I think that narrative is correct. We can't fix the problem if we don't discuss it. The whole "I believe in science" thing (which you seem to be pushing) is really quite silly.
Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). I think this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of scientists are hangers-on, i.e. not capable of doing original research. These scientists are terrified of people who can do original research since it makes them look bad (and feel bad, it's actually depressing to think about all the people out there who are way smarter than me).
You can imagine funding schemes that attempt to account for these issues. "For every dollar of funding for interpretation A, earmark 25 cents for alternative interpretations". View science as a market, something beyond our powers to predict, then diversify your investments.
Science has to be conservative, in order to protect the integrity of the record of published findings. This can lead to a situation where a field gets stuck in a local optimum from which progress is no longer possible, because things that don't seem to fit are dismissed as implausible.
But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about!
At the end of the day, the question is: can we somehow induce these necessary paradigm shifts more quickly? I really don't know.
I think this framing is inaccurate. The alternative ideas aren't necessarily less plausible. The process by which science is funded does not accurately determine plausibility in my view. It's heavily swayed by factors it should be independent of like fads or sounding good to the proposal evaluator (who may not be an expert in the field) but having deeper issues.
To quote from a book I have about writing grant proposals:
> [...] writing a grant application is unlike writing a scholarly manuscript for publication in a prestigious professional journal. In the former case, your target audience is likely to be 1) a reader who is not particularly knowledgeable in the area of your proposal (except in a very general sense); 2) an individual who is overworked, tired, hassled, and intent on getting through the required reading as quickly as possible; and 3) someone committed to reading your proposal only because he or she has to.
From p. 31 of the 2014 edition of this: http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/
The status quo is not the best we can do.
what you really seem to be asking is "why can't science be more efficient?" and science shouldn't be more efficient. it should be wholly less efficient. we should have more people searching in the dark for the implausible.
conservatism wants the safe and sure, and science is, and must be, anything but.
In any case, you're typically going to profit much more by learning from a meticulously examined and fleshed out tradition than you are by starting from proverbial scratch. Science wants certainty which it why, when done properly (aye, there's the rub!), it goes to great lengths to verify things. Conservatism, contrary to widespread misconception, is not about stagnation, but about being careful and responsible with the stewardship of your hard won inheritance.
conservatism unduly burdens science by overly valuing correctness over exploration. science advances on the latter, not the former.
be wrong, it's ok. it only adds to our scientific knowledge. we can't even know when we're wrong without a grueling many attempts at being right.
Why? Because, at least for public scientific funding, it is bad politics for funding committees to look like they value politics over evidence. It opens up a big lane for other scientists to attack them.
If you have 3 groups all studying the same phenomenon, all proposing very similar studies, politics will in part affect who gets that funding. In retrospect, this can look overly conservative and even corrupt... but we must have the discipline to recognize hindsight for what it is.
In real time, trying to make funding decisions with little to no hard evidence for the right course of action, it is scientifically valid to use whatever evidence is available, even if it's something as nebulous as a reputation or a hunch.
Science has a reputation for producing hard evidence and knowledge, but the practice of science exists far out, on the edge of the unknown. The whole point of conducting scientific research is to explore what we don't know. By definition, evidence is scant there.
So what if a group proposes a hypothesis that seems really far out there, or even contradicts existing evidence? It's true that they will be less likely to get funding regardless of their connections.
Is it wrong that radically new ideas and approaches have a steeper hill to climb? Not necessarily; they have worse priors. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's true that paradigm shifts often start out looking radically new, but it's also true that most radically new ideas end up being wrong.
Setting aside some funding for crazy ideas is not a bad idea, but it should not be very much... it certainly won't be enough to preempt any hindsight disappointment. There will always be a chance we'll look back and say "I wish we had funded those (seemingly crazy) researchers earlier."
If you're talking about "politics" in this sense, then yes, I agree with what you're saying. However, I think the person you're responding to is saying "politics" in terms of inter-group and inter-department relationships.
Egos, arrogance, and insecurities run rampant in academia. Science, like any other fields, are not above these issues, which does hurt "good science."
What I meant by "public" is that the funding decisions are publicly reviewable in some way; i.e. other scientists can see and judge the funding decisions after the fact. As opposed to going to a company or rich person for private funding, which is less common but does happen.
That's not entirely distinguishable from gravitons in quantum gravity. Or, for that matter, photons.
That's not necessarily true. There are people who are excellent at both, but I suppose in practice they are relatively rare. The best recognize research as a cooperative human endeavor, and human elements like bias, ego, etc. can never fully be extricated.
They fund universities like anyone else. Yes, there is some internal research, but even in fields like math, where NSA probably does a lot of internal reseach, you still have classified top-secret research performed in public universities.
There is in fact no fundamental difference between a manager deciding what projects to take on and a bureaucrat deciding which projects to fund from public money - in both cases, the person doing the decision is not using their own money, and they don't have the full qualification to make the best scientific decision. Even if they do, they are held responsible by people who do not (upper managers / higher level bureaucrats), who will evaluate them more on the process they followed than on actual results (especially as results are likely to be far off).
Even though 'a company is putting its own money behind the research', it's still people who don't own that money taking the actual decisions. Even start-ups are usually not using 'their own money', but investors' money, with the investors taking the role of grants approvers.
I'd be interested in a compare and contrast with AIDs research. Same time frame but AIDs researchers threw everything but the kitchen sink at it and made progress.
You got to wonder one field was dominated by status seekers with fat ego's and the other people working on a disease that mostly afflicts people no one cares about.
Interesting hypothesis. What is your evidence?
Science is about being right and politics is about a plurality of people working together. In the name of cooperation, politics prefers vague language that is decidedly un-formal whereas science gravitates toward mathematical precision. Both are necessary, but I'd say we're leaning too far into politics these days.
Just one data point, but in my experience in academia that was almost exactly how I found it. The exception that it wasn't a team sport because there's only space for one first author.
My feeling is that the recognition and 'impactfulness' tied to being successful in academia are antagonistic to conducting unbiased research.
Ben Goldacre's bad science is a great book on this topic. He's an entertaining speaker too. He describes a solution to that particular problem which is registering a clinical trials beforehand.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/07/ben-goldacr...
Science is incredibly broken in many ways. I think the big underlying culprit is the prevailing ideology that every human activity is best organized as a competition for scarce resources.
Then gradually re-enculture review boards to expect any given author to have a substantial number of results published to said repository, if they're actively performing research.
Can you resolve / flesh this out more? If the desire for funding is a key driver of behavior then it would seem most anything is possible, including conspiracy or related nefarious activites.
Humans, especially those with big ideas and big egos, in pursuit of fortune and fame have been known to bend and break the rules.
It happens in a lot of places. And to be honest it’s what most of the people want and while places like r/nba are more neutral and give respect where it is due, ESPN knows the casual 12yr old knows Lebron James and Steph Curry and they recruit “talent” to only talk about them, not just what is going well for the sport as a whole.
It’s a difficult balance that is really up to the power players and the quality of leadership to get right.
With science though you’d hope far more meritocracy than big names, but sadly I believe this is a human and non-expert efficiency thing (as most people are not really experts). Some people might blame capitalism of the bio firms but they are just the sum of their people who run and fund them too.
We're not good at thinking rationally about things that involve our own benefit. We'll more often than not only think things through to the point where we avoid breaking any existing rules but still go with the lazy choice that benefits us in the short term.
If you're in a modern, first-world country you get to decide which part of the Pareto 80/20 divide you sit on.
The world doesn't need more mediocre people.
Most relevant is that he was against consensus science, which was highlighted in the submission. Even if you are 'wrong' and in the group consensus, all is forgiven. If you are 'right' but not in the group, you are blackballed, and if you are wrong and not in the group consensus, you are crucified.
In academia it is tied to laurels and funding. The clue in the article was defender of the so-called cabal saying if it were true, it was because the NIH Alzheimers funding was too low, i.e. it was a fight for who would get what research grants. Go against the concensus and be blacklisted.
> In a sea of amyloid-focused grants, there are tiny islands of research on oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and, especially, a protein called tau.
The Wikipedia article you cite:
> On examining her brain, he found senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles [which are made of tau protein -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofibrillary_tangle]
What you actually wrote:
> In 1911, Alois Alzheimer found plaques in his dementia patient's brain. These plaques are what researchers would focus on for more than the next 100 years.
You omitted the tangles and played up the plaques. It looks like you're part of the cabal!
> It looks like you're part of the cabal!
I have no horse in this race ;) I only commented because the title seemed needlessly inflammatory to me. Everybody should just read the full article, like I wrote I think it's very good.
In the end, it's always the inflammation...
It is perfectly natural to fund science that seems like a good idea at the time, and not fund ideas that seem less plausible than the prevailing explanation, and while it does suck that it takes a while to overturn the idea that the idea is good, representing our 20/20 hindsight as some irredeemable inertia with conspiracist overtones is a big problem.
Also, considering the actual harm caused, i don’t think you can be hyperbolic enough about this issue..
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/colombian-woman-s-ge...
This is precisely what modern science is (well, a major subset). The competition for grant funding and attention space is extremely intense.
I agree there was no "alzheimer's cabal" but it's not uncommon in science for the prevailing mainstream position to (intentionally or otherwise) suppress alternative opinions ("extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence" is often used to maintain the status quo).
One of the important issues is when an idea ends up dominating funding. If you have a legitimate alternative hypothesis but can't get the funding to run the experiments to provide that extraordinary evidence, you'll fail to convince people. The people who get the most funding are the ones who are the most competitive, not the smartest, or the rightest.
Modern denialism tends to be more centered around climate change- whether it is occurring, and what the impacts will be in the near and long term, and how to respond. Many physics people (who worked on high energy particle physics, etc) have looked at the claims from the various climate change promoters and found the source evidence to be less than convincing. If they articulate this, they are often described as denialists. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer
a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g
I've watched very experienced, top school trained MDs freeze up and begin to stutter, as they've just realized they said something their lab chief does not like.
Coincidentally, that chief writes treatment guidelines and consults the FDA, and is probably one of the most powerful physicians in the profession.
Medicine is a very hierarchical top-down command structure type of field.
Did he end up permanently losing it?
For example, consider type 1 diabetes (T1D). Lots of research tries to understand genetic risk factors. Despite this being so difficult to translate into treatment, as its many small effects past the top 3 genes, and twin studies show 50% is contribution from the environment.
So very recently, someone said OK the immune system is a classifier that takes sets of little protein chunks in a tissue microenvironment and decides whether its seeing self or something foreign and acts accordingly. Then, your own microbiome has to do something to avoid immune immune responses, as the immune system is only pre-trained using your own DNA. Then, let's assume your microbiome has to mimic (copy) some of your DNA to signal self to the immune system.
And it turns out it is true [1]. Lots of bacteria mimic insulin. And when those bacteria end up being classified as non-self, you also destroy your pancreatic beta cells, which produce insulin.
There's good evidence for lots of other diseases. For example, multiple sclerosis [2]. The first paper cites other diseases, including Alzheimer's that look like mis-classification induced by dysbiosis in the microbiome or an infection.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1
>Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that.
It's bad to sow too much mistrust in science, sure, but it certainly feels like society right now is way too far in the opposite direction right now, with people blindly believing any headline following the phrase "a new study says..." or "scientists say...". A lot of scientific fields are very competitive for funding right now, there is immense pressure to twist every result into a "win" while equally important null results ("we tried X and surprisingly it did not worked") are basically treated as worthless.
People shouldn't blindly mistrust science, but blind trust is just as dangerous, the system right now is far from perfect. I believe most researchers still ultimately want to solve mysteries in nature and improve life, but they're also human beings who ultimately want to be able to keep working and provide for themselves and their families, these two motivations are not always perfectly aligned.
Better = more accurate and neutral, using representative language from the article.
These few scientists did not just choose a stable approach that later turned out to be wrong: they doubled-down, tripled-down on a shakey guess for decades and suppressed voices to the contrary. The seemingly credentialed, respected, and authoritative experts of Alzheimer's sabotaged the science around a hot-button problem for their own personal gain, while society suffered the consequences.
This antipattern can be seen as a kind of "academic rent-seeking" or "false-expertise". It can also be called "collusion" given that an organized group of people semi-intentionally marginalized their opposition at the outset, and at great cost to the broader public.
Edit: I've changed it back because readers are divided on this.
Wikipedia defines collusion as "a secret cooperation or deceitful agreement in order to deceive others, although not necessarily illegal".
I think you make a good point about this title. In a case like this it's best to break the tie with the original title, so I've changed it back above.
No one thought the weapons of mass destruction were fake and lied and said they were real.
The conspiracy was "These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track." so did not allow competing theories.
Exactly the same with the VW emissions issue.
This is exactly how conspiracies and cabals work. They are emergent behaviour.
Article is great to, came to post something along the lines of "no it wasn't a conspiracy", but the article summerises exactly what happened under the picture - "Amyloid plaques have long been the suspected cause of cognitive decline experienced by Alzheimer’s patients. Drug companies have spent billions of dollars creating amyloid-targeting drugs, yet they’ve all failed"
->They went "all in" on bad science.
They went "all in" on science, that happens with hindsight to maybe not have been an accurate model for reality. Nobody can know that a particular explanation is bad without actually doing the science first, no matter what post facto explanations we can come up with after we realize we've been chasing a unicorn.
no particular judgement, but saying "mistakes were made" would be something of an understatement.
No, conspiracies and cabal are by their very nature intentional. Groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink is a much better term for describing an emergent dysfunctional decision process brought on through social dynamics.
It's really hard to find non-fiction examples of cabals, but when applied to real life I stick with they are almost always emergent behaviour.
I would have thought the Phoebus cartel is an example of a cabal, but it seems Google doesn't agree.
But it's an example of progress kept back from emergent behaviour.
There's a reason there's two memes attached to Phoebus cartel, 1. They stopped long lasting light bulbs, 2. Actually long lasting light bulbs burn to much electricity.
The emergent behaviour from 2. caused 1. which made them more money.
This is not Groupthink.
An independent science lab causd the VW scandal by publishing independent measures of emissions. That's one way the process of science corrects itself.
Not totally sold on the meme, but looking at crossovers between disciplines is a thing.
Although I'd argue it's all under anthropology in this case.
There's also plenty of evidence that Iraq had (known, small) stockpiles of chemical weapons, too (last I checked those were classed as WMD), which are widely accepted to be a likely cause of gulf war syndrome and a contributing factor to congenital disease in some parts of iraq.
Mind you: I'm not claiming that it's ethical to invade a country on shoddy pretenses.
Of course at one old point Iraq had WMD programs. But you were completely misrepresenting the situation by stating for the later period that "The funny thing about that conspiracy is that the WMD were real. Hussein had them, and and its true that he didn't give them up". Even the very article you linked stated clearly: "There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said." As for the small amount of chemical weapons or precursors, they also have not been interpreted afterwhile has having any significance regarding the willingness to comply.
Saddam also received considerable material support from the US during the Iran-Iraq War -- those pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand aren't fake. Lots of jokes about "we knew Saddam had WMDs cuz we gave em to him!" were, to a degree, credible on paper.
Saddam had long since stopped working on them, but made a point to look like he was. This allowed him to drum up support by posturing like he was standing up to the US, and also to look threatening to the Iranians (plus the Kurds + Shias).
I'm not justifying the actions of the administration or even the legal basis for it, but per my understanding, the claims were not untrue, notwithstanding how it was sold to the us public (especially as filtered by the complicit media)
Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that.
In some sense this all started from the very beginning, from when Alzheimer's disease (AD) was first described: In 1911, Alois Alzheimer found plaques in his dementia patient's brain. [0] These plaques are what researchers would focus on for more than the next 100 years.
Much later, the protein giving rise to the plaques (APP) was discovered and there seemed to be good evidence for a causal role: Mice with mutated APP developed AD.
Quoting the article:
"""
By the mid-1990s, a now-defunct San Francisco biotechnology company, Athena Neurosciences, created the first genetically engineered mice with a mutated, amyloid-producing human gene. The animals’ brains filled with amyloid plaques, and their memories were destroyed. The mice were hailed as a “model for testing therapeutic [Alzheimer’s] drugs”
"""
So we should really take this story as a cautionary tale. There was, however, no conspiracy or "cabal". These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track. In a way, they were, since hereditary Alzheimer's is caused by APP mutations, it just turns out that this isn't as important as other ways of developing the disease.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Deter