rest who are still doing good and interesting things fight for the last 10% of the crumbs and are forever complaining they are being excluded despite performance and other factors.
It happens in a lot of places. And to be honest it’s what most of the people want and while places like r/nba are more neutral and give respect where it is due, ESPN knows the casual 12yr old knows Lebron James and Steph Curry and they recruit “talent” to only talk about them, not just what is going well for the sport as a whole.
It’s a difficult balance that is really up to the power players and the quality of leadership to get right.
With science though you’d hope far more meritocracy than big names, but sadly
I believe this is a human and non-expert efficiency thing (as most people are not really experts). Some people might blame capitalism of the bio firms but they are just the sum of their people who run and fund them too.
Exactly, it's human nature. No matter what arena it plays out in we only have so many patterns of behaviour at our disposal and you'll see the same types of power plays, favouritism, backbiting, and underhanded dealing. We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy.
We're not good at thinking rationally about things that involve our own benefit. We'll more often than not only think things through to the point where we avoid breaking any existing rules but still go with the lazy choice that benefits us in the short term.
> We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy.
If you're in a modern, first-world country you get to decide which part of the Pareto 80/20 divide you sit on.
I tried to find more information and I'm struggling to find information that Michael Crichton said this exact thing and that turned the scientific community against him. I did find that he was a global warming skeptic and also believed in astral projection and auras and the like, both of which garnered scientific backlash. Could you help me clarify?
His talk 'Aliens Cause Global Warming' is about this phenomenon in all but name. Consensus science, marginalizing alternate theories and politicizing scientific inquiry. "your theories differ from mainstream" being a black mark rather than a point of inquiry.
The backlash against Crichton was well-founded. He used the grain of truth that it's sometimes hard to get new ideas in science funded to build a crazy denialist foundation on that made for exciting fiction, but terrible description of reality.
Yes, his stance on global warming was controversial at the time and as he died only a few years later is more well known for that, but for reasons he himself laid out in the linked talk.
Most relevant is that he was against consensus science, which was highlighted in the submission. Even if you are 'wrong' and in the group consensus, all is forgiven. If you are 'right' but not in the group, you are blackballed, and if you are wrong and not in the group consensus, you are crucified.
Crichton called out the disturbing trend of politicizing science. His target was the elephant that is global warming but his reasoning was more general, it could (and would) have been anything that deviated from the pure scientific pursuit.
In academia it is tied to laurels and funding. The clue in the article was defender of the so-called cabal saying if it were true, it was because the NIH Alzheimers funding was too low, i.e. it was a fight for who would get what research grants. Go against the concensus and be blacklisted.
> In a sea of amyloid-focused grants, there are tiny islands of research on oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and, especially, a protein called tau.
> In 1911, Alois Alzheimer found plaques in his dementia patient's brain. These plaques are what researchers would focus on for more than the next 100 years.
You omitted the tangles and played up the plaques. It looks like you're part of the cabal!
You're right, I should have mentioned tau. But the viral link is the really big deal here that was overlooked for too long.
> It looks like you're part of the cabal!
I have no horse in this race ;) I only commented because the title seemed needlessly inflammatory to me. Everybody should just read the full article, like I wrote I think it's very good.
I agree that the title is pure clickbait, I disagree that the article completely divorces itself from the premise the title implies. This whole thing where science journalism drums up this huge controversy after the fact when enough science on a topic has been performed to think that maybe a particular explanation is a bad one is a symptom of organizations that have to drum up a saucy narrative to sell.
It is perfectly natural to fund science that seems like a good idea at the time, and not fund ideas that seem less plausible than the prevailing explanation, and while it does suck that it takes a while to overturn the idea that the idea is good, representing our 20/20 hindsight as some irredeemable inertia with conspiracist overtones is a big problem.
The title isn’t “pure clickbait” although a little hyperbolic. I worked in a research laboratory in a top medical school in the US. The professor in charge of the lab was an amyloid sceptic, and the existence of this sort of “cabal” was apparent, at least to him. Words like “delusional” were thrown around. This was 7 years ago!
Also, considering the actual harm caused, i don’t think you can be hyperbolic enough about this issue..
See this other link for the case of a Colombian woman whose brain is full of the amyloid plaque but she is dementia free due to a genetic mutation. The biggest difference between her and the rest of her family that suffer from Alzheimer's is the fact that tau buildup is minimal in her brain.
"""feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous."""
This is precisely what modern science is (well, a major subset). The competition for grant funding and attention space is extremely intense.
I agree there was no "alzheimer's cabal" but it's not uncommon in science for the prevailing mainstream position to (intentionally or otherwise) suppress alternative opinions ("extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence" is often used to maintain the status quo).
One of the important issues is when an idea ends up dominating funding. If you have a legitimate alternative hypothesis but can't get the funding to run the experiments to provide that extraordinary evidence, you'll fail to convince people. The people who get the most funding are the ones who are the most competitive, not the smartest, or the rightest.
Interesting... Are there any current issues you can think of in academia where disagreeing with the prevailing opinion can make one a pariah... Even, perhaps, assigned an epithet like "denier"? I think whenever this happens in academia/science, it is incredibly dangerous. Proper science invites and celebrates denial - seeks to deconstruct it and understand it to be more certain of the truth. The mere presence of any other attitude is a strong smell that something is drastically wrong.
It's not relevant today but a well-known virologist, Peter Duesberg, was an HIV-causes-AIDS denialist (before that he was very well known for real accomplishments in virology). However, he never showed any evidence to support his case and there was extensive evidence against it. If you want to be a denier, the reality is that you have to show a lot of compelling evidence both supporting your position, and against the mainstream position.
Modern denialism tends to be more centered around climate change- whether it is occurring, and what the impacts will be in the near and long term, and how to respond. Many physics people (who worked on high energy particle physics, etc) have looked at the claims from the various climate change promoters and found the source evidence to be less than convincing. If they articulate this, they are often described as denialists. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer
Literally anything that contradicts your bosses position.
a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g
I've watched very experienced, top school trained MDs freeze up and begin to stutter, as they've just realized they said something their lab chief does not like.
Coincidentally, that chief writes treatment guidelines and consults the FDA, and is probably one of the most powerful physicians in the profession.
Medicine is a very hierarchical top-down command structure type of field.
Dr Atkins invited the wrath of the medical community because he pushed for a low carb, high fat diet at a time when the medical consensus was that fats are the root of all evil. They eventually took his license for some unrelated issue but the driving force was the fact he went against the medical establishment and ridiculed low-fat but high-carb diets
I think the evidence goes deeper than that. Humans with downs syndrome, which duplicates the APP gene, evince symptoms of Alzheimer's as they reach their 40s.
Genetics is important, but lots of current research in biology reduces everything to genetics. Paradoxically, when twin studies have shown environmental factors typically make an equally important contribution towards disease onset.
For example, consider type 1 diabetes (T1D). Lots of research tries to understand genetic risk factors. Despite this being so difficult to translate into treatment, as its many small effects past the top 3 genes, and twin studies show 50% is contribution from the environment.
So very recently, someone said OK the immune system is a classifier that takes sets of little protein chunks in a tissue microenvironment and decides whether its seeing self or something foreign and acts accordingly. Then, your own microbiome has to do something to avoid immune immune responses, as the immune system is only pre-trained using your own DNA. Then, let's assume your microbiome has to mimic (copy) some of your DNA to signal self to the immune system.
And it turns out it is true [1]. Lots of bacteria mimic insulin. And when those bacteria end up being classified as non-self, you also destroy your pancreatic beta cells, which produce insulin.
There's good evidence for lots of other diseases. For example, multiple sclerosis [2]. The first paper cites other diseases, including Alzheimer's that look like mis-classification induced by dysbiosis in the microbiome or an infection.
>In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous.
>Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that.
It's bad to sow too much mistrust in science, sure, but it certainly feels like society right now is way too far in the opposite direction right now, with people blindly believing any headline following the phrase "a new study says..." or "scientists say...". A lot of scientific fields are very competitive for funding right now, there is immense pressure to twist every result into a "win" while equally important null results ("we tried X and surprisingly it did not worked") are basically treated as worthless.
People shouldn't blindly mistrust science, but blind trust is just as dangerous, the system right now is far from perfect. I believe most researchers still ultimately want to solve mysteries in nature and improve life, but they're also human beings who ultimately want to be able to keep working and provide for themselves and their families, these two motivations are not always perfectly aligned.
I disagree. The article articulates a political problem, not an error in reasoning.
These few scientists did not just choose a stable approach that later turned out to be wrong: they doubled-down, tripled-down on a shakey guess for decades and suppressed voices to the contrary. The seemingly credentialed, respected, and authoritative experts of Alzheimer's sabotaged the science around a hot-button problem for their own personal gain, while society suffered the consequences.
This antipattern can be seen as a kind of "academic rent-seeking" or "false-expertise". It can also be called "collusion" given that an organized group of people semi-intentionally marginalized their opposition at the outset, and at great cost to the broader public.
I really think it's better to defer to the original authors or the submitter on titles. Retroactive title changes have become common on HN and they're somewhat annoying. Certainly the original title upset some people, but perhaps that is a conversation worth having; Statnews isn't a frivolous news outlet, and the revised title elides the intradisciplinary conflict at the heart of this story, creating the impression that researchers in that field had moved toward some other consensus (which does not appear to be the case).
HN's way of dealing with titles has been around forever and functions surprisingly well overall. When grumblings come up they are usually reasonable and we usually react by changing the title until readers stop grumbling. But these cases are a small percentage of the total. Sometimes the community is divided about what's reasonable, in which case every title change generates grumbling and the process never converges. In that case we either stick with the original title or just make a call and move on.
I think you make a good point about this title. In a case like this it's best to break the tie with the original title, so I've changed it back above.
Thanks for your thoughtful response Dan. I guess you're right about how long it's been going on, I am probably mis-remembering practices from back when HN was much smaller than today.
Really interesting observation, fascinating to see it described as "emergent behaviour".
WMDs were known to be fake from the start though, they were just stealing Iraqi oil, and David Kelly lost his life trying to expose it - could you suggest a better example?
Article is great to, came to post something along the lines of "no it wasn't a conspiracy", but the article summerises exactly what happened under the picture - "Amyloid plaques have long been the suspected cause of cognitive decline experienced by Alzheimer’s patients. Drug companies have spent billions of dollars creating amyloid-targeting drugs, yet they’ve all failed"
They went "all in" on science, that happens with hindsight to maybe not have been an accurate model for reality. Nobody can know that a particular explanation is bad without actually doing the science first, no matter what post facto explanations we can come up with after we realize we've been chasing a unicorn.
I'm sure what were fake. The US GAVE Saddam WMDs during the war with Iran (maybe you don't consider these WMDs). No one argues that he didn't use mustard gas on the Kurds.
> This is exactly how conspiracies and cabals work. They are emergent behaviour.
No, conspiracies and cabal are by their very nature intentional. Groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink is a much better term for describing an emergent dysfunctional decision process brought on through social dynamics.
No, definitely not Groupthink. It's open behaviour.
It's really hard to find non-fiction examples of cabals, but when applied to real life I stick with they are almost always emergent behaviour.
I would have thought the Phoebus cartel is an example of a cabal, but it seems Google doesn't agree.
But it's an example of progress kept back from emergent behaviour.
There's a reason there's two memes attached to Phoebus cartel, 1. They stopped long lasting light bulbs, 2. Actually long lasting light bulbs burn to much electricity.
The emergent behaviour from 2. caused 1. which made them more money.
I thought we were talking about science, not spycraft or non-independent emissions testing?
An independent science lab causd the VW scandal by publishing independent measures of emissions. That's one way the process of science corrects itself.
The funny thing about that conspiracy is that the WMD were real. Hussein had them, and and its true that he didn't give them up, and he refused access. Here's the but: they were found by the US, under seal exactly in the place of record according to the UN. It's pretty clear that Hussein wasn't actively developing it anymore.
Your source for the belief tha Iraq had WMD is an article explaining they had yellowcake? Even a youtuber made some and processed it (and this was completely legal)
Yes? That was, after all, concretely the claim made by the administration before the invasion (recall the joke by Dave Chappelle about yellow cake)
There's also plenty of evidence that Iraq had (known, small) stockpiles of chemical weapons, too (last I checked those were classed as WMD), which are widely accepted to be a likely cause of gulf war syndrome and a contributing factor to congenital disease in some parts of iraq.
Mind you: I'm not claiming that it's ethical to invade a country on shoddy pretenses.
If you are thinking about the fear of contraband imports of yellowcake, well none of that has ever been found and its highly unlikely to have existed. The removed yellowcake had been stockpiled prior to the first Gulf War, and was declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency and under IAEA safeguards.
Of course at one old point Iraq had WMD programs. But you were completely misrepresenting the situation by stating for the later period that "The funny thing about that conspiracy is that the WMD were real. Hussein had them, and and its true that he didn't give them up". Even the very article you linked stated clearly: "There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said." As for the small amount of chemical weapons or precursors, they also have not been interpreted afterwhile has having any significance regarding the willingness to comply.
Saddam had chemical weapons and actively used them on the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War, and later against the Kurds.
Saddam also received considerable material support from the US during the Iran-Iraq War -- those pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand aren't fake. Lots of jokes about "we knew Saddam had WMDs cuz we gave em to him!" were, to a degree, credible on paper.
Saddam had long since stopped working on them, but made a point to look like he was. This allowed him to drum up support by posturing like he was standing up to the US, and also to look threatening to the Iranians (plus the Kurds + Shias).
Yes, the pre invasion claim made to the UN was that Iraq was in violation of its obligation to allow inspectors in to monitor its WMD program.
I'm not justifying the actions of the administration or even the legal basis for it, but per my understanding, the claims were not untrue, notwithstanding how it was sold to the us public (especially as filtered by the complicit media)
I have the impression when we read stories like this that it's not that the leading researchers in the field are hostile to other ideas, as such, but that they are not very well versed in economics and thus think that scarce research funding should flow their way because giving any to other possibly-wrong approaches would be wasteful, and likewise abandoning or discounting the predominant theory would be a terrible mistake because of all the money that has already gone into it (a sunk cost fallacy). Over and over we see that expertise in one field - even a very rigorous scientific one - doesn't immunize one from fallacious thinking in other contexts.
think that scarce research funding should flow their way because giving any to other possibly-wrong approaches would be wasteful
I heard someone recently tell me how using science to form views on topics (social/psychology/etc) is dangerous, because science is really about funding. AND large donors/entities who can fund science often pick science research projects that sound cool and sexy. They may not be pushing any agenda but do lean toward funding trendy ideas.
So really, science is often biased because of who hold the checkbooks. That really made me think.
I also wonder if it is a victim of the just-one-more-try problem you see in big code projects: you get funded for a year or more and the lead researcher honestly thinks he is - almost there - if only for that one more try. This means all resources are diverted, and only really late in the game you have to admit you were wrong, which gets harder and harder to do.
> AND large donors/entities who can fund science often pick science research projects that sound cool and sexy. They may not be pushing any agenda but do lean toward funding trendy ideas.
As well as those who do the science. You want tenure, you better not be too far off the beaten path.
The biggest "scandal" at this level was the "cellular immunology" folks who based entire edifices around "recognition of non-self". And then DNA sequencing came along and completely smashed that. However, those professors were still tenured.
They make decisions about what money is available in the first place, and appoint the leaders of the organization that runs the grant selection process.
No one is campaigning on NSF research. The director is appointed, but most of the staff are career workers who aren't replaced when the President or Senate change.
Generally speaking, government funded research is allocated for political gain. For example, defense R+D projects are famously (infamously?) allocated to the districts of Congressmen whose votes are needed.
Reads like "science = titles of approved funding applications". One would hope people don't form opinions based on that (outside of how the funding system work).
Let's say it takes 20 years and 5+ institutions to fully explore a single avenue of research.
If you're 15 years into that research and you think there is a chance that you'll reach a breakthrough in 5 years, you're much more inclined to want your (and the other 4+ institutions) to pursue it for 5 more years rather than starting over.
That's not sunk-cost fallacy. It's more like "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" or perhaps confirmation bias (the inertia the scientists felt to discard their conclusions about the causes and treatment pathways for Alz).
"If you're 15 years into that research and you think there is a chance that you'll reach a breakthrough in 5 years, you're much more inclined to want...to pursue it for 5 more years rather than starting over."
Decision A: 5 years (after 15 already spent) = 75% chance of success
Decision B: 20 years (after 0 already spent) = 10% chance of success
In that scenario, Decision A (sticking with your current research) is more rational as long as your estimate of your chance of success is accurate. We know from the article that this is not true -- their estimates were wrong.
The sunk-cost fallacy would apply for something like:
Decision A: 20 years (after 15 already spent) = 10% chance of success
Decision B: 20 years (after 0 already spent) = 10% chance of success
Since both A and B have the same cost and same likelihood of success, you should not consider the time you've already spent. Most humans would, though.
Is Alzheimer's on the rise, or are are simply more people getting diagnosed with it due to increased life expectancy?
A quick google search yields avg. age of diagnosis to be 80 years; 50 years ago life expectancy in the western world was 70 years, so a bunch of people would've probably passed from Heart Diseases and stroke back then, before getting to the point of dementia.
So it's pretty reasonable to assume that more research went towards things like heart diseases, etc. the past 50 years, than towards dementia and the likes.
But now, as we see a steady decline in those things (or at least them being the leading cause of death), we see more longevity-related diseases, like cancer and dementia.
What I'm trying to get at here is: Yes, maybe there have been ruling forces in academia and research that have stopped alternative theories, but wouldn't a simpler explanation be that there have simply been more pressing issues up until now, and we're now seeing a rise in things like dementia, due to having deal with those previous problems.
We have dementia in one side of our family, even though most have gotten it in their late 70s / early 80s, so I obviously hope they come up with something - which I have no doubt will happen, the next decades.
Unfortunately true for most scientific communities and the reason why the current academic system is badly broken and talented young minds decide to quit academia before even submitting a dissertation.
Talented young minds are mostly quitting because of terrible pay, inexperienced/cruel supervisors, long hours, gambling on tenure, and opportunities in private industry.
The groupthink and publishing pressure are also problems, but they're very secondary to hellish career conditions.
The reasons you raise are very true (I have been there), but most of them are mere symptoms of something deeper. I believe the root causes are exactly the kind of social dynamics discussed in the article.
Terrible pay / other opportunities:
Even at Ass. Prof. level pay is not so terrible. Sure, you won't get rich, but for most in academia that never has been a goal and would not matter.
Long Hours:
That also mostly would not be a problem, as long as you would be able to do what you truly like.
Cruel supervisors:
Here it's getting interesting. Why do you think that is? My hypothesis is that people become cruel if they don't like what they do. They basically become grumpy old men at the age of 40, because they always have to fight. Fight for money, fight against reviewers, fight internal department politics. Supervisors become cruel because they secretly hate their jobs, or better: the jobs the system makes them do.
Gambling on Tenure:
If you have the "right" supervisor in the "right" field (read: a good networker in the current hype topic) your chances are actually not that bad. But as soon as you do something that is either currently not on the radar of the community, or you do something that is even controversial, you get yourself into a fight - which as a young researcher you will lose. In academia you can only make it, if you are well connected and the community carries you there. Group think again. After years in the system I believe it all boils down to that: social dynamics and group think.
Academia was always broken. Despite the current undeserved reputation as academia being open to debate and new ideas, the opposite has always been true. Academia has its sordid history of dogmaticism and hero-worshipping. And progress in knowledge usually advanced in spite of academia rather than because of it.
Go read about the battles between Newton and Hooke or even Newton and Leibniz.
The doctor who first suggested washing hand to cut down on infections in the 1800s was ridiculed and mocked by surgeons.
Scientists who brought up germ theory were mocked as quacks by doctors and scientists who rigidly adhered to the miasma theory as gospel.
Of course white supremacy was accepted "scientific fact" for a very long time by academia and anyone who thought otherwise would have been viewed similarly to a flat earther today. You could argue that white supremacy would still be "scientific fact" were it not for ww2.
My personal favorite is Georg Cantor who was mercilessly attacked by his fellow academics within math and even without for his theories on infinite numbers.
"The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth".[8] Kronecker objected to Cantor's proofs that the algebraic numbers are countable, and that the transcendental numbers are uncountable, results now included in a standard mathematics curriculum. Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory", which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[9][context needed] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life have been blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries,[10] though some have explained these episodes as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder"
"charlatan", "renegade", "corrupter of youth". Isn't it interesting how academics attack each other like religious people attack each other? The odd thing about some of the attacks on Cantor is that it came after his death and after he had PROVEN his countable and uncountable infinites.
The history of academia is as nasty and vicious as any other institution. And its gatekeepers and heroes as petty and pathetic as any you'd find anywhere else.
Let's not forget Ludwig Boltzmann, who derived the thermodynamic properties of gases assuming the existence of atoms:
' In 1904 at a physics conference in St. Louis most physicists seemed to reject atoms and he was not even invited to the physics section. Rather, he was stuck in a section called "applied mathematics" '
Things did not end well for Boltzmann [1].
And my favourite, John Bell, who was the first to understand the consequences of entanglement, in 1964. These ideas were met with derision by the mainstream for decades (citation needed.)
Funny how words meanings change in time. The original Plato's Academia vs today's academia. Socrates was a "corrupter of youth" too. The word "supremacy", as in "quantum supremacy" is much discussed now but why would anybody risk his career to complain about the alliance of ACM with Elsevier against Open Access?
> My personal favorite is Georg Cantor who was mercilessly attacked by his fellow academics within math and even without for his theories on infinite numbers.
I do not think this is comparable to other examples. Math is not science in the sense that its correctness is not determined by the outside reality, only by its internal consistency.
Different (finite vs infinite) axiomatizations leads to different classes of math structures, so it is only a matter of custom which structures are worthy of studying and how these 'leading' structures are defined.
And there is a point that if one studies countable structures (e.g. arithmetics or graph theory) then using arguments from infinite set theory (e.g. ZFC) is overkill. We do not know whether such theory is consistent and if it is not, then most likely much simpler theories covering the countable structures would still be consistent.
It is a well known phenomenon if you have studied the history and philosophy of sciences. Dominant paradigm(research program) writes off any anomalies their core hypothesis faces. They will explain away these anomalies with subsidiary hypotheses. Grants will be denied; tenures are denied; etc--all are common to anyone participating in a research program(paradigm) that competes with the dominant one.
Whenever you hear about science being a "cabal", you have to remember that there's a huge survivorship bias. At any moment in science, there are a few dominant hypotheses, which seem to work pretty well, and hundreds of alternative hypotheses, with only vague evidence in favor of them. The vast majority of alternative hypotheses turn out to be completely wrong, and the researchers pushing them are forgotten. The few that turn out to be right get funding and recognition, exactly as many of the researchers mentioned in this article are getting now. In fact, most criticisms of dominant paradigms in science you read are not from outsiders, but from career scientists who are leading the charge towards the next dominant paradigm.
I say this just to point out that understanding the world is not as simple as believing contrarians. At any moment in time, almost all contrarians are completely wrong. Almost all paradigm shifts didn't work. Almost all anomalies faded away.
Recall the saying that science proceeds one funeral at a time. I believe it was coined as part of describing the shift to acceptance of plate tectonics.
I believe that it was about the acceptance of Quantum Mechanics.
Examples include that Edward Cope never accepted Darwin's theory of evolution (even though the fossils that he found were good evidence for it), Albert Einstein never accepted QM (even though his Nobel was for one of the key discoveries on the way to QM), and Fred Hoyle never accepted the Big Bang (even though he coined the phrase).
I went and found an interesting article confirming this. When a star researcher in a field dies, the result is an increase in people entering the field and exploring the ideas.
The professional science/medicine funding system (i.e. NIH money) can be characterized by "cabal" depending on how you look at at it. If by "cabal" they mean any organized profesional vetting system. I suppose there is a trade off between vetting good funding ideas from the bad, vs. the risk of "suppressing" original views aside from the "dogma".
Did some alternative views get squashed by not receiving R or K grants? maybe. I would bet some of them might have been true original ideas that needed money to get good preliminary data. But many of them probably did not pan out.
A lengthy way of saying I agree w/ the OP of the thread...
>Despite being described as a “cabal,” the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious. Those who championed the amyloid hypothesis truly believed it, and thought that focusing money and attention on it rather than competing ideas was the surest way to an effective drug.
I felt the author did a decent job trying to explain this themselves, but the title is pretty misleading in my opinion.
The few that turn out to be right get funding and recognition, exactly as many of the researchers mentioned in this article are getting now.
Some of the ones that are right eventually get funding, as long as their proponents stick around long enough and produce enough results to convince someone to fund them. On the time scale this article talks about, I'd expect a quite a few people who had ideas worth looking into gave up and went off to do something else instead.
The article talks of journals rejecting papers because the author had already been rejected by other journals or because the author’s prior papers were in less-prestigious journals. This method of selecting papers is the perfect recipe for groupthink. The names of the authors should be removed while a paper is being reviewed—the reviewers shouldn’t know who wrote it so that they’ll be forced to evaluate the paper on its intrinsic merits rather than the reputation of its author. That might not solve this beta amyloid orthodoxy problem, but it’d help at least
> they’ll be forced to evaluate the paper on its intrinsic merits rather than the reputation of its author
Similarly, many academics won't evaluate published papers on their own merits and instead focus heavily on proxies like publication venue. Conference papers are unfairly viewed with suspicion compared against journal articles (in my field at least), and certain venues are viewed as superior in general to the point where some "don't count".
These academics instead outsource the evaluation to a few reviewers, who often don't know what they're doing. Peer review does not appear to be as reliable as it is treated. I view peer review as closer to a lottery. And the "best" journals still frequently publish nonsense. It tends to be more pretentious nonsense in my field, though.
I don't care too much about signaling the quality of my work and instead would rather publish in more specialized journals and conferences where I can reach the people I want to reach and get better feedback. I recall at a presentation on getting a faculty job someone said that they won't count any publications in journals with names they don't recognize. Both quality specialized journals and bad journals are included in that set. Add on top of that the common view that conference papers also "don't count" and I think the incentives here are bad.
Ask people who work in any field that does have blind review, and they'll tell you that it isn't actually blind... you can make good guesses on the author list by examining the description of previous work, the reference list, the style of the writing, etc etc.
It's still better than nothing. You can't reject a paper saying "I believe this author is X, who has few publications in major journals" which encourages people to assess the paper on its own merits, even if it doesn't ensure it.
This is another example of group-think in scientific research. The same thing happened for decades where low fat diets were supposed to help for heart disease but that has only recently been reversed after decades of indoctrination. This happens all throughout scientific research, where science is supposed to be immune to this, but it's obviously not. So many things we take as gospel, only to be reversed decades later, and it has to do with how things get funded which is unfortunately leading society the wrong way.
While I'm all for changing funding systems I want to point out that there fact we have these scandals is the system somewhat working. Similarly to how constant criticism of the government/large corporations isn't a sign of rot, but of a system where improvements are still possible -as long as someone is pointing out the problems you can fix them.
And science is not supposed to be immune to this, the culture of science is supposed to uncover things like this/errors like this as part of a process. The truth has a habit of shining through if you are encouraged to keep asking questions and follow up on them.
And again, not saying the system is perfect or that calling things out is enough. But too often comments like this get turned anti-science or "we can't improve anything, slow decay is inevitable" cynicism (or FUD if you want to be less charitable)
This standard sentiment seems to me to be a machiavellian justification for the status quo and for not trying to improve anything. The costs of the problems are the problem, not whether they are eventually resolved extremely ineffiently.
Yes, we can improve things, but it is important to recognise that the scientific method and process is the best thing we have right now to figure this stuff out. Making it more open and reliable (open acces by default, data and code publication by default,more funding options that encourage public participation and replication studies etc.) is definitely possible but the core is not rotten. Especially some private interests (oligarchs and those with that ambition, "race realists" etc.) like to push the meme that something is fundamentally broken with publicly funded science and we shouldn't trust those ivory tower academics - often because those academics are actually able to go for the truth instead of following the market (i.e. create disinformation). This is what I'm pushing back against
Those oligarchs and race realists have supporters within academia, when selecting the reforms for academic process, this should be considered. Also, acknowledging the core truth these people build their lies around is fundamental to dismissing the whole ball of infectious meme.
> While I'm all for changing funding systems I want to point out that there fact we have these scandals is the system somewhat working.
After decades. The only reason there is a "scandal" is because it is medical. There is shit like this in almost every scientific field holding back progress.
I mean, the system is working but it could work better. Politics is actually working right now too -- we have roads and jobs and we aren't starving -- but it could definitely work better.
It sounds like what science needs then is a cultural shift to supporting and funding more controversial ideas, and being more content with dissent. Maybe we need to make a more intentional effort to fund the contrarians with the understanding that maybe they're dead wrong, but maybe giving them some ammunition will give us a head start down the correct path.
The US built the atom bomb so fast because we tried multiple approaches at once. We should approach basic science the same way. (In fact, writing that is seems obvious, because I guess I assume science is "supposed" to work that way anyway.)
What controversial ideas are missing funding, which dissent is missing please? What's the bar. I'm genuinely asking constructively, because I would like to find a scalable improvement on the rather slow moving funding structure (unless driven by hype). But there are hundreds of free energy, "race realist", AGW deniers etc. being blocked by the current system, as well as genuine con men.
Also, I dislike the idea that science doesn't like controversial ideas or dissent. Yes there is group think, yes there are cabals, but in general, if you find weird results, you publish and they get discussed. What else do people want to come out of the proposal controversial ideas? Controversial doesn't make it automatically good
You have to be careful with "race realist". It can mean people who believe there is only a small number of sharply divided races, such as mongoloid, negroid, and caucasoid. But it can also be used to describe hereditarians who identify meaningful classifications of people with boundaries roughly corresponding to traditional races. Those latter ideas are quite respectable scientifically even though they're demonized in popular culture.
Can you give me some examples of mainstream geneticists (not popular, just academically accepted) which will counter h ttps://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hereditarianism and the sources in it?
Otherwise, your comment reads to me "you have to be careful with this racist euphemism, it can refer to two different attempts of racist pseudoscience trying to appear legit"
I wouldn't count on China to provide lots of free research while it further turns into an etno-nationalist dictatorship. For India we better hope that democracy survives the next 5 years of Modi government, because the signs are they want some of that eton-nationalism themselves.
It’s not working if it takes DECADES for people to figure out that the science is wrong. And it keeps happening over and over and over again. The system is rotten and it’s not working and it’s not okay.
> The truth has a habit of shining through if you are encouraged to keep asking questions and follow up on them.
I would say that the latest Alzheimer's drug failure finally broke the camel's back. While NIH will tolerate groupthink indefinitely, biopharma eventually wants a payback.
I suspect biopharma pulling funding and causing the amyloid people to suddenly lose clout is more to blame for the come-to-Jesus party in Alzheimer's land.
Parent's example comes from a field in which the system manifestly does not work. Basic tenets of nutrition change on a regular basis. Every study is funded by commercial interests. Nothing gets better, ever.
This isn't the same as the situation around low fat diet at all. That research is intentionally distorted by companies who want to avoid the reality of what is needed: moderation, modest calorie intake and low sugar diets. The situation in the scientific literature was always far more fluid and complicated than what was communicated to the public because industry paid to communicate only the research they wanted. https://academic.oup.com/jhmas/article/63/2/139/772615 has a nice overview, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5099084/ talks about how industry intentionally distorted research, and http://resources.betterfly.com/uploads_resources/20000/19456... talks about how the government listens to corporations not scientists and how the science was always in doubt.
The situation isn't even close, low-fat diets are an example of how science is distorted by evil and money without a care for the lives of millions.
The underlying cause may be completely different, but it’s probably useful to group them together under the category “ways our societies can be wrong, even if part of that society tries to correct the whole”.
Useful if you want to make a list of all the different ways, but not at all meaningfull if you want to make society steer a sensible course as they cannot be treated the same way.
I think your list needs to have religion and political game theory on it as well.
No. The fact is decades of research confirmed this wrong science, or the scientific community just ate what was spoon fed to them. No one questioned it. I lived through decades of indoctrination that low fat diets helped and this was echoed by everyone including doctors and scientists. The same goes for things as wide spread as amyloids or even string theory. Decades are wasted because scientists are too afraid of getting their careers ruined.
Scientific truth is a competing value, not an exclusive one.
I wish it was exclusive, but it just isn't. There's ego, prestige, institutions, social arrangement, capital structures... The practice of science is the cleanest practice we've found but its quest for truth hasn't fully escaped the influence of these things.
There may be a way to structure the finances, work, and collaboration to escape these things through some new kind of institutional approach, but it's just not there yet.
Compare science to its predecessors, such as witchcraft and magic (ex: a medicinal herb would have been called magic for centuries). Look at zoology's predecessor, bestiary studies, wherein sea monsters, unicorns, and a giraffe were considered in the same class of anecdotal creatures. Psychology works far better than its predecessors as well, astrology and exorcisms.
Science is a far better approach then these things but there's still work left to do. We're not at the end of history but instead are tasked with moving it forward.
That kind of behaviour in science was identified a long time ago, as Max Planck put it:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth."
I spoke to someone about this the other day and they claimed it was now the dairy and meat industry campaigning in response to get their fatty foods re-accepted. Is there any truth to this? Or anyone heard anything about this?
> Teicholz' claims were harshly criticized by the DGAC, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and others, including a petition signed by 180 scientists, and they called for the BMJ to retract the article or issue corrections.[11][13][16][19][20] The BMJ issued a correction in October 2015 and another in December 2016, the latter with a statement that after an independent review of the paper, it had decided not to retract it.[21][22][23][24]
> Meanwhile, the Arnold Foundation had been pressing for Congressional hearings about the DGAC report and attempted to block the release of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans; its lobbying group arranged meetings for Teicholz with members of Congress and White House staff.[11][13] Teicholz and the Foundation were criticized at the time for being allies of the meat and dairy industries in their lobbying and other public relations efforts to maintain high levels of meat and dairy consumption by US consumers.[25][26]
Yes, the sugar industry was not silenced by this book, so the fight continued. And I am sure you can come up with criticisms about any research publication. But the main point is undisputed: the "low-fat" science at that time was not purely science. It had been influenced - for years - by lobbyists and scientists with a personal agenda.
Then it becomes like so many topics these days: when people (I don't mean you anewvillager) throw enough counter arguments - true or not - distinguishing the truths becomes harder and harder, certainly for the population at large, not so well versed in the subject.
[BTW: I have no affiliations whatsoever with the author or the books, other than that I read it]
There is a lot of evidence that low fat diets have contributed to the metabolic syndrome epidemic over the last few decades. Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.
The latest studies show overwhelming evidence of the dangers of cutting back on fat but many academics refuse to change their views.
The original health warnings were not about fat, but about meat. That ran into the meat-packing lobby, and then everything after had to be couched in terms of fat.
There has never been evidence that fats were bad, as such, just meat as produced in the US, and sugar. But no one was allowed to say so.
But how do you define 'original'? in 1956 the American Heart Association announced that a 'diet which included large amounts of butter, lard, eggs, and beef would lead to coronary heart disease'. Not just meat! See also the enormously influential study and conclusion by Ancel Keys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys. His seven countries study stressed the dangers of cholesterol and fat.
It's interesting that Keys, credited with discovering the Mediterranean Diet, died at the age of 101.
People living over 100 years old obviously have huge genetic factors that allow them to have unhealthy habits (or at least unhealthy for the normal person). I mean, there are people over 100 that smoke every day.
parent tried bolstering his claim by mentioning the Keys lived to 100. I point out that Kummerow who did good research outlived him.
Seriously Keys work is garbage. Where the publicly unknown Kummerow's research was spot on. If you don't know who Kummerow is he's the guy that finally forced the FDA to ban transfats decades after they were known to be poison.
That's a fairly different example, as there has been a lot more low quality, industry funded science in nutrition than in Alzheimers. Sad as it is, those who profited from sugar sales funded a lot of garbage work into low fat diets.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge climate change believer. But it does strike me as funny that climate change is above being charged with group think. We label them deniers.
I don't remember ever being modded down here by challenging some GW related assumption.
But if people come just generally stating that GW is based on group thinking, with no scope or analysis of what they disagree, they do get modded down, as they should.
Hasn’t Alzheimer’s been referred to as diabetes type III? It’s inflammation of the brain, and eating a low inflammation diet (low carb, no sugar, fasting) is the best thing one can do to drastically reduce getting it.
> It’s inflammation of the brain, and eating a low inflammation diet (low carb, no sugar, fasting) is the best thing one can do to drastically reduce getting it.
Do you have a source?
If you state something like this with such authority/in a "matter of fact" way (and is something that seems likely to be controversial), you really should have a source.
I'm not sure that I would state that it's inflammation as a fact, but exercise most likely will not hurt. Peter Attia, who is fanatical about understanding longevity, has said multiple times that he believes the best thing someone can do for long term brain health is exercise every day.
If it does turn out that inflammation is the cause, then things like fasting will also help.
It could be quite complex -- bacteria helping herpes, or herpes helping bacteria into the brain, and the brain responding to one or the other or both with inflammation and plaques. And maybe something else involved, like inadequate or excess dietary intake of something like sugar, or trans fats, or PCBs, or glyphosate.
Gum disease is also linked to being old, just like Alzheimers disease, heart disease, baldness, wrinkly faces, diabetic disease and lots of other things. Sermon: people are really, really shit at linear regression.
The logic that chronic illness can’t be prevented and is either genetic or inevitable is so problematic.
Like everyone is going to get old and if I think getting old means I will inevitably get gum disease which could cause Alzheimer’s then why bother flossing or caring about preventative oral health?
I think his point was that these symptoms could be correlation, not causation. So you need to work to prevent each of them as you age. (Eg that flossing is good for your oral health, even though it might have no influence on other factors associated with being old)
#1: you're going to die, and while you can stave it off by living a certain way, there's ultimately nothing you can do about it.
#2: gum disease is correlated with age. Alzheimers is also correlated with age. The connection between the two correlations is age. That means there is basically no evidence gum disease causes Alzheimers any more than heart disease or having wrinkles on your forehead causes gum disease.
I remember seeing that but I really suspect it's a gross oversimplification and not likely to be very explanatory. Almost like science clickbait. But not saying there isn't some connection....
We don't seem to understand much about any of diseases that affect the brain or nervous system. MS, Parkinson's, ALS, Huntington's disease, alzheimers, not even essential tremors or BFS. All these futurists thinking longer lives are just around the corner when in reality we don't jack shit about shit. Something goes wrong with your nerves or brain, you're likely fucked and there's little anyone can do to help you.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -Max Planck
Or, as it is more commonly put: Science advances one funeral at a time.
It's not forced retirement that is needed, it's constant replenishing of leaders and decision makers to let new ideas have a chance. So things can't advance, sometimes, until the people who are invested in the old ways stop blocking the new ways.
I studied Alzheimer's a bit during my degree, so in 2002 or so, and it seemed pretty clear that the amyloid hypothesis was wrong even then. I had no idea it was still the dominant paradigm.
>Several who tried to start companies to develop Alzheimer’s cures were told again and again by venture capital firms and major biopharma companies that they would back only an amyloid approach.
I wonder if that's because their internal advice was from "cabal members" or if they didn't like the fundamental science or some other reason? Maybe the economics of (well understood) beta amyloid ideas worked better economically than new ideas (I guess it's a big, unhedgable gamble to invest in something that might be a cure, but won't be on the market for 20 years).
The whole point of venture capital is to fund things that "mainstream" has rejected but rejected without good reason. That does make me wonder a bit how good the science behind other ideas was.
Perhaps the most pernicious example of a common dysfunction of the grant system and entrenchment of power in old faculty.
We hired a friend of mine exclusively to study amyloid beta spectroscopy. He was aware that it probably didn't explain the pathology, but how else would he get a job?
True-ish, but Aricept is generally seen and used as a disease-slowing treatment (even if the data is inconclusive, it is perceived this way by physicians).
> In patients with Alzheimer's Dementia participating in clinical trials, administration of single daily doses of 5 mg or 10 mg of ARICEPT produced steady-state inhibition of acetylcholinesterase activity (measured in erythrocyte membranes) of 63.6% and 77.3%, respectively when measured post dose. The inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) in red blood cells by donepezil hydrochloride has been shown to correlate to changes in ADAS-cog, a sensitive scale that examines selected aspects of cognition. The potential for donepezil hydrochloride to alter the course of the underlying neuropathology has not been studied. Thus ARICEPT cannot be considered to have any effect on the progress of the disease.
> Efficacy of treatment of Alzheimer's Dementia with ARICEPT has been investigated in four placebo-controlled trials, 2 trials of 6-month duration and 2 trials of 1-year duration.
> In the 6 months clinical trial, an analysis was done at the conclusion of donepezil treatment using a combination of three efficacy criteria: the ADAS-Cog (a measure of cognitive performance), the Clinician Interview Based Impression of Change with Caregiver Input (a measure of global function) and the Activities of Daily Living Subscale of the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (a measure of capabilities in community affairs, home and hobbies and personal care).
- % Response
- Intent to Treat Population n=365, Evaluable Population n=352
I'm guessing the perception that it slowed Alzheimer's is because some patients were misdiagnosed. Aricept can help with falls in Parkinson's patients with balance problems, and in my experience seems to help with arousal.
Accurately diagnosing the elderly is difficult. My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's 15-20 years ago, which was likely inaccurate. At this point it looks like she probably has Dopa-Responsive Dystonia and may also have some form of Vascular Dementia, some sort of CSF disorder, and possibly some other problem that hasn't been diagnosed.
Yes, until recently there was no way to confirm Alzheimer with certainty until after death. But recent imaging solutions make it possible to see the amyloid plaques in living subjects.
"“Once a field commits to a particular hypothesis, the research resources — funding, experimental models, and training — all get in line,” she wrote in a 2018 analysis. That brings backers of the dominant idea accolades, awards, lucrative consulting deals, and well-paid academic appointments. Admitting doubt, let alone error, would be not only be a blow to the ego but also a threat to livelihood."
Is this not extremely controversial? It was always my belief that "not creating a cure for X disease keeps the money flowing" was the calling card of tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nuts. This statement, and the following paragraphs seem to suggest this is somewhat commonplace
I presented my research on Delirium, dementia, and frailty at an Alzheimer's conference last year. There was no evidence of an Alzheimer's amyloid "cabal" in that room. Around 90% of the work being done had to do with early diagnosis: since this is a chronic, long-term disease, like diabetes or heart disease, most of the research and talks were about how to diagnose and treat EARLY, before the neurological damage has been inflicted.
In my opinion, there will probably be no silver bullet for Alzheimers, though we may develop long-term treatments which slow the rate and severity of the disease in those pre-disposed or in the early stages of AD.
if alternative ideas received little funding support, it was because NIH’s Alzheimer’s budget was woefully insufficient ($425 million in 2012, $2.4 billion in 2019)
low NIH funding for Alzheimer’s from the 1980s through the 2000s is to blame for alternative ideas languishing
This seems like a hollow excuse. AFAIK, NIH doesn't have a mandate to put a certain amount of funding towards one line of inquiry before funding another.
> This seems like a hollow excuse. AFAIK, NIH doesn't have a mandate to put a certain amount of funding towards one line of inquiry before funding another.
Rather NIH can't fund projects for the 10 most likely ideas, so it funds projects for the 1 or 2 most likely ideas.
It is easy in retrospect to see that going all in on the amyloid hypothesis was a mistake.
But that is always true once a hypothesis has been proven false (or at least not completely true).
Is it possible to look at this as a very large “fail fast” experiment? Given the limited funding, would it really have been better to spread it over many hypotheses, rather than pick the most likely, and test a minimal viable solution?
It's hard to see this as a fail fast experiment when:
> In more than two dozen interviews, scientists whose ideas fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences.
It's one thing to go all-in on a hypothesis, but another to undermine other folks' hypotheses directly. Especially when your hypothesis has not produced any results for decades.
It may well be that the right strategy sometimes is to pour most funding into the most promising candidate, but the question is how large a proportion of the funding that ought to be vs. how much is left over to fund at least initial inquiries into alternatives.
Even more so how soon you should rebalance funding if further progress isn't achieved with respect to your biggest bet.
I collaborate with an expert in Alzheimer's Disease. She stated to me that the Amyloid hypothesis was so strong for so long because it is "like the garbage left over in a stadium after a big event...you see concrete evidence something happened, it's obvious this garbage is bad and should be cleaned up, but the garbage itself did not cause the event."
I am reading the book "An Epidemic of Absence" by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, which articulates a basis for everything being covered in this HN thread. While I wish the author made better use of citations and footnotes, the narrative seems compelling.
>scientists whose ideas fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences
Not quite in topic, but Is it really such a stretch to acknowledge that the same forces in academia might bias climate science too? Except as another commenter pointed out, it doesn't take a shadowy cabal. Just a strong trend that individuals can believe in for ethical or moral reasons. Even when it becomes dogmatic.
I will acknowledge that those forces may be in play. But I will also ask you to acknowledge that oil extraction has and continues to make certain people, companies, and governments immensely wealthy and powerful and that those groups are very interested in keeping the status quo. Those people/companies/governments have the power and resources to finance research into climate change that would support their narrative. And by all accounts they have been doing that. But despite those efforts the scientific consensus supporting climate change has remained.
So yeah, science isn't perfect and we have seen cases in the past where group think has held back progress and discovery. But we have also seen plenty of examples of corporations and trade groups bending and influencing the scientific narrative to their benefit (see the low-fat discussion in this thread). And in the case of climate change, the most monetarily interested party is literally the wealthiest industry in the history of the world. So I think it is safe to say that the current consensus is facing plenty of scrutiny.
Does this argument prove anything? An enormous industry that wants to disprove man-made climate change science doesn't prove climate science is iron-tight. There are also many vested interests, at this point, in proving popular climate science to be true. This can be companies, politicians, and even just people who are invested in the hypothesis (either professionally or personally).
There are industries who oppose the hypothesis that climate change is man-made for personal reasons, but there are people on the other side who have similar interests. There is scrutiny about man-made climate change, but I've often seen such scrutiny lambasted by people who are too vested in the idea that man has solely created climate change. Is it possible that, despite push-back from oil companies, there is still group-think happening with climate change science?
As a disclaimer I believe a significant portion of climate change is man-made but also that part of it can be attributed to natural changes. I _definitely_ think we need to act to save ourselves from climate change. Climate change science has a lot of momentum right now and perhaps certain ideas have been given undue recognition or derision due to their conclusions found.
The key mechanism that enables 'group think' in academia is access (or lack of access) to funding for research. Generally, funding for research is fairly limited relative to the number of interested researchers (ask any grad student). The control over journal publications and conference speaking slots is only useful in that it enables researchers to increase their odds of receiving future funding. If one is able to get funding without those credentials, say by going to industry players with aligned interests, then the 'academic cabals' really don't have the power and influence to be a 'cabal'.
It is worth noting, that part of the reason the Alzheimer 'cabal' existed in the first place was because the pharmaceutical industry was willing to go along with it. And part of the reason the 'cabal' is finally falling apart is because the industry is no longer willing to fund the research.
Here is a fun question for you (or anyone who is skeptical). Can you name one example where industry and academics were diametrically opposed on a particular topic, and where it turned out that the academics were wrong? I can point out quite a few examples where the opposite was true, but I am struggling to think of a single example that would qualify the above prompt.
Yeah I agree there is a very strong incentive for certain groups to disprove climate change and they're backed by a lot of money and influence. Comparatively, there doesn't really seem like that big of an incentive to sell a "lie" that CO2 is fucking the climate. That being said, it does irk me a bit that I know so many people who smugly demean the moronic science-deniers who don't believe in climate change, even though they themselves don't know any of the data or figures that support climate change. Most people just follow whatever their talking-head of choice on tv tells them to believe.
> there doesn't really seem like that big of an incentive to sell a "lie" that CO2 is fucking the climate.
The article we're commenting on argues there's been a huge pressure towards researching ways to stop beta amyloid plaques; and yet there's no obvious "incentive" to do so. It's just a catchy hot topic on which many have invested their careers.
In the case of climate change, you have to factor in both the scientific pressure, similar in everything to what's been described here; and the media pressure, absent in the alzheimer's case: the media absolutely loves to sell a scare story, and the climate change story is just the perfect one: it's everywhere, it's invisible, it carries an enormous amount of consequences and huge risks. Most of the predictions are decades away in the future, so the story can go on unchecked for decades. And so on.
I'm not saying climate change science is wrong (although some of it certainly is: "climate change science" goes from the basic physics of CO2 greenhouse effect to ecology, economy and social and political predictions far away in the future). I'm saying that you must factor in all the inevitable effects of a story everybody just loves to tell.
>Most of the predictions are decades away in the future, so the story can go on unchecked for decades. And so on.
It's not just the sea level rising stuff in the future though, now basically any adverse weather event is blamed on climate change. Powerful hurricane, big mudslide, wild fires, etc. I'm not saying climate change doesn't play a role in any of these, but the news media plays it a little loose with any of these events and citing them as being caused by/evidence of climate change with 0 proof. But again, if you question any of if then YOU are the one painted as being against science.
How exactly is media pressure influencing climate science? Most of the foundational research was done long before climate change was being discussed in the media. And as far as I am aware, the media continues to have zero influence in how NSF grants are awarded.
Another fun fact, Fox News, a nakedly partisan cable network that adamantly denies the existence of climate change is the most watched channel on cable TV. They just recently hit their highest viewership[1]. And the President of the United States has been known to set his policy priorities based on things he sees on Fox News. So who's influence should we be worried about?
In the spirit of acknowledging potential sources of bias and influence that originally started this thread, I will acknowledge that the "mainstream media" occasionally gets it wrong and does have a tendency to sensationalize stories about climate change. But I would like you to acknowledge that the "other mainstream media"[2] like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting Group are just as bad (if not worse), and are just as powerful and influential (if not more so) as their counterparts in the "mainstream media".
> How exactly is media pressure influencing climate science?
Exactly through the same mechanism that skewed Alzheimer's research. Some topics are "hotter" and scientists know that to obtain grants, be published, and attract unspecialised media attention they better mention climate change in their articles and possibly highlight some major consequence (even with qualifiers as "may", "could" etc.).
This stuff is then picked up by mainstream media and spread to a much larger public, making the topic even hotter. Finally, scientists are a subset of the mainstream media consumers, and might not be much better than the average public outside their domain of expertise. So they are likely to be influenced by sensationalistic reporting outside their field. (For example, a physicist cannot evaluate the soundness of an economic study on the consequences of climate change- but might be influenced by it when deciding grants or publication worthiness of something related to his field).
> Most of the foundational research was done long before climate change was being discussed in the media.
The foundational research is tiny compared to the mass of research on the myriad consequences of climate change. And the effects are what concern us.
> Fox News, a nakedly partisan cable network that adamantly denies the existence of climate change
Yes, Fox News. I am European, I have never watched a single minute of Fox News. I can assure you that almost all news outlets I follow just love to publish news about climate change, the scarier the better. The situation of the US might be different- on the other hand last time I checked 40% of Americans believed in creationism, so maybe the US public opinion and media are not a good sample.
In the case of the Alzheimer 'cabal', there was a large minority of researchers that were being locked out of funding by the cabal. Can you point to a single credible climate science researcher that has contrarian views on the consensus and also lacks access to funding for research? As mentioned in another post, the oil industry is very wealthy and is spending large sums of money in this domain. So while there are plenty of contrarians, I highly doubt the credible ones are having any issues with funding.
Whether you realize it or not, you are making some fairly extraordinary claims. While the academic world is subject to politicking and influence like any other domain, it tends to get things right in the long run. If your issue is with media over sensationalizing climate change headlines, well that is a separate issue, and quite frankly seems like nitpicking considering how little progress we have made in solving the problem and how dire the consequences can potentially be.
> In the case of the Alzheimer 'cabal', there was a large minority of researchers that were being locked out of funding by the cabal
I think the most important thing here is to remember that the term 'cabal' is completely improper. The article this thread is about says explicitly that "despite being described as a “cabal,” the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious". So what happened is just the result of an un-organised majority of scientists applying a selective pressure on the type of research that was funded and published, often without even realising it. This effect is always a risk in science. There isn't hotter topic in science, politics and information today of climate change, and I don't need to produce any example of scientists who were "locked out" to be certain that the effect is strong in the field.
This article might give you an idea of the most extreme example (for which the term 'cabal' might even be appropriate):
But most of the pressure is probably implicit: everyone wants their research to be sexy, and there's nothing sexier than linking the hottest topic of the time and pointing to some coming existential threat. Scientist do it all the time, no nefarious intentions but it's part of the game.
Finally, you seem to have a very restrictive idea of climate change science. There's a pretty much established physical base to it, but the quantification and consequences concern a myriad different disciplines: from statistics to botanic, ecology, ethology, economics, medicine, social sciences, agricultural sciences, engineering, etc. These offer enormous space for speculation about the future, with results that are much less solid than those of the physical foundations.
> This article might give you an idea of the most extreme example
Ahh, yes. A link to a 10 year old climategate article. Nice one.
> everyone wants their research to be sexy
This is flat out wrong. There are plenty of people who care more about money, prestige, and power than they do about producing sexy research. Right now, the easiest path to achieve that would be to produce contrarian research. There is no shortage of funding from the oil industry, and the right wing media will give air time to anyone that sounds like they have a plausible sounding argument.
> you seem to have a very restrictive idea of climate change science
I am well aware that there is a large amount of uncertainty regarding the predictions of the future. Pretty much everyone, including the 'academia establishment' acknowledges that. If anything, that fact that they are so open about these uncertainties makes your argument of 'cabal-group-think' weaker.
I can imagine that a dominant hypothesis could play a role in the predictions of future trajectories of climate on earth, but not so much for things like measuring past temperature / sea level rise.
To twist the analogy back to Alzheimer - all these scientists still agreed on the patient-level diagnosis of Alzheimer.
> Not quite in topic, but Is it really such a stretch to acknowledge that the same forces in academia might bias climate science too? Except as another commenter pointed out, it doesn't take a shadowy cabal. Just a strong trend that individuals can believe in for ethical or moral reasons. Even when it becomes dogmatic.
Sure, but bear in mind that in the case of the amyloid plaque hypothesis, there wasn't really any bad science going on. It's not as if false results were being published (after all the drugs kept failing in trials); the problem is simply that too many resources were focused on research based on a hypothesis that didn't pan out.
Unfortunately, if there was something similar happening with climate change that would still mean that all the published results are correct and climate change is real, but maybe too much effort is being spent on solutions that aren't realistic (e.g. carbon capture).
It's already happening. Not so much in climate science, but in climate activism.
Banning plastic straws, planting trees, etc. are popular yet entirely ineffective measures. Actually effective measures like rolling out nuclear power are unpopular and yet most climate scientists agree that we're likely boned without it.
I urge everyone to look at tools like [1] to get an idea of what it takes to deal with climate change.
according to climate predictions we'd be underwater today in pescara but they would have not be an issue as we would also have dief of all the cancer from the ozone layer depletion.
change is real, damn this winter we got 15+ degree Celsius instead of the ten cm snow we usually got when I was a kid, the local effects are quite evident, and the trajectory spells real dangers, but past predictions were definitely overstating the effects, no wonder people have doubts about current predictions
You mention the ozone layer depletion as evidence of past exaggeration when in fact it's evidence of how a concerted, international effort can deal with an environmental issue.
here the thing: these are both true, by definition, states reacted and people didn't cook up. but people only see what resonates with their belief and immediately attak anyone poking at the notion that it'll happen again for co2, despite all the evidences from the past
> Not quite in topic, but Is it really such a stretch to acknowledge that the same forces in academia might bias climate science too?
What's the downside to "believing" in climate science, though? Let's say it's all a hoax. The way I see it, the worst thing is funds are diverted for things that don't help us that much.
But what's the real down side to climate science for the general population? I don't think anyone wants to inhale exhaust gases, have coal power plants in their neighborhood, plastics pollute almost everything they touch and they do it long term...
The way I see it, if climate science is correct, everybody wins. If it's not correct, we'll be mildly inconvenienced for 20 years, until it's debunked for good.
To me the huge uproar about climate science kind of proves that it's just hated by a hornets' nest of very powerful people, most likely because they're about to lose a lot of money or gasp have to work harder to make that money :-)
> What's the downside to "believing" in climate science, though? Let's say it's all a hoax. The way I see it, the worst thing is funds are diverted for things that don't help us that much.
The "green new deal" is estimated to cost between $50 and $100 trillion over ten years. The current US budget is about $4.5 trillion per year. What else could the US government do with between 100% and 200% of the current budget? How about end poverty, build the best education system in the world, land on Mars, develop fusion energy to solve the upcoming energy crisis, develop desalination technology to solve the upcoming water crisis, or cure some of the most deadly diseases around today?
The cost to getting climate change wrong is massive in both directions.
> How about end poverty, build the best education system in the world, land on Mars, develop fusion energy to solve the upcoming energy crisis, develop desalination technology to solve the upcoming water crisis, or cure some of the most deadly diseases around today?
Well, some of the things you list are at least partially related to climate change. For example desalination technologies looks a lot like stuff you'd need if fresh water became scarce. Fusion energy would also be environmentally-friendly, landing on Mars could be a decent plan B for humanity or at least a way of off-loading some of that economic activity elsewhere.
The bits about poverty, education and curing diseases seem to be quite independent from any climate science thing...
I forgot to mention something, climate science is not a US-specific thing. Everyone is taking a stance and therefore betting on something.
If these bets are not hedged, those who bet on the losing side will be absolutely crushed economically by those who bet on the winning side.
Barely. Upcoming water and energy crises are primarily because of rising standards of living. If our climate woes were non-existent, those problems would remain.
The green new deal is often described as being just about climate, but it is not, and its costs are not. There is a lot of infrastructure etc spending. Think of it as an omnibus bill.
Rather amazingly, the $93 trillion dollar price tag seems to be a function of right-wing think tank groupthink.
Some right-wing think tank came up with the number, and you can see it cited on mises.org, the Washington Examiner, Fox Business, and a wide variety of other right-leaning outlets, all citing the original right-wing calculation uncritically.
Seems somewhat apropos on a discussion thread about groupthink that such a figure, given its provenance, would come up.
The proponents of the plan refuse to estimate it's cost. I don't think it's unreasonable or unexpected to use opponent's estimates when they are the only estimates available. The (left-leaning) website factcheck.org notes that the green new deal is likely to incorporate a Medicare-for-all program with a pricetag around $36 trillion, so the order of magnitude is at least correct.
So, I think your "groupthink" descriptor is a off base. I'd also note that you didn't respond to the substance of my comment (seriously - replace the $50 to $100 trillion in my comment with $20 trillion - does it make a difference to my argument??) but instead frothed at a widely cited estimate without providing another estimate that you saw as more reliable.
Climate science is heavily politicised, because its findings have a massive impact on our economies. But the strongest economic interest is in downplaying global warming, not overplaying it. As a matter of fact, scientists that have a contrarian view towards the consensus have received ample publicity.
> the strongest economic interest is in downplaying global warming, not overplaying it
The strongest economic interest might be for inaction (but let's not forget that economic costs are often human costs in the end).
On the other hand, as far as information goes, the pressure is towards overstating the risks of climate change: it publishes articles with catchy abstracts, it connects boring researches to a hot new topic, it gives newspapers strong headlines that pique the readers' interest, it gives millions of activists something to fight for.
Anyone can put some co2 and a thermometer in a sealed container. A second one without additional ghgs, too. Alzheimer’s probably more difficult to understand and you have to trust somebody.
There are sufficient resources for alternative research into climate change to flourish. In the end, those who control the money control the studying, and there are enough people who control money who want the other part studied.
maybe but the topic is quite polarised now and the foundamentalists are tolerated to avoid giving munition to the deniers, which might cause even bigger divisions on the public opinion.
The truth has a habit of shining through if you are encouraged to keep asking questions and follow up on them.
The point is that people are actively discouraged from asking questions and following up on them. People lose their careers and livelihoods for asking the wrong sorts of questions.
(I have no stance either way regarding that account, but it's an interesting phenomenon that someone has to basically shroud themselves in anonymity to present certain flavors of scientific research.)
On the specific topic of IQ and scientific racism, the "centrist" position of "just asking questions" has been a cloak for agendas and not caring about the truth for a while now. Exhibit A: https://mobile.twitter.com/Simon_Whitten/status/117331966332...
Exhibit B, what happens when you actually dig into the science behind the most well known peddler of the IQ is real and important, therefore racism is actually not a problem meme https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
Note that I'm not saying there aren't good faith inquiries to be had, but it is really hard to have these with racist agendas being pushed whole claiming "neutral" questions.
A few observations that I would like people to keep in mind when looking at these fields:
- the people who complain about being "silenced" continue to find funding, public platforms to push their research and in some cases, tenure
- the "hard questions not being raised" seem to cluster around the question of differences between "races" and less around whether the concept of race actually makes sense in humans (AFAIK geneticists generally think no), whether these differences might be socially constructed (yes, that's possible. If there are systemic social biases against groups with genetic genes the impacts of these will be 100% explained by the presence of these genes in data, but 0% genetically determined as in biologically determined). And often they are then raised to dismiss concerns about the systematic problems which might have caused the measured problems
- scientific racism and shoddy science in this field has a long history, and people carry their misconceptions around. Famous examples are "objective" written IQ tests given to barely literal test subjects, or asking trigonometry questions, Both of which test the schooling of the subjects more than the IQ
In an inherently political field of science, denying the political nature and implications of questions being raised and the manner in which they are raised and trying ot claim "objectiveness" is in and of itself a political tactic.
There's definitely a lot of agendas being pushed. But I'm not sure why we're being expected to trust numbers like 100% and 0% - what makes these numbers inherently more "objective" than other possibilities such as, let's say 90% and 10%?
Well in this case, because they are numbers in an example given and you are nitpicking. In the general case, it's more complicated, but (controversial statement ahead) truth exists,some ideas are wrong either by data or by definition
>"On the specific topic of IQ and scientific racism, the "centrist" position of "just asking questions" has been a cloak for agendas and not caring about the truth for a while now"
That is the price for _having_ a truth. All sides must be allowed to argue, because sometimes _you_ are the one on the wrong side and just don't know it.
You can’t simply join scientific debate while ignoring the existing findings.
Genetics and race are almost completely unrelated with black in America including people that 7 out of 8 white great grand parents. So, arguing your measurements are of genetic differences needs to account for such non biological social constructs. Good faith research can follow the social construct of race, but it needs to address that elephant in the room.
I was just pointing out that we must all be willing to both prove others wrong and be proven wrong or we can never correct anything.
And, we must all be willing to accept and work with the difficulty this causes for many people.
But we must never, ever stifle speech because it's upsetting or we disagree with it. At the very least because the pendulum swings and any oppression we support today _will_ be turned against us or others in the future.
That’s the point I was addressing. It’s not the responsibility of the scientific community to pay attention to everyone. The threshold of communication is an awareness of the fields existing models and results.
Getting published in a reputable journal is generally a low bar and probably a good yardstick for joining the conversation. That might seem excessive, but it drastically improves the signal to noise ratio and frankly works.
Now, complaints after that point are reasonable, even Einstein disliked QM. However, eventually the old guard dies and new people are willing to consider new idea at which point science marches on.
>had concrete scientific evidence that climate change wasn't man-made. (It's a thought experiment, so humor me for a moment.)
I think that there would be a rush to find out what process was causing climate change and to develop mitigations for that.
In fact this is a kind of worst case - AGW has a silver lining; we are doing something to make it bad. If we stop doing that then it will go away (slowly). That's all we have to do (at the moment) - just stop it.
If the kind of radical climate change that we are seeing were being caused by a natural process we would have to take action to counter that. Also we would have to contemplate the idea that the process might not have a human scale end - for example the sun could be warming the earth by 1'C extra every decade for the next million years. The earth would be heated by an extra 5'C in our childrens life times, and 15'C in our grandchildrens.
We know there is a hard stop on AGW. The earth warms by 4'C and civilization disappears (along with most humans). Sure, it takes 500 years for carbon to fall back to "normal" and it's debatable if the climate resets or moves to a new stable state. But in the end, 500, 5000 or 50,000 years from now this to will pass, obliterated by the glacial beat. A natural process might simply cook life off earth.
> Suppose tomorrow someone had concrete scientific evidence that climate change wasn't man-made.
This depends entirely on what the alleged mechanism is instead, who is publishing the paper, the extent to which it depends on statistics, and which existing research it contradicts exactly? How difficult is it to reproduce the relevant experiments, or does this rely on analytical interpretation of evidence? How difficult is is to gather more evidence on the same topic?
(Also, are we though-experimenting that it's not happening, or that it is happening but the radiative forcings are much smaller than expected and something else is causing the warming? Because the latter is still a huge problem!)
Humoring your thought experiment: yes, I think society would accept the evidence. Lots and lots of people already dismiss the science, claim it's a hoax, or don't want to contend with the inconvenience climate change demands.
But...I think you'd continue to see pushback on pollution in general, because living in polluted environments is just terrible. Remember LA in the 80s? Been to any of the SE Asian megacities now? Even if it had zero impact on the future of the planet, reducing emissions is still a laudable goal for the myriad other human costs.
Moving away from car-centric lifestyles has a lot of benefits aside from the impact on carbon pollution, like reducing the time spent sitting in cars on gridlocked freeways and city streets. People would still push for the societal changes that reduce auto dependence for those reasons, even if there was zero human cost to carbon-producing transportation there.
Great comment - sometimes I wish that HN would allow you to "spend" karma by upvoting multiple times (mind you - I can see the disadvantages of this as well).
You've managed to capture a lot of my own unease about discussions of IQ - not being from the US (and most definitely not being a fan of IQ tests as a concept) I've often felt I was missing out on some other underlying aspect when IQ is discussed.
>If there are systemic social biases against groups with genetic genes the impacts of these will be 100% explained by the presence of these genes
That makes sense, but according to Plomin there's also an opposite (and counterintuitive to most people) effect, which over time increases the influence of genetics over the influence of the environment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lev8dGnxvdw&t=4m43s
Recursing on my post: Plomin might make sense as well, but according to Nassim N. Taleb not always: "Plomin who studies heredity doesn’t seem aware of the intransitivity of correlation." (he made a whole paper about these correlation issues: https://www.academia.edu/39797871/Common_Misapplications_and...)
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Why did you have to go straight in on "race science"? The history there is that "inherent inferiority" has been used to justify everything from legal discrimination to actual genocide. "Race science" has killed more people than nuclear weapons and poisoned more lives than tetraethyl lead.
It's the clearest example where a simple disclaimer like "I'm not racist but" is no more adequate than handling plutonium with kitchen gloves. It needs to be kept in an extremely safety-orientated environment, not splashed all over the internet.
Another conspiracy theory: obvious morons like the racists are encouraged and publicized in order to discredit those who dissent from the established narrative in real ways that actually challenge TPTB.
It's a conspiracy theory, so like you I hesitate to offer any "evidence". If you don't mind pondering some stray thoughts: Racism has taken on an outsized life of its own in USA, but that might have been a contingent feature of our horrific history. Poor whites have been brutal to blacks, but always with the approval and guidance of the wealthy. Their brutality never improved their own lot, but it did distract them... Now in the present, we've created a blameless class of authorities with "dangerous" jobs (well, not compared to pizza delivery) who are deputized to continue the racial brutalization we no longer trust "civilians" to provide. Meanwhile we export our (excess) brutality to brown populations in other lands but somehow this is never viewed through the obvious lens. DoD has "misplaced" trillions of dollars, and we have to learn of it through "alternative" publishers. Somehow, every time a non-white person is harmed without justification, someone makes money on it...
An honest question: How does this compare to the group-think in the climate change/global warming research? Are we similarly rejecting funding to any research that does not fit into the common consensus? The fact that we call some people "climate change deniers" tells me that we have an unhealthy dynamics going on there. Will it take 30 years to get to the same point?
> The fact that we call some people "climate change deniers" tells me that we have an unhealthy dynamics going on there
1. Climate change is observable, it doesnt rely on a theory, just measurements. Nonetheless there are a bunch of people trying to discredit what is essentially a very well established observation.
2. Genesis of climate change (ie is it anthropogenic) is not a direct observable, but looking at concentrations of CO2/other gasses and where it comes from it is not too hard to convince yourself of humans as root cause. Again, a lot of people deny human-driven climate change despite all evidence pointing one way.
3. Perhaps the most uncertain are climate model predictions. I agree that this where something might be overlooked, or maybe not.
At any rate, "climate change deniers" by and large object to (1) and (2), and those people really have no credibility. If someone accepts anthropogenic climate change but proposes a new model that fits observation-- more power to them!
The biggest red flag is that "climate change deniers" aren't a fringe group of meteorologists, but a group of politically-inclined people who also denounce "cultural Marxism" and other crank theories.
I assume that actual expert skeptics are given a lot more respect but also get far less exposure than deniers.
I agree with you, but I think your argument is not a good way to engage with skeptics because it is basically an appeal to authority, but scientists precisely dont have much authority in their eyes.
Measuring outside temperature, however, is a lived experience for them. And this is what we have done (in a more complicated fashion) for years now. This, to me, is a more convincing argument.
Straw man. It's not black and white. Some are skeptical of the _degree_ to which the claims are true. Go watch Al Gore's 2006 documentary to see a good example of alarmist hyperbole. Some would say this movement has been hijacked by those seeking political and economic power, by those who don't care about the environment. Some would say the projected outcome is 10x exaggerated, and are suspicious of proposed "solutions" such as increase tax, transfer trillions of dollars to third world countries, setup carbon trading schemes to make investment bankers rich, and so on.
He is not a scientist. The entire discussion was about scientists engaging in group think.
Regarding skeptics to degrees
1. There are no credible skeptics in the community regarding the observation that climate has warmed in the past 100 years
2. There are nearly no credible skeptics in the community regarding the rather simple deduction that humans caused a non-trivial portion of the warming in the past 100 years
Yes. "No true Scotsman" believes such things. My point stands, that the accuracy of the models is debatable, and the extreme scenarios that are used to inform policy are quite possibly exaggerated by an order of magnitude, by influence of powerful non-scientist entities.
Since the IPCC is worried about being too "alarmist" and other external pressures no one is investigating the plausible scenarios where CO2 increases exponentially in the next 20 years. The amount of potential feedbacks that could cause rapid climate change are alarming.[1] If anything group-think is making it so we're not taking enough action.
I saw a hint of this in a paper describing how something in climate change was found to be positive or not as bad as previously thought. It ended with a call to action for people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, despite the paper itself not being about that. Why? Maybe either the scientists were activists uncomfortable with their own findings or they were afraid of being rejected for denialism.
I don't believe for a second that your question is 'honest', because I think you're smart enough to be able to type it in to Google and find the answer if you were actually interested in it.
Read the IPCC report if you actually want to know (Spoiler: yes and yes).
My first job out of college 10 years ago was in a lab focused on Alzheimer’s research. Our Principle Investigator made an art of writing grant applications for studies that would appear to be in line with mainstream theory, but were really intended to test theories he actually thought were worth testing, presented in results as an “interesting” aside. He believed the amyloid theory had been conclusively disproven.
He explained to me that people like him work for decades, quasi-retire into positions accepting grant applications, and have a conscious or unconscious agenda to preserve or validate their life’s work. His money quote was “science is like the Catholic Church, a lot of nice sentiments but full of people”.
I don’t have any evidence or examples, but I suspect this dynamic is not limited to Alzheimer’s research.
Another anchor to research not mentioned in the article is how much sponsoring universities take from research labs. To put a university endorsement on our research, which is needed to be credible, the university took half (half!) our grant money.