Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

I actually bought one of the devices and took it apart on video. There is nothing inside except 4 magnets and a plastic printed card. No active circuits and no power source and no components such as resistors or capacitors and certainly there is no microchip inside.

edit below are links to pictures of the device and accompanying text as originally on facebook posted

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Hi Powerinsole I ordered one of your power chip devices and took a detailed look at it. My analyses is as follows. 1. There is no battery and no system for harvesting energy. All electronic circuits require an energy source and a lack of an obvious system for powering the device is a problem. 2. There are no components such as integrated circuits, transistors, capacitors, diodes or inductive devices that would be required to create a "circuit" or "chip". A "chip" is not just a random configuration of tracks. The tracks are there to transfer electricity between components that shape and switch the electric current according to purpose but given that there are no components what are the tracks for? 3. There are 4 magnets. Probably neodymium. They produce a constant magnetic field. They do not generate "frequencies". The device sticks to a metal wall like a fridge magnet and doesn't vibrate. 5. The tracks are configured in such a way that even if components were attached at the "solder points" nothing would happen because the tracks are all shorted together. Electricity always takes the easiest path. If all the tracks are are shorted then the components will receive no energy input. 6. After testing with a multimeter I found that the tracks on the "circuit board" do not conduct electricity. If the tracks do not conduct electricity there is no possibility of transferring energy to components. ( there are no components ) 7. The magnets are isolated from the "tracks" and each other by a plastic layer and glue. It is not clear what the relationship the position of the magnets to the tracks might be. 8. There is no NVRAM, magnetic storage, optical storage, ROMs or other known systems for storing information. So claims from PowerInsole that they load information onto the device is difficult to comprehend. 9. There is no crystal or LC circuit to drive an oscillator. Even if there was there is no battery to drive it and the tracks are all shorted and the tracks do not conduct electricity. Given the above observations I find it difficult to believe that the device can function as advertised. What you essentially have is 4 small magnets on a printed card in a gel cushion for 69 euros. If I am wrong about any of the above I would be happy to have a respectful and open discussion about your technology.

https://scontent-vie1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/163585013_1...

https://scontent-vie1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/163740448_1...

https://scontent-vie1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/164072709_1...

https://scontent-vie1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/164005668_1...

https://scontent-vie1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/164045289_1...

The other risk is that it's an act that can easily be abused. It is very easy to level charges against someone without proof; somehow we tend to believe the first salvo (myself included). In this case it sounds relatively straight-forward, but it really is irresponsible to take a stranger's word for it.

So, if you really care, you might reach out to the OP and get the details. That eliminates the downside risk to the OP and acts as a shibboleth that ensure only people that actually care enough to look into it know the details.

Whether or not that lawsuit has any merit is irrelevant.

With certain exceptions based on subject matter (e.g. SLAPP) or jurisdiction, it still costs money to hire a lawyer to defend against the suit.

Otherwise I'd expect people to leak trade secrets as a series of questions, leak top secret info as a series of questions, etc.

I kinda hope it's the underlying substance, not how you phrase it, that determines this sort of thing :)

That said, if you know the legal situation, demonstrating that you're not afraid of the legal threats is often the way to make them go away.

For security research, if the goal of the legal threat is to prevent you from publishing your results for the first time... publishing the results can significantly reduce the incentive to cause you further trouble because the goal is no longer achievable.

If the author of the most cited paper in a field is going to get all the grants, and a standard "useful" paper is going to get no continued funding - then researchers will push to make their work sensational. Eventually the professors and everyone left in the field is fighting sensational with either outright fraud or alternate funding sources.

Same goes for VC funding of startups, employees at companies, and government programs. The baseline "useful" work is rotting away in favor of aiming to be the top ~5-10%.

There's no doubt groupthink happens in academia on many issues, but the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important. Not just for climate change reasons, but overall human health. For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.

I really reccomend, if you want a level headed, conservative, independent look at the issue that you check out some of these videos by Potholer54, a retired geologist and science reporter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0

Write an article and send it to the papers?

This kind of thing needs to be shamed and punished. While I agree that the institutions can be expected to cover there ass, there must be a course of action.

I do think that modern technology can revamp antiquated systems of peer review and appeals to authority with more robust and deterministic / objective measures of quality - an evolving consensus repository of the sum of human knowledge where each pull request is a debate, each experiment a commit to a branch that may become a new foundation or a footnote. Yet we still see fit to define knowledge as property, ownership as power, power as success. Fear of the impression of weakness, or the threat of starvation and poverty seems to override all other priorities and for the most part, we toe the line.

It is what it is I guess.

Why does _this_ not pose a legal liability?

Um what? It's basic ethical behavior. What has the world come to that someone can defend unethical, unprincipled behavior of a educational institution because "preventing legal and financial liabilities is the #1 priority for institutions ...", with the implication that therefore unethical behavior should be expected?

Institution should have nothing to fear if they've followed due process and shouldn't be in a position of being implicated in dodgy science to begin with!

Admitting your mistakes is a strength, not a weakness. We should not expect other's to self-censor their shortcomings because if we do, we live in a fake world already. I mean, it happens, but whatever happened to honesty, the greater good, long term goals? Your take short sighted, short term benefits which will bite them in the ass eventually in the long run (like a can of worms).

A) Why not?

B) If not, then you can and should expect the people within the institution to implicate it: Everything is a decision, even the decision not to make a decision. For them to not make the decision to become a whistleblower, is for them to make the decision not to become a whistleblower -- i.e, to condone research fraud. If you really, really want to insist that institutions can't be black-balled, then we'll just have to start black-balling the people within them. (If the world starts to do this diligently and systematically, I think you'll rather quickly see a lot of people denouncing this kind of shit at their institutions, probably just as swiftly followed by a developing consensus that maybe you should expect institutions to police themselves.)

The most entertainingly written such blog to my taste is Leonid Schneider's:

https://forbetterscience.com/author/leonidschneider/

Most university administrators can see avoiding coverage like this is a good thing:

https://forbetterscience.com/2020/06/04/michael-hottiger-of-...

https://shop.powerinsole.com/en/blogs/news/doppelblindstudie...

https://uni-salzburg.elsevierpure.com/de/projects/der-einflu...

When I was an economics RA literally half of the econ professors didn't work Fridays and barely worked summers. It was incredible you get paid 150k with that kind of schedule.

This is compounded by publishing negative/null results being disincentivized. Knowing what doesn't work can be as important as knowing what works.

This describe my lab's head perfectly. At first I found strange he was so angry about a side project paper I wrote alone quickly on my free time and asked to publish at a conference. Then I understood why: in his view, every minute I spend on my projects is one I don't spend on his projects. The guy approved my first journal paper submission, which had his name on it without even reading it. It was obvious by the lack of comments and when he asked a few days later during a lab meeting to change half the content of the paper...

I'm not against putting name of people contributing to the research, even slightly and informally, but at this point this is pure leeching and exploitation. Then he wonders why my thesis isn't progressing (hint: because when I chose nothing about the topic, method and experiment setting I'm not really motivated to work on that).

Over time though the last author came to mean "the more senior person" and then "the person whose idea it really is". So being last went from this thing that no one wanted, to this thing that people would kind of argue over. In the process the more manipulative cases, people would kind of casually say "oh I can be last author" realizing the gains from that position.

It seems when a more junior person is doing all the work and is first author, an unscrupulous senior researcher will claim that "it's the idea that counts"; when that senior researcher is first author, it's "ideas are a dime a dozen, it's getting it done that matters."

Part of the reason we have the problem you're mentioning is not that there isn't enough money to go around, it's that universities (at least in the US) now depend on inflated costs to function. The costs of research are kicked down the road to the federal government, and the research itself is seen in terms of profits rather than discovery. So if you have all these universities essentially telling researchers their jobs are on the line if they don't bring in profits, you're going to have everyone scrambling to bring in as much money as they can. It's not just postdocs or untenured research professor lines, it's tenured professors as well, whose income can be brought down below some necessary standard of living, or who can have salaries frozen or resources cut.

I was thinking about this the other morning. I had a grant proposal that the program officer was really excited about. This program of research could probably be conducted for almost nothing because it involved archival data analysis. However if you put a dollar amount on the time, it might realistically actually cost around 250k USD, maybe 500k max, pretty generously in terms of staff effort. However, the university managed to inflate the budget ask to around 2 million for the sole purpose of indirect funds.

When you have that kind of monetary incentive (carrot or stick), of course you're going to have thousands of persons applying for each opportunity. It's what led to the graduate student ponzi scheme, inflated numbers of surplus graduates, etc and so forth.

It all trickles down too, in terms of research claims, p-hacking, etc and so forth.

There's a place for profit, but there's also some realms where it does nothing but corrupt.

Citation needed, first of all, but governments are at minimum accountable to voters. Private money is in no way accountable.

They absolutely are if it helps them promote something. Cigarettes and asbestos industries helped produce plenty of fake safety studies.

The problem is that research has been marketized; you have to "sell" your proposal to get funding, so naturally you big it up as much as possible. And thus the incentive to fake results.

There is also "sponsored" research as others have pointed out, that is more of a bought study that a business hopes they can use for marketing. These have a big conflict.

I agree that government is probably the worst system in most cases. It's the same kind of "picking winners" that doesnt work in corporate funding. I'm from Canada where our tech industry basically runs on subsidies, and very little escapes the bubble of trying to get more government funding and actually becomes self sustaining.

Personally, I have seen there is a legit appetite for corporate funded research that advances the company's goals. As an academic, I would rather seek out companies for funding, knowing that I'm working in something that someone wants, and not trying to optimize for government priorities. I'm coming at this from a hard science perspective. I imagine the dynamics are very different for drug trials or other efficacy type studies, which are maybe more relevant to this discussion.

The fact that it's not out in the open is somewhat complicated. You're perhaps right that it would lead to better outcomes, but it's also important that researchers feel free to speak openly.

outside of your field how much of the BS papers can you catch? I know enough about computers that I could probably figure out at least some of it in that field (after spending 10x longer than someone who actually reads papers regularly), but give me a paper in something else and I'm not so sure.

There's also no way to really know if the researcher entirely left out 10 other tests they tried that failed. Sometimes you can guess that it's a stretch because of the stupid categories they use (I'm reminded of those ESPN graphics that say things like "most home runs on a rainy Tuesday in June"). But it's harder to detect if someone straight up removes data points, repeats tests and reports only the nicest, etc.

So at some point you basically need to be an insider in the field so you hear the gossip about what doesn't replicate. Or if you have access to thousands of dollars to blow you could try a dozen different variations to try getting it to replicate yourself.

I think for something like COVID that is actively affecting many people, there should be funding explicitly for replicating studies, and some slots reserved in a prestigious journal for the findings of the replications. I get that it is not feasible to be replicating everything in science, but I don't see why we can't have ~one lab per relevant university department that specializes in replicating important studies. If you make that a path towards becoming a tenured prof I think that could change the culture surrounding replication studies in general.

A fun one that circulated for awhile when the vaccines were first launching was "all vaccines are the same". They are decidedly not, and I don't think people are as stupid as that kind of messaging implies. It was weirdly taboo to say that you'd prefer a particular vaccine, even once we got to the point that there was enough stock to choose. It's true the clinical trial efficacy numbers shouldn't be literally compared to one another, but that doesn't mean we should pretend the vaccines are actually the same either. Somebody deciding to drive an extra hour so they can get an mRNA vaccine is not anti-science lmao.

We need good politicians to negotiate a consensus on how we move forward in light of human desires and modern thinking about cause and effect. Pretending that "science" provides us with a way forward is abusing science for something it is not designed to do nor capable of doing.

Another COVID-related example is masks. At one point early in the pandemic there was messaging that masks were not useful in preventing the spread of COVID in the general public. There were supply chain reasons that probably motivated that message, but I also know virology PhD students that were insistent it was the truth, with papers in hand. At the time there were also papers to suggest the opposite, so one could have a healthy debate on the subject - but at the end of the day I gave my grandparents a small box of masks, because wearing a mask is so low effort I don't see why you wouldn't unless you are truly extremely certain that it's useless.

Be a rock. This doesn't mean be hard-headed and unpersuadable, but it also means not being lead around by statistics and citations and "studies". Know who you are, trust your instincts, and do what is right for you.

The fact is, unless you're actually the scientist doing the science, almost all the papers and publishing and Science The Meme! that happens and is constantly and endlessly touted, has zero bearing on your own personal life. Ignore it all.

In particular, when it comes to health science, you can literally ignore every little bit of it--none of that garbage gets in front of a wide audience unless it's got some profit for some concern at the other end. Know how to feed yourself and stay fit and healthy. Sure, you could use the NYTimes to determine whether a pescetarian diet is superior to a carnivore diet, or whether you should be eating highly-processed factory-produced fake meat and in what quantities, or you could just use your own common sense and your own body to do your own individual science--try carnivorous eating for a month, then vegan, see how you feel.

Be confident and ever-increasingly capable. Become more dangerous every day. Have an anchor that's ties your core values to who you are, however you define that, and let the rest of the masses get socially engineered into believing whatever the hell they want.

Actually it is not the science that is causing this issue. But research in various forms is.

Trusting science is fundamentally different from trusting "scientists".

Trusting science is essentially trusting nature to behave in a regular fashion. But trusting research, done and proclaimed by a bunch of humans is well, trusting human beings. Nothing could be more fundamentally different.

I think adding a "repeatability factor" to researches could help. So if anyone on the planet can replicate a research method, it should have a repeatability factor value of 1. If only a single entity can replicate it, then it should have a value of 0. If some entities can validate it, then it should have a value somewhere in between.

This does not mean that research that have low RF cannot be applied widely. It just that it will have to do additional work to gain the trust of the people.

It only follows common sense that trust in something cannot be mandated. So, measures that are based on low RF value research should NEVER be mandated. No matter what that cost.

And thus I think this can save the corruption and manipulation in the name of science.

Plus ça change...

Science as a word doesn’t typically denote “the scientific method”. It usually means the body of knowledge and the collective of institutions that claim to practice the method.

The bad studies may not be fundamental to some abstract ideal of what science could be, but they seem pretty fundamental to humans doing science in the real world.

They're in on it. Without material the journals have nothing to publish. So their inclination is to accept and publish with as little friction as possible.

Publish or Die. Remember? That applies to the whole supply chain, not just poor put upon individual researchers.

A nice demo of this effect is DNA matching in criminology. Although DNA matching of suspects to DNA samples can be insanely accurate, in practice it is limited by the incidence of monozygotic (identical) twins, which is about 3 in 1,000. You cannot be more certain than this that you got a match, essentially.

I think you're making the classic Prosecutor's fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy. In my experience, smaller p-value tends to be more of a measure of sample size than anything else, or an overly restrictive null distribution that is almost certain to be rejected.

This example is a gnome-wide genetic association study. Every genetic variations are tested, so at least 500K or more linear regressions were performed. This many statistical tests could lead to many false positives just by chance, so one must do multiple-testing corrections. The end result of multiple-testing correction is much bigger and therefore worse p-values. Hence the drive toward ridiculously tiny p-values.

There are also serious problems with appointing fact checkers as impartial arbiters of objective truths. It is an untenable scheme. A naked appeal to authoritarianism.

Elected politicians are representatives of their people. If people are voting on politicians complicit with institutions, private or public, engaged in this behavior, then it's an example of this issue.

Trump has shown us how frighteningly little of American democracy is kept together by anything more than decorum. If politicians remain popular while being shameless, there isn't much your democracy can do to protect itself.

I can say that the same (rapid institutional degradation) is happening in Brazil, the country I grew up in. In 2016 an elected president was removed from power based on a campaign of disinformation that started before the election (but failed to prevent her re-election) that ended in accusations of unlawful accounting maneuvers that, in the end (well after the impeachment), were considered legal by a court. The disinformation campaign continues and was responsible for the election of a cartoon fascist that is still supported by a third of the population. Newspapers report 3 to 5 lies every day. Last one is recommending a chemical castration drug as a COVID treatment.

We need institutions that more robustly defend ourselves from disinformation campaigns.

> "My impression of WHO is that I feel sorry for being caught in a dilemma. Until now, I have only seen bright light in my life as a researcher. But this time, I learned for the first time after reading this article that shadows also exist in the world... Ivermectin is no longer a scientific issue, but a political issue." --Satoshi Omura

It seems like big tech's misinformation crusade is biting us and science in the ass.

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33495752/

[1]: https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/of...

[2]: https://twitter.com/michaelcapuzzo/status/141062676916673331...

[3]: https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/92c85ad9476f56a6fc51daec56...

So options are being weighed.

The "immoralizer" must not be "promise of profit" (unless you are a total lizard) but rather freedom from anxiety, promise of safety.

Rigorous testing is all well and good, but we do know how many errors crop up in scientific papers, right? A lot.

The gold standard of testing is double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled studies and this is only done sometimes for vaccines, as far as I aware.

I believe there are certain circumstances such as no safe and effective already existing vaccine, or where there's a certain kind of benefit to the injected population, where vaccines are generally allowed to go through this double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled studies (the gold standard of testing) and certain circumstances where they do not go through such rigorous testing.

I believe this ethic stems from Jonas Salk's decision during the development of the Polio vaccine where the ethical call was made to not do double-blind, placebo controlled testing due to the desire to prevent damage to human lives that could be prevented by not using a placebo.

I invite fact-checking on everything stated.

It feels like we currently have both at the same time. There is "low trust" in any data that doesn't confirm an existing bias, but "high trust" in the data we want to be true.

I see it all the time in HN comments. Any study that contradicts the consensus is met with comments about "correlation =/= causation", while anything that supports the census is supported and correlation/causation isn't mentioned.

If you've got scientists that believe that the standard of honesty is an artificially constructed power structure then obviously you can't trust them.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Soviet_Union_an...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...