Two decades of Alzheimer’s research was based on deliberate fraud

Given everything we know about how research funding has been captured and shaky ethics in particular domains, skepticism is warranted, not disrespectful.

It's not disrespectful to point out conflicts of interest. Recusing yourself is standard practice for good reason.

lol

Based on the way that string theory keeps on going like a zombie in physics, I don't think its disrespectful at all to consider allegations that are pretty much indistinguishable from those. Although I think that heavily entrenched groupthink and biases are all that is required. I don't think they're consciously think that "I need to lie in order to keep the research grants flowing" but its instead that old adage that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". To an external observer those are largely indistinguishable and have the same effect, but in the latter case the person has convinced themselves of the lie or the half-truth via financially inclined self-deception.

And the people who want a change in direction have an interest in calling out any of that sort of thing that may be happening. So if it is, I hope to see it called out in a scientifically substantial way.

> basically all images in scientific publications are not scrutinized for photoshop

This was (mostly) true back then, but it is definitely not true today. People tempted to commit fraud now have to be worried about people like Elisabeth Bik exposing them and ruining their careers. In my experience, the type of people known lie in papers overlap strongly with those that are career-minded/money-driven. So having a few journalists with the skills to detect fraud is an obvious win. Some of the frauds will just get better at, that's just how it does, but it's not like there are no imaging experts in the field.

That's not really the problem. There are many ways to fake papers and there's no guarantee that a Photoshopped image is detectable just by looking at it.

The problem is that somehow researchers managed to get hundreds of millions of dollars, entire labs, and 15+ years of research on the back of a study that presumably nobody ever tried to replicate, nor did they notice that the claims weren't true even when building new research on top of it. That's the problem and it is frankly very hard to understand how it's possible.

You have a better idea to contribute ?

Maybe that is the business case ? Making science accessable and in return get ppl that care or help with funding ?

Neither solutions are perfect as most things in life, I guess the question is, will it be better enough compared to what we have now ?

Minor spelling point, it's "lay people" not "lee people".

Yes, economic systems are completely binary. Just like political ones. Either everybody votes on everything or absolute monarchy. Wait...

There's a cogent argument to be made that under capitalism, once market saturation is reached, any further excess wealth (and capitalism creates lots of that!) is redirected to zero-sum competition (which is, on a societal level, waste).

I don't think capitalism corrupts everything it touches - but I'm pretty sure it corrupts saturated markets, and these days that's an awful lot of things.

I think it's fair to blame this one on capitalism-like structures without implying that the way to solve this is communism.

Clearly institutional competition for grant money has increased and changed what it means to be a successful researcher. Incentives are displacing virtues. But it's hard to find incentives, especially financial ones, that are fully aligned with honest research. Maybe we are trying too hard to find those.

You can decry Western Capitalism without lauding dictatorship with a communist twist.

Some people latch onto whatever they can to gain power to exploit people.

Using failed dictatorships to prove 'communism is worse than capitalism' (which in the West we heavily curtail, but only to the point where we avoid uprisings against those holding power) is exactly the sort of shallow, illogical thinking you seem to rail against.

Communism fails because it doesn't account for human greed; it assumes everyone is onboard with improving society. Capitalism succeeds inasmuch as it panders to human greed to the point of evil and ignores the vast majority whom it fails.

Mind you, anarcho-syndicalism is where it's at, you can expect to wield supreme executive power just because some water tart gives you a sword ... /montypython

I'm curious, do you have a counterpart to "capital" and "property" in your analogy?

I think capitalism facilitates specialization - and that quite effectively at scale. Specialization can occur without capitalism, too. There are other systems to coordinate specialists.

Black Plague was natural too. That’s no defense of it.

What you wrote is consistent with the comment you replied to

Just because capitalism has generated good things doesn’t mean it’s perfect. We need to acknowledge the damage it’s causing and think of ways to move beyond it.

Unless you want this to be the way things are for the rest of humanity.

You got the first two right, and the second two completely wrong.

It takes a lot of life experience for someone with integrity to find out that other people are simple dopamine hunting monkeys who will flip flop to whatever social pressure is being applied at that present moment. We assume that others are like ourselves.

And so the very people who are supposed to call out and fight the irrationality are actually blind to it. You do get people calling out the irrationality, but mostly they are driven by social incentives rather than duty and so they turn their eyes away from realms that are deemed pure. They have no incentive to look inwards to the scientific institutions because that way they lose the social esteem they gain from association with the scientific establishment.

If it really doesn't matter which vaccine, is this a case of stirring up the immune system to get rid of anything the immune system recognizes as different? There are articles showing ivermectin helps shrink melanomas too. The leading hypothesis was that the immune system once woken does its thing. It does concern me that once woken it might also take offense to my pancreas or thyroid or gluten or...

Wow. That's impressive.

Though the effect is from "antiherpetic medication", not vaccines.

Eh, we know diabetes is often reversible with careful diet and there's plenty of amyloid deposits in that disease.

Evidence is mounting that amyloid is the downstream result of whatever actually causes these diseases.

I think any parent or manager also knows this…

By "investor" I was thinking of people who risk their own money.

Machine learning

Social sciences have a reproducibility problem and is littered with fraudulent data. Of course most of it isn’t really science but they (social scientists, politicians, activists) that rely on it to justify applications of power insist it is. Because otherwise it’s just anecdotal, which it mainly is.

“Sokal Squared” is a great example of the problems in the field.

For one person, a small amount of money is life changing motivation.

This generalization would occur in any occupation and probably doesn't. There should be consequences except many in thread now cast doubt on the whole of "science"

A list of resources for you to read up on this is below.

But: science isn't really self correcting. Someone has to step up and fight to correct it, every single time. Spend some time learning about this problem - as I have - and you will find the overriding attitude is one of despair. Science isn't self correcting, it's arguably self corrupting:

1. There's no incentive to pick fights with colleagues so it almost never happens

2. Even when someone does pick that fight the institutions go to ground and defend their people, so there's no outcome.

3. The first response of journals and universities on being informed of fraud is to turn around and tell the fraudster everything, so there's no way to keep fraud detection techniques secret.

4. And usually after that they ask the fraudster to submit a "correction" (i.e. higher quality fake). The idea that you should maybe NOT let a fraudster have a second try once caught, does not seem to occur to the brightest of sparks that run our scientific institutions. There are actually cases where this has happened and then the original complainants spotted that the newly submitted correction was also fraudulent.

How do these papers get spotted? Spend time on PubPeer. It's a site where people compare notes on dodgy papers and how they're being detected. Also read the blogs of people like Elizabeth Bik, Smut Clyde, read the old blog posts by Joe Hilgard when he was still in academia, follow https://twitter.com/steamtraen

tl;dr There's a range of techniques used for different fields, often by looking for re-used images or data across papers that shouldn't be re-using them, or by spotting internal inconsistencies in reported data tables.

Probably the best proxy for quality is popularity that endures for centuries since we can’t measure quality directly. Either way, if there’s a max of one paper per year, scientists will be trying for the most impactful work.

> We'd probably need a whole new degree that's like a PhD, but whose dissertation isn't a novel extension of the field, but reproduction of other studies.

I don't think that would work - those positions would go empty. People apply for grad school because they want to do original research. On the other hand, once people are already in the academic pipeline and they run into struggles advancing from postdoc to assistant prof or maintaining funding as an assistant prof, I think a lot of people would take a 50/50 grant if lets them keep one foot in the door for original research. They aren't going to turn their noses up at the only grants they are competitive for.

You do raise a good point that labs with 50/50 grants wouldn't have as good of a value proposition for prospective grad students as labs doing 100% original research. I'm not sure what the solution is there.

similar to the field of dreams but motivated by money instead of altruism

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

What is the source for your belief? Something unscientific perhaps?

P less than 0.0005 isn't much better because if that's the criteria then you still have to accept that psychic phenomena have been demonstrated in the lab.

The methodology is deeply flawed, given that you haven't stopped accidental p-hacking (publication bias) and deliberate p-hacking (researcher data mining, e.g adding endpoints after looking at results), which compounds to create fake results with astronomically tiny p-values.

You can only trust single, extremely large, canonical RCTs which were announced in advance, and in which you are confident there is no survivorship bias in terms of the possibility that this RCT would have been cancelled had the results been thought to be negative halfway through.

Epidemiology (victim of researcher p-hacking and impossible to deal with confounders) or meta-analysis of RCTs or single small RCTs or RCTs that weren't announced in advance (victim of publication bias) should be taken with a grain of salt. If you accept conclusions drawn from these things at face value, be prepared to accept anything, because the methodology you've accepted is proven to be easily capable of demonstrating any fake phenomenon as true.

This is assuming your experiment was designed to test your hypothesis and that you model your null hypothesis properly. A p value means nothing anyway until you have both of these. Add to that the fact that many wrongly consider that a high p value disproves the original hypothesis.

I agree but It’s weird that now Math is being politicized in California then. No limits to activists I guess

Mathematical proofs can be wrong. People do make mistakes. But yes I think it’s less likely there is a mistake in a (reasonably) self-contained line of logical reasoning than a statistical study which has so many potential sources of both nefarious and accidental issues.

And being anti-science is used by the political right to allow them to make claims without evidence. Once they have reduced trust in science enough by amplifying what might be a small percentage of problems they'll be able to justify any action and if the research shows otherwise they'll just call them "elite liberal east coast ivy league etc..." to dismiss it.

Why do you think that is? (Serious question). My understanding in life science research is that as a rule, papers do not get reproduced, as there is limited benefit to the researcher. Why is the same not true in physics? What is so seriously flawed about life science research that is not flawed about physics?

There's limited value in reproducing a theoretical result. That doesn't tell us if it's actually a valid model of the world. You can "reproduce" the results of string theory all day long, but nobody know if that's how things actually work. It's entirely possible that 100% of the papers in that sub-field are wrong even if the math checks out.

Which would also imply a total lack of funding for counter-narrative research.

Is rocket science possible sans science? Can you be more specific what engineering without dependency on any science is? Like how do you even approach inventing gps as an engineer if 80% of physics calculations don’t actually work for example?

Where do you think engineers get their equations?

Do you also consider stuff like physics and chemistry engineering and not science? Otherwise I’m not sure how you’d achieve anything as an engineer if 80% of your scientific understanding of how your materials work were wrong, for example.

What about Starlink?

I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to describe GPS as “socialist”. It was a military project. There’s a long list of military projects with more funding than GPS that have been invented and implemented since then.

I’ve never seen KPIs in academics, is that a thing now? I’ve seen KPIs in tech companies who like to model Google.

There is a lot of funding going to universities, and a lot going to specific projects. I think maybe the main model for research funding generally is that funding doesn’t just appear, people have to go ask for it in the form of a grant proposal. Those grants typically once granted go 40% to the university anyway. Universities, for their part, have been absorbing money for larger and more expensive administrations for the last 30-40 years, and it’s out of hand. Most people I know practicing science feel the opposite of what you said - that less funding should go to the university and more directly toward funding research.

So that we can reinstate the old order of eminence-based science? I think the funding system should be rather be more anonymous, more global, more detached from local elites ... like universities, organization close to government/administration etc.

You mustn't forget that universities are only one player of many in the science system. And the main task of some universities rather is education and not research.

> how can you argue with “the science”?

Yeah, totally agreed. It doesn’t even make sense to suggest that testing to check whether things work or not is the wrong process. The scientific method is tautologically true, right? This is one of the reasons I cringe at the yard signs in my neighborhood that declare “science is real”, as if it needed an affirmation. Somehow that seems to give more credibility to the idea that science might not be real, whatever that means. Of course science is real. We don’t have modern houses or cars or computers without, sillies.

You’re conflating science and politics and business. Science isn’t firing people, companies are. The science is right, the vaccines are relatively safe and effective. People whine about the mandatory actions, sometimes with good reason, and we could probably handle this better, but ultimately why should you be allowed to spread a disease at work that has an unfortunately high probability of killing people (or even of just causing someone else to be out sick for a week or two)?

The US currently somewhat operates on the principle that companies are allowed to make and enforce their own rules, as long as they’re legal. And there’s a long list of things you must do if you don’t want to get fired, including work forty hours a week, and not be a jerk to your co-workers. Do you think companies should not be allowed to fire people who choose to do things that can hurt the company’s bottom line? Do you want the government to monitor businesses more than it does today?

Science funding is complicated and political, but the high level summary of the situation is that the public funds science right now because that’s what the public wants, because a good chunk of society understands that doing science has proven to be a great investment. It would be a bummer if the public decided not to fund science or education, that sounds like the fastest way for the US to become irrelevant globally.

Anyway, what is the alternative to doing science? Do you like your computer/car/cell phone? Do you want to see technological progress stop? Can you name a better approach to seeking truth than the scientific method? What has ever proven to be more effective than science?

I didn’t suggest people should be manipulated, you ignored my qualifying clause in order to interpret what I said negatively. What I said is that trust is required in order to fix the funding problem. Our funding process by and large does not fund things that have no public support. I did not say or even imply that we should attempt to manufacture trust. If anything, the whole problem is that right now the distrust is being actively manufactured, and we need to stop that.

I agree completely we should fix the problems, and I have no problem openly discussing what those problems are. In order to do that there needs to be hope that fixing the problems is a viable and likely-to-succeed activity. Summarizing all of science activity as broken is neither accurate nor helpful in terms of fixing the problems, right? That really is a framing problem because it is not broadly true, the parent poster implied that the practice of science is the problem, when it isn’t the problem. The problem is that people are involved, and science is actually one of the least problematic things we do. It’s incorrect to call out science as broken without comparing it to all other fields.

If everyone is convinced that science is a complete and total waste, and people are opposed to spending tax money to fund it, we will not be able to fix the existing problems. If we believe something about science specifically is broken, and not with the rest of the world, then we will come to the wrong conclusion about what is broken and be unable to fix the existing problems.