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.

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.

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.

You have a better idea to contribute ?

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

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".

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.

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"

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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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 think any parent or manager also knows this…

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

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Where do you think engineers get their equations?

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?

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.

Machine learning

> The military isn't an economic system,

The system of which the military is a major pillar is definitely also an economic system, and the fact that a major part of that system (the military "sub-system", in this instance) was run in a way that was antithetic to the stated ideology of that "all encompassing" system as a whole ("capitalism", in this instance) was quite interesting.

I'll give you drones, even though the drones that have had most of an impact in the present war are the consumer-oriented ones, which are not directly the work of any military system (I'm talking about the small drones that help with artillery targeting). The Bayraktars were quite rapidly neutralised by the Russians once they got the hang of it, and at this point they're merely a PR thing.

Cryptography is also a result of Cold War funding, in fact it's one of the quintessential results of that war when it comes to our industry.

> Why do you believe GPS involved more invention or development than Starlink, drones, cryptography, machine learning, or anything else?

Didn't say that, quite the contrary, most of those are the result of direct and sustained Government funding via the military, i.e. what I called socialism. Again, Starlink would have remained a pipe-dream without Reagan's 1980s Star Wars Program.

Anyway, I'm happy for the current status-quo, i.e. for the best and brightest in our industry golden hand-cuffed at FAANG companies, spending their best years worrying about their comps and about KPIs and OKRs, had they been part of a Manhattan-like or Apollo-like Government-run system then things would have been much, much, much worse (in terms of peace on this planet, that is).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

lol

The problem with getting more and more specific about my experiences and expertise is you get closer and closer to doxxing yourself. Honestly, it may be time to retire this account again.

Also its worth noting that I am not claiming my experience is the end-all be-all. I am stating that, from my experience, I have incredible distrust for many studies that are published with 'amazing' results until peer reviewed preferably on disparate datasets.

My experience is based around outcome based studies of the effect of drugs/treatment/regimens in oncology and oncology adjacent fields. This includes drugs treated alongside traditional cancer regimens to assist with managing adverse events and toxicities.

Other fields may not have this reproducibility problem. Mine does. Even if the study design if perfect, and I can't imagine most are, the data itself can be questionable.

Consider - what dataset would you use to identify if patients taking keytruda had a higher incidence of high blood pressure?

You can use data from an EHR, licensed for deidentified studies, but EHR data is a burnt down trailer park of questionableness and its use in studies has been laughed at in many conferences.

You can use data from individual enrolled patients (for a clinical study) but then the cost is extremely high vs a non interventional observational study using other data methods. The value of the data is likely to be higher, but since it costs more to collect maybe you are only in a few regions that may have a higher prevalence or incidence of this anyway. Troublesome.

What about insurance data? You can get it cheaply, if you have high blood pressure GOOD doctors are likely to medicate you with a drug meant to treat it, and you can get it across the country. Seems good right? And it is, as you can generally draw an implication of high-blood-pressure->treatment-with-drug-x. So for a yes/no study it can help, but what if the base condition causes high blood pressure and we want to tell if the drug causes a HIGHER amount of high blood pressure than others. Insurance data by itself may not be enough to tell this data.

So what do you do? You are stuck with no great answers.... and this is assuming your study design is perfect.

So you buy multiple datasets in some third party health marketplace, and someone gets the great idea to combine the datasets to increase the n value. Well, too bad those datasets have a high overlap. So you have attributed a higher power to the study than is relevent.

I hope this explains more about the concerns I have. Though, I suppose, it may mean that this account is now dead. I will have to think further. Anyway, hope you have a great day.

Of course it matters, adding citations to already written research is deceptive and thus actively harmful.

The point of citations isn’t simply an index of prior research it’s there to inform readers of the writers context.

Got no grounds for opinion about physics or chemistry. Certainly some of it is good work, although I harbor doubts about the ultimate usefulness of string theory.

But your example of GPS, and others' of "rocket science", show that you have even shakier ground for opinion, along with insufficient respect for engineering. You are not alone in that: scientists get good publicity. They even get dedicated press offices at universities.

Is that an accusation of bad faith or just a non sequitur?

I know you are trying to say something, but I am not quite following what it is you are trying to say. Being more blunt may help.

You may disagree with the experiences I have had as it may not be in alignment with your thoughts and ideals, and it still doesnt make you a bad person. It doesn't make me a bad person either.

I'm not claiming there are no overly stubborn PIs. But we should not be lazy and paint so a brush that we view the field as a monolith.

> When you are in the trenches you can't look at the good and throw away the bad.

When in the trenches of science this is literally your job. What seems like the likely hypothesis, what model that explains the data is good or bad.

Papers are not textbooks. They are the boiling cauldron from with some bits eventually emerged as fully cooked facts.

The only way that I can square others' experience of science with my own is if they take the Discussion sections, which are free-form extrapolation about future directions, and treat them as if they were asserted as truth.

What happens is social scientists look at certain outcomes like people who go to Harvard are the top economic winners and people that take advanced courses go to Harvard. So the reasoning is if we can get people of an arbitrary group into Harvard we will “even out” outcomes.

But what this logic fails to consider is that people who graduate from Harvard aren’t successful simply because they went to Harvard. Their success comes from many attributes like their intelligence, etc that advanced courses are designed to separate the cream.

So then they organize and legitimize their power (removing merit and replacing with lotto or affirmation quotas) by claiming the existing system is racist. When you ask for specific examples they respond that it’s “systemic” and although no one can detect it, it’s imbued in everything. The solution is “anti-racism” which means to make up for past discrimination by systematizing present and future discrimination. This is why your HR department probably has a commissar on it now. They might call it DEI Officer or sone other bullshit job title.

This is what social sciences have contributed the last 40 years.

> how do you make math political?

By proposing a math curriculum that requires teaching all students the same material, regardless of their ability, with the aim of increasing social equality.

I'm OK with that aim; but I know from my own experience that trying to teach calculus to someone that's not ready for it isn't just a waste of effort, it's disastrously counter-productive (I totally fell out of love with maths when I was taught integration, failed to "get" it, and my well-regarded teacher didn't get why I didn't get it).

My understanding is that nowadays in UK state schools, maths is largely student-paced, using worksheets; they've given up on trying to get a whole class of students to all understand the same stuff. That's partly because a set of worksheets is much easier to come by than a good maths teacher, of course.

I'm not a maths teacher, and I don't know enough about the California curriculum arguments to have a view.

I'm torn here.

Yes, some people use "where's the evidence" as a conversational gambit to try to shut down discussion they don't like. (And if you provide evidence, they may say "that's only one source, got any others?") And if they're being dishonest in asking, there's no point supplying the evidence they request; it is useless to try to have a conversation with those who will not listen.

On the other hand... when you make a claim, the burden of evidence is actually on you, not the other person. And if you say "you have access to the same search engines as everyone else", well, that's true. On the other hand, one person writes a post, and ten people read it, or a hundred people, or a thousand. Making the thousand do the searching, instead of having the one writer do it, is really inefficient.

This leaves you at "do the work of providing the evidence, but don't feed the dishonest trolls", which is... well, at best it's not very actionable advice.

I told you I was torn...

I mentioned GPS because it depends on general relativity (or at least I believe it does).

Are particle accelerators a better example for you, in that they wouldn’t actually work if 80-90% of science is wrong? Or is particle physics also actually engineering and nothing to do with science?

Anyway, my guess at this point is that we both agree on lots of the same technologies that actually work, just not on if general relativity or physics or chemistry are technically science or engineering, and therefore whether they would fall under the “90% of science doesn’t work” statement. Its hard for me to imagine engineering without a dependency on scientific knowledge, but it’s interesting that that’s a valid point of view out there.

That's not how competent research is done. You don't go into a hole for 5 years and then come back into the world with a fully-formed paper. While you're doing that research, the world moves on, and if your citations are from 5 years ago, any publication will ask the extremely appropriate question "How does this matter w.r.t. the research published since you started this work?", and send the paper back for rewrite. Or, it may ask the even more appropriate question "Why does your research matter given the results of papers x,y,z which are directly related to your research question?" Any competent researcher should preempt in their literature review, and if they can't then it's not research but instead PR.

And this doesn't even touch upon the fact that research that's going to take 5 years is going to be well-funded, and you'll have to write interim reports over that period. When you get 5 years of funding, you don't get that all at once. During that time, you'll have to answer for advances in the field and justify why the research is still worth doing.

Here’s a translation of a rather fun counterexample.

https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/232514/Einstein%20E=mc2%20(pp...

But, I don’t disagree that someone should keep up with the literature. Including it as part of a paper is what I disagree with.

“I consulted a magic box and arrived at the answer” is precisely the kind of paper that is an example of search, and not research. I mean, they plainly stated that’s what they’ve done.

How would you go about redoing exactly what Lander and Parkin did? You can’t because they don’t really say. Isn’t this whole thread about a lack of reproducible studies resulting in fraud?

But anyway, I like what you’re doing here because you’re beginning to document why the modern peer review system was developed in the first place in the 70s. Sounds like a good topic for a research paper.

So you aren’t actually open to new information, that’s disappointing but unsurprising. I get your stance but again papers aren’t textbooks.

O well, there’s a reason science advances one retirement at a time.