Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president | Hacker News Reader

Blockbuster Alzheimer's paper retracted by former Stanford president

stanforddaily.com

73 pointsrencrisa136 comments

For those not familiar, this is the paper which first proposed the amyliod plaque theory (the original link mentions protiens, but not beta-amyloid or Tau specifically).

https://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/what-now-for-the-amyloid-h...

Wow, even as a lay person I hear other lay people talk about amyloid plaque. It’s scary to know how far into common knowledge misinformation can burrow.

Have you been following politics?

Indeed, same phenomenon plagues that arena as well. The desire of high profile people to be seen as brilliant is strong.

How many years have these false papers set back Alzheimer's research? The amyloid plaque hypothesis has been dominant for a decade-plus while people continue to die from Alzheimer's. Will there be suings or criminal cases as a result of this?

> 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.

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.

Yes, it could imply lots of things. To focus on only that possible implication shows a bias; to focus on any possible implication without data shows a disinterest in actual science.

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.

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.

You're just making up results, sans data. Your paper won't even pass peer review - on HN.

And you downplay evidence of fraud. You mentioned studies where 1/3 to 1/2 of reviewed papers are found to not be replicable and say they get similar but weaker results. This is evidence of p-hacking or data manipulation. You should expect far less papers to not be replicable given proper statistics.

First: your arguments, even if I accept them as-is, do not constitute evidence of fraud, but of a systemic problem. Second: your argumentation raises the question: what are reasons for retraction?

Shoddy science is (currently) not a reason for retraction. So just because a paper's results aren't replicable doesn't mean it should be retracted. Deliberate falsification is. But you'd need to distinguish those from not-perfect science.

Last, a sanity check: your comment implies/suggests that 1/3 to 1/2 of published science is fraudulent because it's not replicable. But fraudsters might accidentally hit upon the truth - at least sometimes. Moreover, plenty of research answers a binary question (yes/no, which of the two has a greater effect, etc). For those research questions, just guessing the answer gives you a50% chance of being right.

All of that implies that, following your logic, a huge portion of published research is based on fraudulent practices - not mistakes, but deliberately falsified contents. Add to that the "meta-fraud" (playing with authorship, citations), and one has to wonder if every second scientist on the planet is cheating and faking everything they publish.

To me, that is an obvious sign that the reasoning went off rails somewhere - much like the result of a sine function being outside of [-1, 1]. So no, you shouldn't expect 1/3 to 1/2 of all published research to require retraction.

> 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.

It's going to be really field dependent. Computer science has fewer problems than social psychology for example.

To put a figure on it, consider that about 0.04% of papers are retracted but about 2.5% of scientists admit in polls to having engaged in fraud. Obviously though most fraudsters won't admit to it (they often convince themselves it's not fraud via mental gymnastics), so another way to approach it is to ask them to estimate what proportion of other scientists commit fraud. Then they answer 10%.

It's a bit hard to know how many papers are published per year, I've seen estimates of anywhere from 2 to 5 million. If 10% of scientists are committing fraud and they were all detected, that would yield on the order of maybe half a million to a million retractions per year, as we'd expect fraudulent scientists to be much more productive than the ones that play fair.

But fraud isn't the only reason that papers should be retracted. You'd expect serious non-fraud problems to be a reason too. If papers were retracted for all the reasons non-scientists imagine papers are retracted, e.g. being foundationally based on another paper/dataset that's been retracted, using invalid methodologies, internally inconsistent statistics, serious software bugs etc, you could probably get up to 50% or more in some fields.

This sounds absurdly high but is the number estimated by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. And according to Marc Andreessen, when he asked if it could be true that half of all biotech research was fake the head of a major US funding agency actually laughed at this figure and said no, in biotech it's more like maybe 90% is fake. So the problem does seem to be huge.

All a small retraction rate tells us is that it’s very difficult to get a retraction. But as with peer review, whether or not there’s a lot of retractions tells you little about the quality of the unretracted papers.

Think about how much attention has to be paid for retractions to happen, how long the work existed without retraction, how difficult it was to get a retraction for outright fraud (ignoring work that itself was poor quality). This maybe says more about the incentives against retraction which then explains the low retraction counts better than whether or not the remaining papers are good. After all, the papers that have been retracted are high citation count papers that are foundational for certain avenues of research (this one for Alzheimer’s, the other famous fraudulent work about honesty pledges, etc). What does this say about all the papers that then cite these papers as work they’re basing theirs off of. What about the papers that then “agree” with papers that turn out to be completely fraudulent?

> All a small retraction rate tells us is that it’s very difficult to get a retraction.

You're just making the data fit your preconceived beliefs, which would is how we get fraudulant research.

> making the data fit

What? this is literally what happened (someone pushing hard to challenge the results) for these 4 retractions related to this guy's work. You don't get a retraction just by posting a comment on HN or something.

I don’t think that’s correct. I’m saying that the retraction rate tells us nothing either way and highlighting why a low retraction rate could exist even in the face of massive problems using actual facts that are not in question as examples to illustrate that point.

You’re the one making definitive statements of a position and then claiming the data backs up your position and then arguing with anyone who posits that your interpretation of the data may be flawed.

No he isn't, everyone who has ever investigated academic fraud reports that it's extremely difficult to get papers retracted, even when the evidence is blatant and obvious. The extreme difficulty of getting journals to care is, though, exceeded by the difficulty of getting universities to care - most investigators draw the line at just trying to get a retraction because even that is exhausting.

Elizabeth Bik has said:

“Science has a huge problem: 100s (1000s?) of science papers with obvious photoshops that have been reported, but that are all swept under the proverbial rug, with no action or only an author-friendly correction … There are dozens of examples where journals rather accept a clean (better photoshopped?) figure redo than asking the authors for a thorough explanation.”

I wrote an essay about this in 2021. The photo at the start is indicative of the level of problem we're talking about here: you can literally just look at it and notice it's a Photoshopped photo, yet the journal contacted the authors who gave them a transparently nonsensical explanation, fully accepted without question. The people who did the fake research of course suffered no penalties and continued to be employed, most likely their employer never even found out.

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422

The retraction rate in science is small because standards are low, and whenever random outsiders stumble across problems the system closes ranks. Getting even one paper retracted is a giant struggle and succeeding doesn't cause other papers based on the first to be retracted either.

Consider that in psychology papers, basic statistical consistency checks of the numbers in them fail about half the time. Were half of all psychology papers retracted when this fact was discovered? Definitely not.

Also, bear in mind that journals and universities have very narrow criteria for retraction. They care a lot about plagiarism and data forgery, but if the paper is merely filled with nonsense then nobody cares. The DCM paper I call out in the blog post "calculated" that the average Brit lives in a household with 7 other people. This problem was noticed during peer review but never fixed, and the paper has been cited 75 times so far. It would certainly not be retracted if anyone asked.

Erm...

> Retractions remain exceedingly rare for scientific papers

This retraction actually happened because someone BOTHERED to check the results and push for hard questions.

You can bet that this does not happen for every publication... So...

More data:

> [Elisabeth] Bik later told The [Stanford] Daily in an interview, relying on her experience of investigating more than 20,000 papers for research misconduct and causing nearly 1,000 retractions and roughly the same number of corrections to make that claim.

https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-res...

Let's assume Bik chooses papers to investigate because, to a significant degree, her expert judgment is that they are most likely to have fraud, and Bik may know that topic better than anyone in the world.

Of the 20K most likely candidates, 5% were retracted and 5% corrected, and 90% apparently needed neither (though possibly they were inconclusive or she couldn't convince publications or authors to retract).

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?

> Maybe the incentive structure of academia is the actual problem

it's fairly clear that it is the case. You are rewarded with tenure for pushing lots of papers, regardless of their validity, since nobody actually cares about replicating anything.

> peer review system is an imperfect, but perhaps effective

The peer review system is just about checking points of details or calculation in a study, they never bother to actually check if the original results are valid. It's a mostly useless process that does nothing but remove the most obvious problems in the writing stage.

> the alternative

just like we did for hundreds of years now, proper replication baked in, by different people in different places, following the exact same conditions or protocol.

Some (many) experiments the replication is difficult it exceptionally expensive. Particularly for experiments with large exotic equipment, huge populations, etc. But certainly replication should be incentivized - sadly I think even then it’ll be largely a secondary behavior.

> Maybe the incentive structure of academia is the actual problem

There are definitely major problems in academic research (the number of retracted papers should be much higher than it is), but it's worth noting that Tessier-Lavigne did the non-reproducible research whilst working at Genentech. One of the strangest parts of this story is how Genentech apparently already knew that the claims didn't replicate, but allowed MTL to publish a paper in Nature about it anyway ... and then went ahead and presented the claims to investors. MTL left soon after Genentech was acquired, and when they concluded years later that the paper was definitely bad they had apparently lost the ability to retract it, even though it had been done by their own employees.

Whilst papers are not much of anything, presenting research to a potential acquirer that you knew wasn't reliable sounds like the basis of potential legal claims. Normally companies are very careful about that because the liability from misleading investors or acquirers can be huge.

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.

And his mom is Susan Glasser, who was assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, the founding editor of Politico Magazine, and a global affairs analyst for CNN.

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.”

Good point, I too have came to the same conclusion after observing both parties around me.

A case of science progressing just slightly faster than by-the-funeral.

> Retractions remain exceedingly rare for scientific papers: Just eight out of every 10,000 are retracted, according to a Retraction Watch database.

This to me is a crucial statistic. Is this number much less than it should be? Or are many more papers dubious in their methodology?

What's the rejection rate? Maybe it's low because peer review tends to block them from being published

The replication crisis and data colada showed there's tons of dubious science. About half of papers results don't hold up to replication.

About 1/2 (1/3?) of papers in a specific field, when replicated, produced similar results but less strong statistical measures of them.

It's fun to hear people complain about accuracy in this way.

Add this point from the article for context: "This retraction is Tessier-Lavigne’s fourth in as many months, a stunning turn of events for a researcher of his stature."

That begs the question, how did at least four such cutting-edge research works with fabricated data and results go through the review process unscathed?

You just discovered that the peer review process is a big farce. Well done.

There's no evidence of fabricated data, afaik. (That's your own fabrication, apparently.)

Here’s some of the evidence of data manipulation: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-res...

Thanks. Clearly there are (or were at the time of the article) serious allegations that it is a possibility.

> Is this number much less than it should be?

Maybe it's more than it should be, or just about right.

If we are just going to assume our biased preconceived notion is correct and the conflicting data is wrong, why have data? But if we use that method, what is the likelihood that our claim will eventually be retracted?

Since most stuff is never replicated it should be much higher than that.

Still a good place to study, though.

I think it would be beneficial if every Stanford admit just went to their state schools.

The purpose of these institutions isn't to educate, it's to confer status (in a tax efficient and positive-eugenic way)

Have you attended any of those institutions? That's not my experience at all. The education was off-the-charts good. In more detail:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829116

Of course not, I wouldn't get in.

But I never said the education is bad. I just said their purpose is not to educate. Morill Act institutions were developed to educate, and by accepting the vast majority of people that apply University of Oklahoma will always exist to educate. The same cannot be said for Brown or Stanford.

I got master's in CS from Brown. Fwiw, I was really pleased with the instruction.

Again, never said the education was bad! Just that their purpose isn’t to educate as evidenced by the fact that they don’t let in 95% of those that apply. Maybe Brown MSCS is 94%, I don’t know.

These schools can offer harder, accelerated courses under the presumption that the floor of the student body’s ability is higher than average. In that sense, the education can be more rigorous and faster. Is that actually the case in practice? I’ve never gone to a mediocre university so I can’t compare.

But I can say that aside from intellect, attendees of top universities are not ethically superior to the average person.

Berkeley is an objectively lower tier school than Stanford that has a 4-5x higher acceptance rate but Berkeley most definitely has a more "rigorous" CS program for undergraduates. Same applies to the honors classes at other public ivies that are accessible to "good students" without the need to be superhuman like the HYPSM+ admits.

This is why acceptance rates cannot be considered in a vacuum as a measure of universal quality. Informed people generally understand that there is a lot of overlap in the bell curves of the intellectual abilities of Stanford and Berkeley undergrads. Stanford may generally have a higher stature in that it has a stronger association with wealth, but only fools believe it has the monopoly on student intellect in the Bay.

> good place to study

I work with a lot of Stanford grads. They’re terrific folk.

But the concentration of corruption, delusion and depravity in its graduates, professors and administration begin to make one question if they were great and collected and resisted Stanford’s transformative effect, which increasingly (albeit with low confidence) looks like it may be net negative, or if they were transformed positively by the experience.

I’ve personally witnessed schools of Stanford’s stature accepting students on multiple occasions, who were unable to handle AP Calculus AB in high school, or at least without significant assistance. When I mention this to associates from Asia, they are genuinely astonished. Anyone who got into a top university in East Asia will generally have breezed through such subject matter in high school. How can the United States hope to compete with Asia in a century? IMHO it’s going to be very difficult. Hard skills of this nature will rule the world.

Fwiw this refrain was something we heard in the 80s. You’d expect 40 years on to see some of that impact.

We do. Even just recently, US presidents have been cutting off China’s access to US tech out of fear.

If they're so much better than we are at this stuff, why does it matter? Why do they need access to US tech? Our tech is made by idiots who can't pass AP Calculus AB.

I think the better question is, if we didn't think they were so good at this stuff, why would we limit their access?

I believe the US possesses the human capital within it to compete with the likes of China in terms of STEM, but American society does not value this ability at nearly the same level as Asian (including India) countries.

Anyone who grew up in the US can gut check this. Which is more prestigious: MIT/Caltech or [insert almost any Ivy League]? The average American will pick an Ivy League. That, not our latent ability, is going to be the seed of our eventual dethronement.

Granted many from Asia might also pick an Ivy League, but I'd wager a lot of money that the proportion that picks a tech school will be much, much higher than America.

Why is that the better question? My question seems simpler. Can you answer it?

I don't think China "needs" American tech. My impression is that, while they have not yet reached technological parity with America, given the country's intellectual capital and culture, that can only remain true for so long.

And it only "matters" to the extent that we care about whether China surpasses the US technologically within a few generations. If you don't care, then I suppose it shouldn't matter to you.

> don't think China "needs" American tech

This is objectively false. Unless you believe fighter jets, semiconductors and AI are obsolete.

> whether China surpasses the US technologically within a few generations

China is experiencing demographic collapse. If they can’t gain the upper hand within about a decade, the opportunity will have likely passed as the surplus capital it has enjoyed to date as a result of its demographic dividend will reverse.

What I meant is that China will be able to - at least - replicate all of these things within a few generations, even without us handing over the tech to them. As an aside, I don't see why India wouldn't be capable of the same, as their society also imparts much higher status to STEM education than us, although they probably won't have the same magnitude and type of motivation as China.

> China is experiencing demographic collapse. If they can’t gain the upper hand within about a decade, the opportunity will have likely passed as the surplus capital it has enjoyed to date as a result of its demographic dividend will reverse.

Even if their population collapses, their (STEM-proficient) population will still significantly outnumber America's - especially if America continues to implicitly funnel its brightest into non-STEM fields through societal pressure.

Thats what they want you to believe

> 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.

Its not because most of stuff is not retracted that its valid. Most studies are never replicated...

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 does not only happen in cancer research. In a study from Nature, out of 1,576 researchers, more than 70% have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and over half failed to reproduce their own. And even though 52% agree there is a reproducibility crisis, only 31% think that failing to reproduce published results means that the result is wrong. Even if replication is not necessary for results to be valid and true, any further work based on these results requires confirmation of valid results beyond the initial study.

source: https://vce.usc.edu/weekly-news-profile/the-replication-cris...

Current Science is mostly cargo cult.

> 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.

I am an engineer so I know very well that industrial replication is far from easy, but that's a whole different topic here. That's why when manufacturing at scale you implement numerous controls for each step to ensure you remain into "whats known" territory.

Now, when you publish a discovery in a paper, common sense demands that you are sure that you results are not random, and the only 100% reliable way to do that is by replicating your results. There's no way around that. The fact that most people who publish stuff and the system that allows it never ever do that undermines any credibility in said "science".

Hence this is cargo cult. This is typically something that mimics the look of Science by using the scientific method, but it has none of its properties, because the incentives to cheat are obvious and there is nothing in place to prevent them.

"Difficult to replicate" does NOT mean "wrong".

The fact that your experimental technique sucks is not my problem, thanks. Go get some better grad students.

And this is before we start getting into medicine which has both ethical and expense issues with running multiple experiments.

Your position is both unrealistic and untenable. Medicine and science would literally grind to a halt.

> the incentives to cheat are obvious and there is nothing in place to prevent them.

The real issue is that Marc Tessier-Lavigne has caused an entire industry to waste millions (possibly billions) of dollars,d elayed Alzheimer's research for decades and will suffer no real punishment. He's 65 years old and has made a shitload of money based on the fraud.

The real question is "How do you punish this in order to disincentivize it?"

> Your position is both unrealistic and untenable. Medicine and science would literally grind to a halt.

Medicine and Science would grind to a halt if we try to replicate things? Did I read this correctly?

If you don't do replication, you are not doing Science, period.

> I am an engineer so I know very well that industrial replication is far from easy

And industrial replication, if I understand your meaning, is far down the development line - for technologies that have been discovered, researched, passed the test of viability, and then developed to the point where they can be used commercially.

Scientists are way back in the discovery and research phases; they don't have the benefit of all that, or the budget. They are doing the unproven and untried.

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.

The data is right there at the top of my comment.

You made a claim about an "impression" on HN. You cite data about the actual phenomenon. Interesting.

I didn't understand your prior comment. I don't feel the need to backup my impression of HN by doing personal research.

I wrote,

> Reading HN, one might get the impression that it's much higher [than eight out of every 10,000 are retracted]

You wrote,

> I certainly don't get that impression at all, and it doesn't seem like anyone else in this thread does either

People in the thread seem to disagree with the data, not my impression. They think the fraud rate is much higher than the data implies, which supports my impression.

Are you serious? I can see people say explicitly in replies to you what they actually disagree with. Are you not capable of distinguishing between the claims "this stat is false" and "it's bad that this stat is true", or "this stat doesn't imply what you think it does"?

Great timing.

As a young man, I would have given nearly anything to attend Stanford or MIT, but I knew I wasn’t quite up to their standards. Now I find their presidents are not up to mine.

True that. I used to feel bad not being able to get into these schools due to mental health issues. Felt insecure. Now I’ve looked around at the community of the Ivy League, the various so called success stories like Zuckerberg, and of course incidents like this.

All I see is the rich fucking over everyone else for power and inflating public perception of their intelligence to try and keep actually intelligent people down.

I recall Paul Krugman discussing the composition of Ivy League college student bodies, and how legacy admissions allow subpar students to matriculate while the schools have the resources to attract the most intelligent / capable students — so the student body let’s say is half legacy, half brilliant outliers (one maybe consider rich legacies as societal outliers too for different aspects). The brilliant students give the schools clout for being intellectual; while, the legacy students support the elite way of life and make that associated with the school — elite lifestyle as an enticing prospect for many brilliant students. A symbiotic relationship is formed, one that may then essentially slowly corrupt the minds of people to aggressively pursue elite-perpetuating actions (so then elite are preserving their position in society, a position that can be challenged by the more intelligent).

People have to have the innovative ideas and skill to make them happen, and others need to know them to fund the venture.

This is why the objective admission system used by the University of California is so important. Nobody can game their way into a UC and IIRC, being a legacy only DQs you from some financial assistance they offer to 'first in family' to attend.

I worked at a fintech that employed both MIT graduates and people that didn't go to college at all.

With our hiring and interview process serving as a great filter, it was impossible to tell who fell into which population until they told you.

What was the interview pass rate for MIT grads and people without a college education?

Is that really the point worth focusing on here?

I think those ratios are more telling than the observation that people are indistinguishable _after_ your interviewing filter. Especially in the context of this topic.

Given that MIT grads are objectively superior to the rest of us that didn't get into any elite schools in basically every dimension I'd wager it's fairly high.

With that said, the Square interview process isn't as algorithmic as most tech or finance companies and is instead more collaborative, so the raw IQ most MIT grads would use for their Jane Street interviews probably doesn't apply here.

> Given that MIT grads are objectively superior to the rest of us that didn't get into any elite schools in basically every dimension I'd wager it's fairly high.

Genuflect when you say that fella.

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.

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.

You mean like Steve Jobs who, by your definition, didn’t go to a top school, but is more highly regarded than 99.99% of graduates of top schools?

Reed is a pretty selective and well regarded school, unlike the schools I got into.

It’s nowhere near the stature or notoriety of Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc. It feels like you’re moving the goalpost.

Anyway, maybe you should change the way you measure yourself.

How else would I? Seems pretty clear how society views people like me

I don't know what subset of society you live in, but the university you attended is not commonly brought up in America. If you're referring to your intellectual aptitude rather than the credentials attached to your name, just try to be a good person and do the best you can with what you've got.

> but the university you attended is not commonly brought up in America.

yes, it is, and it's seen as a proxy for intellectual aptitude

And clearly since I have no intellectual aptitude...

I’ve lived in America all my life, and it isn’t commonly brought up in my American peer group.

You’re also conflating the perception of intellect with the actual possession of it. It seems like you don’t have much confident in your measure of either. Maybe find a therapist. Help with this is beyond the scope of HN comments.

There are countless people who have not attended a top tier college, e.g. people who might be regarded as “intellectually inferior” who are richer than you and I. Meditate on that.

Not surprising. Papers have no bearing on ones capabilities especially in an era where knowledge is virtually everywhere

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, being prepared - in a good way - to be world leaders.

Maybe a very simple comparison is between young tennis players that work with a local pro and go to tennis camp, and the super-talented ones working with elite professional coaches, the kind that train world champions. It was clear that there is no way you could teach yourself at anywhere near the level of top-10, nor find that education at most schools. And remember that your peers are part of your education - you won't find that population of peers either.

I know some institutions hire only from the elite, top-10 schools. I used to think it was 83% prejudice, but after those experiences I understand why. It's still lazy and unfair, but I also see significant reasons for it, maybe 33% prejudice.

(Possibly other top-10 schools aren't as good as the one I have experience with, of course.)

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. I'm just wondering what it should mean for the rest of us, the 99.99%.

So turns out that someone studied this way back in 1999. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-10/27/049r-...

Unless I'm missing something obvious Dale & Kruger says people that get into top schools get the premium, which is exactly what I alluded to. What can the rest of us even do?

Makes me think my class of people are just considered garbage humans by everyone.

You are indeed missing something obvious.

Help me out here, what am I missing?

Maybe read the article?

It seems like my takeaway is identical to the article's takeaway, that getting in matters more than going. Unless you're thinking of something else.

The whole "matters less multiple years into career" bit is a cope if it's just a measure of how inherently good you are if you can get in. There seems to be a clear separation between the people that get in and the people that don't!

Good students will do well wherever they go. The “getting in” qualification is a red herring. In this case it serves as the control.

What is your class of people? The 99.99% that you alluded to in another comment? Can that be called a class of people?

Correct, those of us that didn't get into any elite institution (and most likely aren't considered "qualified").

Yep, the Ivy League is one mechanism through which classism is perpetuated. The "elite" do think they're better than us, though it's rare that they'd be so gauche as to say it outright.

Here are my thoughts:

The first step is to put aside subjective biases, put aside ourselves completely, which is necessary to reading and listening effectively - curiously and objectively. You may fear or hate those things, but you brought them to the conversation; they aren't what I wrote about. (For example, I never said I attended either institution, or that the students there are somehow superior.)

Another step: There are more talented people, with better resources, than you - and than me, and you might be one of them. Good for you, if that's so; I hope you go much further than I do. That fact will always be true for everyone (ignoring a statistically meaningless theoretical exception). If we can't handle that fact, we can't talk about reality. Must we censor the idea that elite university education is exceptional, and their student bodies are exceptional? It's a cheap way out of the conversation.

Step three is that it doesn't bother me at all that you might go further than me, or the students at these institutions might go further. What is to fear? I'm not inferior to anyone on the planet. If we rely on external rewards, especially elite ones, as necessary to a successful life, then 99.99% will 'fail' - which seems to be where you reached your own conclusions. Most importantly, all the external rewards in the universe won't fill the holes inside; people seek them as a substitute, including elite status, but it never works. The only answer is to be happy with yourself internally, to provide love and recognition internally, regardless of the external rewards. The external doesn't fill those holes, and will come and go; you are the only person who will always be there; nobody can take that away.

> and their student bodies are exceptional? It's a cheap way out of the conversation

> I'm not inferior to anyone on the planet

These appear in tension, yes? It’s pretty clear that I’m inferior to anyone at Harvard including Claudine Gay, and my life is far worse than anyone there and will not get better. It’s also clear that people like you would definitely believe people like me are subhuman “NPCs” because we didn’t accomplish enough in high school if you bristle at censoring your admiration for this exceptional, superhuman cohort of people. If they’re superhuman, I can only conclude I’m under human, yes?

I can only refer you back to the GP. All your words are brought by you to the conversation; none by me. I not only disagree with you, some directly conflicts with what I've said.

The tension is only if you accept some external definition of yourself. That's why I talked about external and internal in the GP. Harvard can't possibly love you; in a sense, nobody can love you; you can only love yourself (and then, there's there's room for personal love from others - but never Harvard). The same goes for me and everyone else.

All that matters is what you give to yourself. If you give yourself the parent comment, that's what you will have, even if Harvard begged you to come - lots of externally successful people are very unhappy for that reason. If you give yourself love and value, then you will have that, again regardless of what Harvard says about you. Harvard is orthogonal to the outcome.

You are not inferior to anyone. But only you can tell yourself that. You won't hear me until you tell yourself and believe it. But I really mean it.

Throwing out numbers like 83% and 33% seems like a handwavy attempt at precision and diminishes your argument. The real world is not like university, unless you live in the very small subset of the world that makes its living off research. Formal education / book smarts !== leadership.

It's a representation of basic fractions that I think most people on HN recognize, and is not at all precise.

If the kind of work these people do at your company doesn’t pressure test the skills they exhibited to get into MIT, then that stands to reason.

Why are you grouping MIT into the same group as Stanford?

They’re all wrought with dishonesty and self preservation.

Jennifer Doudna [1], who helped characterize* CRISPR, worked at Yale:

> Doudna joined Yale's Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry as an assistant professor in 1994.

... and now works at UC Berkeley.

David Liu [2], who pioneered base editing, a generational improvement on classic CRISPR, works at Broad Institute (which is a collab between Harvard and MIT):

> He is the Richard Merkin Professor, Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT

I absolutely loathe the current social meta where people are allowed (even celebrated) for thoughtlessly punching upwards, regardless how broad the brush (boxing glove?) seems to be. Are there shitheads in these institutions? Undoubtedly. Are there also a ton of really brilliant people who have good intentions, have integrity, and deserve your utmost respect? Undoubtedly. Are the shitheads more likely to be located in administration? My bet is yes, because the scope of administration is a lot more political, but again -- we have to be careful.

Is it anywhere near accurate to say "They’re all wrought with dishonesty and self preservation"? I don't see how this statement could be supported with anything other than personal emotion. Anti-intellectualism is just another form of dangerous prejudice and should be treated as such. You can sign me up for metaphorically stringing up this particular asshole.

I also say all this as someone who didn't go to a prestigious school.

Happy New Years!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Doudna [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R._Liu

> Are there shitheads in these institutions? Undoubtedly. Are there also a ton of really brilliant people who have good intentions, have integrity, and deserve your utmost respect? Undoubtedly.

Right, that is the nature of every human institution, and every human.

Doudna didnt discover CRISPR; her fellow Nobel recipient Emmanuelle Charpentier did

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuelle_Charpentier?wprov=s...

Yes, "discovered" was too way strong of a word there, and apologies to Charpentier. Thanks for the correction.

However, she did win the Nobel prize and I have found source after source that suggests she seemed to be fundamental to the development of the science.

My point remains -- you could literally substitute her name with one of a thousand names associated with high profile biomedical miracles to have originated from prestigious universities.

Yeah I’m thankful you brought it up. There’s a really well done documentary about their individual and then collaborative work but i’ve not found it. Will update with link if i do.

Update: might be

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/human-nature/

When I say “they” not referring to individuals. I’m referring to the organization at a whole. It’s ironic that so many who operate under the umbrella of science and truth do things that are antithetical to that. At the end of the day these institutions are fighting for survival like everyone else - and they don’t always operate truthfully.

> They’re all wrought with dishonesty and self preservation.

Citation needed.

They are both elite institutions with sub 8% acceptance rates, it's a valid categorization

In a positive sense, they are the two top tech oriented universities, west coast and east coast counterparts.

In the negative, you have this story at Stanford. With MIT you have the Jeffery Epstein connection, some high profile retractions, and the president part of the three Uni Presidents who flubbed the anti-semitism question in the congressional hearing.

Other universities have negatives too, but they are not newsworthy at lesser known schools. The heads of lesser-known schools aren't featured in Congressional hearings.

"Smug MA"?

They are operated by and for the elite. Sociopaths are overrepresented in the elite.

Seems like every day the rules apply to thee but not too me. Except I never seem to be the me in this situation. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

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