Exactly. What brain block is preventing people from understanding this?
The paper made firm, overbroad claims not backed by evidence, and in private communications the authors themselves said they found the conclusions unpersuasive.
> I think Nate would say that the problem is that the paper literally said that such a scenario was "implausible" while the authors believed the opposite.
Please show me the evidence that the authors believe the opposite when they wrote the paper.
I'm not convinced there’s a villain among the PO authors, but just a series of cock-ups and poor decisions, aligned with, and fuelled by, bad incentives, eventually engulfing everyone in its wake.
It remains an embarrassing institutional failure, however we look at it.
I disagree with those who try to rationalise their content and pretend that the authors changed their mind as they followed the science (sigh).
There was never any new real evidence that could have triggered a change of opinion in that time period, anyway.
The charge that the final version of Proximal Origins in Nature Medicine does not accurately reflect the PO authors’ doubts expressed in private feels fair to me.
This whole conspiracy theory relies on selective omission of context from the messages (I refuse to believe that Silver, Chan and co. are doing it out of incompetence). And of course nobody actually checks a 140 page source document. This also explains why no serious journalist has picked up the story. They do actually read sources.