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Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

stanforddaily.com

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Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#121

Post by wolverine876 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #78
wolverine876 wrote: post #30

> Retractions remain exceedingly rare for scientific papers: Just eight out of every 10,000 are retracted, according to a Retraction Watch database. Reading HN, one might get the impression that it's much higher.

What data do you have to support that? Because I certainly don't get that impression at all, and it doesn't seem like anyone else in this thread does either, so do you have some polling, or maybe NLP analysis of comments? Of course you're entitled to your impressions, but so are the rest of us.

The data is right there at the top of my comment.

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#122

Post by wolverine876 »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #66
wolverine876 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my anecdote: In extensive exposure to a top-25 global university, and to a top-10 elite one, there was a big difference in the student body and the education. The latter was a different world; the education was innovative, brilliant, demanding at a very high level that I didn't anticipate. The students operated at a different level, world-class talent with shocking intelligence and, for their age, experience,…

I'd love for you to tell me, step by step, what someone that didn't get into a top institution of any kind should take away from this comment. Because all I can take away is that people like me are just objectively inferior compared to you, destined to not be a future leader or professional. Is that not what you are attempting to communicate? I just want to be crystal clear. We all know people like you are superhuman…

Here are my thoughts:

The first step is to put aside subjective biases, put aside ourselves completely, which is necessary to reading and listening effectively - curiously and objectively. You may fear or hate those things, but you brought them to the conversation; they aren't what I wrote about. (For example, I never said I attended either institution, or that the students there are somehow superior.)

Another step: There are more talented people, with better resources, than you - and than me, and you might be one of them. Good for you, if that's so; I hope you go much further than I do. That fact will always be true for everyone (ignoring a statistically meaningless theoretical exception). If we can't handle that fact, we can't talk about reality. Must we censor the idea that elite university education is exceptional, and their student bodies are exceptional? It's a cheap way out of the conversation.

Step three is that it doesn't bother me at all that you might go further than me, or the students at these institutions might go further. What is to fear? I'm not inferior to anyone on the planet. If we rely on external rewards, especially elite ones, as necessary to a successful life, then 99.99% will 'fail' - which seems to be where you reached your own conclusions. Most importantly, all the external rewards in the universe won't fill the holes inside; people seek them as a substitute, including elite status, but it never works. The only answer is to be happy with yourself internally, to provide love and recognition internally, regardless of the external rewards. The external doesn't fill those holes, and will come and go; you are the only person who will always be there; nobody can take that away.

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#123

Post by wolverine876 »

ekianjo wrote: post #93
bsder wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Current Science is mostly cargo cult. Such statements are mostly cargo cult. Experiments with known results are finicky. See: "Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass" https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html Experiments with unknown results are ridiculously finicky. You would be stunned at the number of experiments that got lucky and hinge on things like "how strongly stoppered the bottle is" (this normally…

I am an engineer so I know very well that industrial replication is far from easy, but that's a whole different topic here. That's why when manufacturing at scale you implement numerous controls for each step to ensure you remain into "whats known" territory. Now, when you publish a discovery in a paper, common sense demands that you are sure that you results are not random, and the only 100% reliable way to do that…

> I am an engineer so I know very well that industrial replication is far from easy

And industrial replication, if I understand your meaning, is far down the development line - for technologies that have been discovered, researched, passed the test of viability, and then developed to the point where they can be used commercially.

Scientists are way back in the discovery and research phases; they don't have the benefit of all that, or the budget. They are doing the unproven and untried.

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#124

Post by wolverine876 »

bryan0 wrote: post #104
wolverine876 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no evidence of fabricated data, afaik. (That's your own fabrication, apparently.)

Here’s some of the evidence of data manipulation: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-res...

Thanks. Clearly there are (or were at the time of the article) serious allegations that it is a possibility.

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#125

Post by wolverine876 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #39
ekianjo wrote: post #34

> This retraction is Tessier-Lavigne’s fourth in as many months, a stunning turn of events for a researcher of his stature. That says a lot about how worthless the whole science journal and peer review process is. At this rate your assumption is that 50% of what is published is complete junk.

That would be a far less scientific, and true, conclusion than what was in the papers. From the article: > Retractions remain exceedingly rare for scientific papers: Just eight out of every 10,000 are retracted, according to a Retraction Watch database.

More data:

> [Elisabeth] Bik later told The [Stanford] Daily in an interview, relying on her experience of investigating more than 20,000 papers for research misconduct and causing nearly 1,000 retractions and roughly the same number of corrections to make that claim.

https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-res...

Let's assume Bik chooses papers to investigate because, to a significant degree, her expert judgment is that they are most likely to have fraud, and Bik may know that topic better than anyone in the world.

Of the 20K most likely candidates, 5% were retracted and 5% corrected, and 90% apparently needed neither (though possibly they were inconclusive or she couldn't convince publications or authors to retract).

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#126

Post by whoiscroberts »

timbit42 wrote: post #118
whoiscroberts wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, even as a lay person I hear other lay people talk about amyloid plaque. It’s scary to know how far into common knowledge misinformation can burrow.

Have you been following politics?

Indeed, same phenomenon plagues that arena as well. The desire of high profile people to be seen as brilliant is strong.

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#127

Post by andrewflnr »

wolverine876 wrote: post #121
andrewflnr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What data do you have to support that? Because I certainly don't get that impression at all, and it doesn't seem like anyone else in this thread does either, so do you have some polling, or maybe NLP analysis of comments? Of course you're entitled to your impressions, but so are the rest of us.

The data is right there at the top of my comment.

You made a claim about an "impression" on HN. You cite data about the actual phenomenon. Interesting.

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#128

Post by kristianp »

pedalpete wrote: post #25

For those not familiar, this is the paper which first proposed the amyliod plaque theory (the original link mentions protiens, but not beta-amyloid or Tau specifically). https://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/what-now-for-the-amyloid-h...

How many years have these false papers set back Alzheimer's research? The amyloid plaque hypothesis has been dominant for a decade-plus while people continue to die from Alzheimer's. Will there be suings or criminal cases as a result of this?

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#129

Post by mike_hearn »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #79
ekianjo wrote: post #34

> This retraction is Tessier-Lavigne’s fourth in as many months, a stunning turn of events for a researcher of his stature. That says a lot about how worthless the whole science journal and peer review process is. At this rate your assumption is that 50% of what is published is complete junk.

Given how difficult it is to know what’s true in some of these fields and what’s fiction, that might be a pretty good rate. I think the bigger question is why is fraud and sloppy work so important? Maybe the incentive structure of academia is the actual problem and the peer review system is an imperfect, but perhaps effective, control? What’s the alternative to peer review?

> Maybe the incentive structure of academia is the actual problem

There are definitely major problems in academic research (the number of retracted papers should be much higher than it is), but it's worth noting that Tessier-Lavigne did the non-reproducible research whilst working at Genentech. One of the strangest parts of this story is how Genentech apparently already knew that the claims didn't replicate, but allowed MTL to publish a paper in Nature about it anyway ... and then went ahead and presented the claims to investors. MTL left soon after Genentech was acquired, and when they concluded years later that the paper was definitely bad they had apparently lost the ability to retract it, even though it had been done by their own employees.

Whilst papers are not much of anything, presenting research to a potential acquirer that you knew wasn't reliable sounds like the basis of potential legal claims. Normally companies are very careful about that because the liability from misleading investors or acquirers can be huge.

Re: Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

#130

Post by mike_hearn »

wolverine876 wrote: post #59
vlovich123 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All a small retraction rate tells us is that it’s very difficult to get a retraction. But as with peer review, whether or not there’s a lot of retractions tells you little about the quality of the unretracted papers. Think about how much attention has to be paid for retractions to happen, how long the work existed without retraction, how difficult it was to get a retraction for outright fraud (ignoring work that itse…

> All a small retraction rate tells us is that it’s very difficult to get a retraction. You're just making the data fit your preconceived beliefs, which would is how we get fraudulant research.

No he isn't, everyone who has ever investigated academic fraud reports that it's extremely difficult to get papers retracted, even when the evidence is blatant and obvious. The extreme difficulty of getting journals to care is, though, exceeded by the difficulty of getting universities to care - most investigators draw the line at just trying to get a retraction because even that is exhausting.

Elizabeth Bik has said:

“Science has a huge problem: 100s (1000s?) of science papers with obvious photoshops that have been reported, but that are all swept under the proverbial rug, with no action or only an author-friendly correction … There are dozens of examples where journals rather accept a clean (better photoshopped?) figure redo than asking the authors for a thorough explanation.”

I wrote an essay about this in 2021. The photo at the start is indicative of the level of problem we're talking about here: you can literally just look at it and notice it's a Photoshopped photo, yet the journal contacted the authors who gave them a transparently nonsensical explanation, fully accepted without question. The people who did the fake research of course suffered no penalties and continued to be employed, most likely their employer never even found out.

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422

The retraction rate in science is small because standards are low, and whenever random outsiders stumble across problems the system closes ranks. Getting even one paper retracted is a giant struggle and succeeding doesn't cause other papers based on the first to be retracted either.

Consider that in psychology papers, basic statistical consistency checks of the numbers in them fail about half the time. Were half of all psychology papers retracted when this fact was discovered? Definitely not.

Also, bear in mind that journals and universities have very narrow criteria for retraction. They care a lot about plagiarism and data forgery, but if the paper is merely filled with nonsense then nobody cares. The DCM paper I call out in the blog post "calculated" that the average Brit lives in a household with 7 other people. This problem was noticed during peer review but never fixed, and the paper has been cited 75 times so far. It would certainly not be retracted if anyone asked.

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