How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by jffhn » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

jffhn wrote: post #97

igorkraw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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...)

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

#162

Post by will4274 » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #146

will4274 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? H…

> 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 ne…

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.

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

#163

Post by Psyladine » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:33 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #139

Psyladine wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael Crichton said as much and the community turned on him.

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.

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

#164

Post by svara » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

leftyted wrote: post #155

svara wrote: post #100

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) wa…

> 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 politic…

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.

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

#165

Post by dccoolgai » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #159

svara wrote: post #100

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) wa…

"""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 (in…

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.

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

#166

Post by Psyladine » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #144

Psyladine wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael Crichton said as much and the community turned on him.

What do you mean?

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.

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

#167

Post by btrettel » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

svara wrote: post #164

leftyted wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 politic…

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 t…

> 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.

From p. 31 of the 2014 edition of this: http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/

The status quo is not the best we can do.

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

#168

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #147

ping_pong wrote: post #3

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 late…

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.

> 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.

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

#169

Post by richk449 » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

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?

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

#170

Post by vidarh » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

richk449 wrote: post #169

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 solu…

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.