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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Certain drugs now, specifically hydroxycholorquin, ivermectin, and the vaccines, now have teams. One negative effect of this is that researchers are highly disincentivized from researching them once they have been picked up by a team, given the consequences of publishing results one team or the other doesn't like. The net effect is not just the manifested stuff like that in the article, but more importantly a chilling effect where only researchers who have an axe to grind take on the subject, resulting in bias and a feedback loop where distrust grows and polarization around the drug's efficacy continues.

It'd be fascinating if it wasn't so depressing.

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As an ex-scientist, I’m sad to say this is true of most research. It starts in grad school- your research is most likely going to advance an agenda set by your professor. Then when you apply for a post-doc your network consists of collaborators who think like your professor and are more familiar with your work. Same thing with applying for a tenure-track position. In my sub-field I could tell what line of thought a paper was going to advance just by reading the list of schools that the authors came from.

The idea of the pioneering research who establishes a reputation through novel work and rigorous experiments is mostly a myth. You advance when your peers like your work, which creates all the wrong incentives.

That's the thing when people say "Trust the science." Yes, the scientific method is absolutely the best way to advance human knowledge. However, like any process mediated by humans its administration is fallible.

When I say "trust the science" I mean that almost nobody but the actual scientists has a chance to provide actual counter arguments, so unless you hold a PhD in the field, you better believe the majority opinion. Generally people who don't "trust the science" get their information from social media, not by studying the actual papers and finding flaws.

I'm sure you are right, but it would seem to me that those agendas are usually so much insider baseball that it doesn't really harm the public.

Usually isn't much good if you let something like thalidomide slip through.

The less than stellar public policies that have come to us as a result of circle jerks within the fields of sociology and criminal justice (and others) are probably better examples.

Better but less obvious.

You speak of "teams" in a way that implies there are two sides equally unbased, equally mindlessly driven just by team mentality. In this misguided rhetoric, you equate all the scientists driven by data at one side, with the snake oil salesmen driven by whatever on the other; as if both sides were equally wrong for defending their position. The thing is, when we didn't know if those drugs worked or not, all scientists were jumping at the chance of studding them, after all, there is a lot of clout to be have by finding a cure, there were no teams. But after the results came out and certain drugs have shown to not have a significant effect, then the serious scientists moved own (or wanted to move on), but formation of the "team snake oil" to go against the data means that scientists have to keep repeating themselves debunking things that we already know don't work.

As they used to say in the USSR: "Our brave scouts thwarted cowardly enemy spies". If you were on the other team then your designation of "data driven scientists" and "snake oil salesmen" had been opposite and you would be as sure in your point of view as you are now.

Not as depressing, as this thread being currently flagged on HN...

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