How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

that's how it started over a hundred years ago, it's harder to start seeing progress on treating Alzheimer's.

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.

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"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor

"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.

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.

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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle