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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

#71

Post by laidoffamazon »

paulcole wrote: post #70
laidoffamazon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but is it not accurate?

Your belief that somebody who got into MIT is “objectively superior” in “basically every dimension” compared to someone who didn’t is one of the cringiest thoughts I’ve seen expressed on HN and that is saying something. I honestly thought (and still hope) that I missed the sarcasm.

I'm not being sarcastic and I don't just mean MIT obviously, any elite school. I didn't get into any and I've met people that have. They're just superior - physically, mentally, in habits, by net worth and income.

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

#72

Post by networkchad »

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…

[dead]

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

#73

Post by labster »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #56
roddylindsay wrote: post #12

Fun fact: Theo Baker, the student journalist for the Stanford Daily who broke (and continues to break) major portions of this Marc Tessier-Lavigne scandal, is the son of Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the NY Times.

Wonder if this is a case of journalism in the blood, or having media connections others don’t have (probably both).

The answer to “is it nature or nurture?” is almost always “both.”

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

#74

Post by bsder »

teh_infallible wrote: post #48
wolverine876 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If retractions are exceedingly rare, it could imply that, once published, fraudulent papers have a tendency to persist.

It's also a recent thing that both wide dissemination and the "reproducibility crisis" have gained momentum.

It has become a LOT easier for non-experts to hunt down fraud as electronic dissemination has widened.

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

#75

Post by defrost »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #71
paulcole wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your belief that somebody who got into MIT is “objectively superior” in “basically every dimension” compared to someone who didn’t is one of the cringiest thoughts I’ve seen expressed on HN and that is saying something. I honestly thought (and still hope) that I missed the sarcasm.

I'm not being sarcastic and I don't just mean MIT obviously, any elite school. I didn't get into any and I've met people that have. They're just superior - physically, mentally, in habits, by net worth and income.

Rich parents does a lot of lifting there.

Stephen Smale scored a Wolf Prize, a Fields Medal, a Sloane Fellowship and a slew of other accolades off the back of mediocre grades at the University of Michigan (a fairly decent public research uni I've heard but not as far as I know an "elite" school).

Looking around there's many a high achiever that missed out on a US Ivy League placing.

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

#76

Post by laidoffamazon »

defrost wrote: post #75
laidoffamazon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not being sarcastic and I don't just mean MIT obviously, any elite school. I didn't get into any and I've met people that have. They're just superior - physically, mentally, in habits, by net worth and income.

Rich parents does a lot of lifting there. Stephen Smale scored a Wolf Prize, a Fields Medal, a Sloane Fellowship and a slew of other accolades off the back of mediocre grades at the University of Michigan (a fairly decent public research uni I've heard but not as far as I know an "elite" school). Looking around there's many a high achiever that missed out on a US Ivy League placing.

Don't know if Smale is a good example to use, since he did this 75 years ago! Back then the CUNY schools had similarly impressive graduates due to quotas at the elite schools. And Michigan is also a public ivy, though I'll concede it's more achievable to get into Michigan compared to Princeton (far more egalitarian in this regard).

I'll be honest, I'm sure there are some high achievers that missed out, but I haven't met a single one. Most very high achieving people I know that didn't go to top schools at least got into one (and usually multiple). I don't think there's any hope for my class of people.

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

#77

Post by bsder »

ekianjo wrote: post #67
wolverine876 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What data do you have to support that?

first, I have a functioning brain that makes it possible for me to imagine that incentives to cheat and the complete lack of replication process makes it easy to push the balance towards publishing fake results. Then, I am well aware that the peer process is not about replication at all and is mostly useless in its current shape. Then people actually tried it which confirmed everything I mentioned: > This certainly d…

> 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 manifests as "give it to grad student so-and-so as he somehow always makes it work even though the rest of you suck"). Unless you actively attempt to replicate an experiment you simply will not trip over this.

This isn't to say that there isn't real fraud--there is. However, even when everybody is fully aboveboard and cooperating, replication is ridiculously hard.

This isn't limited to science. Any company that tries to replicate a manufacturing line trips over this, too. Suddenly, a whole bunch of variables that you didn't even conceive of affect your results.

Go to an injection molding conference and prepare to laugh until you cry over how uncontrolled everything is.

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

#78

Post by andrewflnr »

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.

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

#79

Post by fnordpiglet »

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?

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

#80

Post by arp242 »

jyxent wrote: post #51
wolverine876 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You misunderstand. The issue is that many more papers should be retracted. A paper this major that couldn't be replicated still took another decade to be retracted. There are many more papers that are less cited that will never get looked at in enough detail to discover fraud.

> The issue is that many more papers should be retracted.

The reality is we don't know. Should it be more than 8 out of 10,000? Almost certainly, since quite a lot of papers barely get any attention after publication.

But should the number be 10 out of 10,000? 20 out of 10,000? 100 out of 10,000? We don't know.

And boring papers without any interesting conclusions published just for CV reasons also don't really matter, and the 10,000 figure is also wrong, and we also don't really know what the correct value for that figure is.

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