How about "The beta-amyloid paradigm thwarted progress toward an Alzheimer’s cure"?

I disagree. The article articulates a political problem, not an error in reasoning.

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.

That's why I suggested "paradigm". Because that includes all the political stuff. Not just a widely accepted hypothesis.

Ok, we'll use something like that. Thanks!

Edit: I've changed it back because readers are divided on this.

How about "Collusion" instead of "Cabal"?

Wikipedia defines collusion as "a secret cooperation or deceitful agreement in order to deceive others, although not necessarily illegal".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion

The word 'collusion' doesn't appear in the article and has its own triggering capacities these days. Best not to go there.

You'd have to demonstrate 'deceit' and 'cooperation'.

I really think it's better to defer to the original authors or the submitter on titles. Retroactive title changes have become common on HN and they're somewhat annoying. Certainly the original title upset some people, but perhaps that is a conversation worth having; Statnews isn't a frivolous news outlet, and the revised title elides the intradisciplinary conflict at the heart of this story, creating the impression that researchers in that field had moved toward some other consensus (which does not appear to be the case).

HN's way of dealing with titles has been around forever and functions surprisingly well overall. When grumblings come up they are usually reasonable and we usually react by changing the title until readers stop grumbling. But these cases are a small percentage of the total. Sometimes the community is divided about what's reasonable, in which case every title change generates grumbling and the process never converges. In that case we either stick with the original title or just make a call and move on.

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.

Thanks for your thoughtful response Dan. I guess you're right about how long it's been going on, I am probably mis-remembering practices from back when HN was much smaller than today.