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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

My opinion is that amyloid-as-cause moved from a majority to a minority view over the past few years, but it's not yet reflected in the literature (the entire amyloid establishment isn't going to give up its dominant position easily).

Also, I didn't say anything about the evidence (I don't have a "read" on the evidence, because I don't read Alz literature). My point is entirely that my priors indicate that Derek is a more reliable reader than you.

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>My opinion is that amyloid-as-cause moved from a majority to a minority view over the past few years, but it's not yet reflected in the literature

>I don't have a "read" on the evidence, because I don't read Alz literature

these two sentences seem contradictory to me. i am not sure how you would keep up on the research (to know it's moved from majority-held to minority-held view), and know that the move is not reflected in the literature, without reading the literature.

Most scientists who are not experts in their field don't read the literature for a field directly. Instead, they synthesize their opinions about the field by consulting experts, and weighing various sorts of evidence. In my case, I work in an adjacent field and see presentations from scientists, have casual conversations with them, and read the news articles in major journals.

The raw literature for alzheimer's, as well as biomed in general, is not really easily interpretable. It's rife with errors, misleading statements, and intentional obfuscation.

You said the camp promoting the amyloid hypothesis has struggled greatly to come up with evidence to support its position. What did you mean by that if not a read of the quality of the evidence?

Why do you continue to frame this as a choice between a single cherry-picked expert's opinion, and my own non-expert opinion? Either fairly represent the spectrum of experts' views, or decide based on the actual evidence and arguments.

My estimate of the quality of the evidence is based on daily discussions with people who work in that field and reading summary articles in major journals. I typically don't read raw scientific articles directly- those are aimed at people in the field. Instead, my understanding comes from a synthesis of expert opinions weighted by my own priors (based on 30+ years in the field). Derek's opinion is now the prevailing one that I hear from a wide range of researchers.

I've seen this happen before, btw- overturning establishment paradigms, especially ones where the underlying etiology is complex- is extremely hard and often takes decades of experimental results.

What started as an argument to ignore arguments and evidence and instead rely on authority, seems now to have morphed into an argument that we should ignore the authority of the establishment, because of your own personal assessment of the evidence (which you have not yourself read) and your own personal synthesis of conversations you've had with researchers you've personally come into contact with (despite this being apparently unrepresentative of objective measures of typical researcher opinions).

Arguing from authority really only takes you so far when it ends up as an appeal to your personal experience. I'd rather you either address the arguments directly, or drop the dubious appeal to authority.

I don't have a horse in this race, but for anyone who has worked in it, "science advances one funeral at a time" comes to mind here

update your priors dude

I did. I started out very skeptical, then got convinced by the quality of the evidence.

Your making an argumentum ad verecundiam which even if you are right means we have to discredit it.

It’s poor science to make an argument on authority, if you know the science then you should be quoting the published research and not relying on others so called expertise.

That's the dream (all science communication should be based in the raw scientific data as published in the literature) but it's not how things work now, nor is it even practical. Instead, we rely on experts (authorities) because our priors tell us that experts are usually the most able to interpret the complexity of literature.

One thing that has gone mostly unsaid in this thread is that scientists lie when they publish. Not every scientist, and not every publication, but significant fraction of papers contain true errors or omissions intentionally added by the paper authors. Learning how to read a paper and translate the bullshit takes some time, and usually requires a fairly deep understanding of the state of the art of the field.

I don't think you're obliged to discredit any argument made from authority (we're not making true logical arguments here, we're working in a real world space with ambiguouity).

Then the next question becomes 'which expert to trust'? which is a subjective judgement; personally, after polling many different experts, the "go look for other causes of alzheimer's" experts seemed to have the most compelling biological narrative.

The amyloid and tau people have had over thirty years with nothing to show for it.

It's time for the inflammation / diabetes / infection / metabolic dysfunction / liver dysfunction folks to get more money to test their theories.

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