In Defense of the Amyloid Hypothesis

This is a good post and we need more like it. The "contrarian blogging" crowd-- by which I don't mean the real nutcases who post about ivermectin, but rather the intelligent-but-uncredentialed people (I count myself among them) who enjoy high-quality science news and get all worked up about things like the Jones Act-- has a tendency to latch onto contrarian explanations just because they have a good story about institutional failures in science, especially if there's frustratingly slow progress.

"The amyloid hypothesis is obviously bogus, and survives solely on corruption" is a classic example of this, MOND is the equivalent in astrophysics. And because a lot of practicing scientists in the field are too busy actually working to bother addressing this stuff, it tends to solidify into fact just by sheer repetition combined with lack of counternarrative.

I still don't know if the amyloid hypothesis is true or false, but this was a high-quality rebuttal to the "it's all a scam" outrage bait that tends to dominate the conversation whenever it's brought up.

They don't really change my thinking as a layman who is rather annoyed at how mismanaged research has been. If you replace amyloid with scar tissue in the article I would agree fully with a lot of points, recognize that scar tissue reduction studies would be of great benefit to some, especially those with highly abnormal genetics, and still ask what the hell is wrong with financial allocation in research.