* Whatever skepticism you have toward NAS, I have a thousand times more skepticism toward a tweet thread from Sharon Weinberger.

* Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications. The peer review process is not itself a form of research. The paper should be judged on its own merits and the credibility of its authors.

* Contrary to what Weinberger said, a 64-page NAS document is available at https://www.nap.edu/read/25889/chapter/1

Credibility is one heuristic that let’s us figure out what might be worth investing time into, since your answer cannot be “everything”.

With respect to publishing, there is a significant volume of work, and we should be able to keep up with it long as people review as much as they publish.

That tweet was made before the report was released, but there were a few press stories about it. The second thread opens with a link to the report.

>Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications.

And this paper is of such low quality they couldn't even manage that. It has no merits, and even the paper admits the data is shit and the conclusion is unfounded.

Peer review is the process by which that judgment is made.

Criticizing peer review is a little bit like criticizing democracy. It's the worst possible way to go about doing things, except for all of the others we've tried.

Not if you are yourself a scientist.

Peer review is a social method of establishing the validity of research, but it's not the only method. Another would be collaboration between well-credentialed investigators. Yet another is having the backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution.

Peer review is lauded by people who either (A) don't know anything about research, or (B) do research without stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution. Its chief proponents are the publications and conferences themselves, whose entire business model depends upon a perception of the elevated status of peer review.

Plenty of fictitious and fraudulent claims have been validated by peer review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...

If you want to review the research, read it yourself and evaluate the methodology.

What is a "well-credentialed" Investigator if it's not measured by peer review? It seems to me like an argument from authority, which is ten thousand times worse than "problematic peer review" you claim. Define well-credentialed without peer review without a cycle please.

What is "backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution"? They already exist, they are called journals, which perform, surprise, peer reviews. Other alternatives you mention are probably private organizations, you seriously believe it's less problematic than already less problematic journals? Much naivety in this argument.

Peer review has its problems, but as you've been told before, it's the best we have come up with. Your proposals are much worse than what we have.

If you are a "brand name" researcher (i.e. already well known and respected by your peers) peer review is even less meaningful as it's pretty much a rubber stamp.

It's not like many of these fields are just starting up.

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...

Studies that don't replicate are cited at the same rate as those that do:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...

This year I've read a lot of epidemiology papers, and sometimes their peer reviews. There's something deeply wrong with peer reviewers in this field because they often write long, detailed reviews that completely ignore glaring problems in the papers, problems that jump out to 'lay' readers on the first glance through. My guess is that there are very complicated sets of unwritten rules about the sorts of problems that are and are not legitimate to criticise in peer reviews, and problems that are a little bit too fundamental, of the form "this entire paper should be rejected out of hand", don't get given when a paper has 25 authors at prestigious universities, even if the methodology or conclusions are absurd.

But in fields that the method is closer to science (e.g. physics, chemistry, neuroscience), I would expect that the overall field is converging to the truth and that senior authors will therefore be more tuned in to the best estimate of truth or how to get to it than junior authors.

Even in microbiology there are a huge number of papers that don't replicate.

To me it looks like the problems are general. They aren't restricted to a small set of social sciences.

While plenty of bad claims have been validate by peer review, it doesn't mean that peer review doesn't massively reduce the number of outrageously incorrect claims.

In any case, as it stands, the NAS article wouldn't pass peer review, because it makes borderline unphysical claims without providing enough evidence, even though doing so is quite easy. As for stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution, one of the authors is fairly kooky and the institute itself has a massive conflict of interest.

There's a reason even the State Department is distancing itself from this thesis.

Overall, FND seems to be the most plausible explanation at the moment.

As mentioned elsewhere though, signals intelligence at diplomatic posts (see Stateroom and the SCS) would likely have detected at least lower frequency microwave energy. At higher frequencies it is less commonly used for communications and hence less likely to be monitored.

Don't know why everyone is expecting solid proof here. There's a reasonable chance this would have been detected, but we're unlikely to know even if it was. Microwaves are still a plausible explanation.

Occam's razor. Doctors see these symptoms many times every day. For some reason, embassy staff are different from the rest of us humans, and we have to concoct some incredibly implausible reason for their symptoms.

"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day" Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.

The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before. The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.

It's fair to invoke Occam's razor if you need an immediate hard conclusion but there's no reason for experts to not explore this and state what they're finding. The problem is when there are so many non-experts with limited information jumping to the conclusion that this must be nothing but a drum beat-up to war because of the conspiracy amongst warmongers for which there is also no proof.

If it is due to some weapon, the operation would be designed to be unattributable. And if it could be attributed no one is going to tip their hand as to their capability of finding out. So we're unlikely to get solid proof for any of this and need to follow up on plausible explanations. I said that microwaves are a one, not saying other explanations aren't also. And I'm not rushing to conclusions.

There are no brain abnormalities. They simply found different values for grey/white matter in certain areas of the brain from controls, but these values vary among the population, and it isn't evidence of brain damage.

>"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day" Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.

Indeed, and these symptoms can be very serious in many cases (having experienced them myself, to a much worse degree of impairment than described here).

>The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before.The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.

It's not "nothing". FND (and variations thereof) is incredibly serious, and not "mass hysteria", and it is the most common complaint seen by neurologists. People who actually understand about FND are saying it is the most plausible explanation for these symptoms:

https://www.edinburghneuroscience.ed.ac.uk/news/functional-n...

From what I understand, you're saying the FND occurrence rate among these embassy workers is the same as that of the general population, but for some presumably conspiratorial reason, they're being treated specially.

Let's give credit to the many neurologists on this who know about FND, and many other disorders, and assume that they and the authors probably have considered it.

No, not conspiratorial. People just don't like functional disorders, as they think it means they are weak/crazy/lazy etc. Having recovered from CFS, I have seen this preducice first-hand.

>Let's give credit to the many neurologists on this who know about FND, and many other disorders, and assume that they and the authors probably have considered it.

Unfortunately FND (and functional disorders in general) are very misunderstood by almost everyone, including the authors of this report (they say that vestibular and balance symptoms would be "hallucinations" and are very uncommon, and liken them to schizophrenia).

According to the DanFunD study, the prevalence of functional disorders is about 16% in the general population (which includes all the symptoms being discussed).

The report stated that they were lacking too much data to determine it was a mass psychogenic illness, and could not make a conclusion on the subject. It would still fit the available data though.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/201911/...

That doesn't make sense, because the supposed culprits in the narrative are non-Cubans.

That’s the rather tidy thing about claiming to be attacked by a weapon no one can see and that leaves no evidence of use: you’re free to build theories that suit your geopolitical ambitions.

If you believe that there are several diplomats with real injuries and persistent symptoms, then it stands to reason that something happened. No amount of FUD can controvert that.

Personally I have no geopolitical ambitions. What I do have is a great deal of faith in the American investigative apparatus, and none whatsoever in the honesty of Russia and China.

The twitter thread mentions this. It involved a bombardment of microwave rays that was detected. How would a similar attack evade detection now?

>The twitter thread’s main objection seems to be that the US is not publishing plans describing the secret Russian weapon.

Even without publishing the plans, if you think a microwave weapon caused this event you should be able to explain how it would function.

>Now that he’s on the way out, it’s not surprising they’re beginning to take action.

Taking action is a report that took months to complete with no strong conclusion?

Sounds like something they could have worked on in the past half-century. Detection of a narrowly focused burst of radiation would be fairly challenging if you're outside of whatever volumetric detection zone is generated by the attack device.

How would you differentiate it from other RF interference?

> if you think a microwave weapon caused this event you should be able to explain how it would function.

I don't see what exists to be gained by explaining the function of a weapon that jeopardizes and frightens your diplomats. If the claims are true, then there is nobody to convince here; the US is going to act internally on its own information, and the alleged foreign actors involved are going to spread their own disinformation accordingly.

Even if you make an effort to concentrate the effect in a specific spot (e.g. phased array antennas), you can only achieve a moderate reduction (e.g. 1-2 orders of magnitude) outside the central lobe. It will be easily detectable outside the effective area.

Why would that be more frightening than releasing a report saying they were probably attacked by an unknown microwave weapon?

I think a radiation beam powerful enough to hurt people as described but able to avoid detection seems unlikely. Anything similar to interference is unlikely to cause damage.

Citation needed.

IIRC, most diplomats live in private residential areas, not in an embassy compound.

You seem to be assuming US intelligence is as scarily competent as it is in the movies.

For instance even if they did test something similar 50 years ago, in the real world, all the people with that expertise would have retired long ago. To put it in perspective (with an imperfect analogy): 50 years ago, software engineers were writing code in COBOL and IBM 360 assembler, how quickly would a senior Java developer be able to parachute in and figure out and fix a subtle bug in an application written with those technologies?

But since we are entertaining conspiracies, what if US also is using this weapon, then they won't want to admit it and give clues on how to prove it was used.

My opinion(very uninformed) is that it is more probable that if a device is involved then it is some kind of spying/scanning tool and not a weapon.

I see what you did there!