<story><title>Faked Beta-Amyloid Data. What Does It Mean?</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lettergram</author><text>To quote someone I know in Alzheimer research - “I’m pretty sure it’s all fake”&lt;p&gt;It’s funny because more than once I’ve had conversations off-the-record with people who had the same concerns.&lt;p&gt;What I think is most troubling is how long it took and how many papers support the claims.&lt;p&gt;In other words, there are thousands of papers supporting beta-amyloid and&amp;#x2F;or building off the data &amp;#x2F; theory. All of that data and everyone conducting that data should be in question. Yes, sometimes you’ll see correlations even though the mechanism is not what you’d expect. That said, for 16 years? Lol&lt;p&gt;No, in reality, this should indicate there is systemic fraud in the industry. I don’t think everyone’s a fraud, it’s as much about what doesn’t get published as what does get published. How does this happen? I commented on incentives prior here:  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;reply?id=32213123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;reply?id=32213123&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I personally don’t see how we can advance science with the current credentialing and paper citation == academic success we’ve seen grow the last 50 years. In many ways, fundamental research has stalled, with applications of research advancing (giving us the illusion of advancing the fundamentals).&lt;p&gt;To fix this problem, an overhaul is needed. Most importantly, the gate keeping mechanisms should be removed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fossuser</author><text>These trends have a long history.&lt;p&gt;Halsted&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;radical mastectomy&amp;#x27; was similar. He had an incorrect theory of cancer (centrifugal spiral) that caused a lot of unnecessary harm, but it was not possible for people to push back against it because of his status in the community (iirc pushback eventually came from someone doing research in London where Halsted was less powerful). The emperor of all maladies is a great book about cancer generally which touches on this.&lt;p&gt;Mendel&amp;#x27;s peas are another example - breakthrough that went ignored for 40 years because Mendel was a nobody and biologists of the time had their own nonsense theories not backed by real empiricism.&lt;p&gt;Phlogiston, Elan Vital, etc. - a little different since they weren&amp;#x27;t even pretending to be empirically true. Just people making stuff up.&lt;p&gt;Falling into made up tribal nonsense is the default state of humanity - even for scientists, it&amp;#x27;s hard to think independently to overcome that. At least scientists are supposed to have that as a goal, but focusing on this difficulty and how we&amp;#x27;re all affected by it does lead to better thinking imo - at least it helps recognize these failures as they&amp;#x27;re happening more quickly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Faked Beta-Amyloid Data. What Does It Mean?</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lettergram</author><text>To quote someone I know in Alzheimer research - “I’m pretty sure it’s all fake”&lt;p&gt;It’s funny because more than once I’ve had conversations off-the-record with people who had the same concerns.&lt;p&gt;What I think is most troubling is how long it took and how many papers support the claims.&lt;p&gt;In other words, there are thousands of papers supporting beta-amyloid and&amp;#x2F;or building off the data &amp;#x2F; theory. All of that data and everyone conducting that data should be in question. Yes, sometimes you’ll see correlations even though the mechanism is not what you’d expect. That said, for 16 years? Lol&lt;p&gt;No, in reality, this should indicate there is systemic fraud in the industry. I don’t think everyone’s a fraud, it’s as much about what doesn’t get published as what does get published. How does this happen? I commented on incentives prior here:  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;reply?id=32213123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;reply?id=32213123&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I personally don’t see how we can advance science with the current credentialing and paper citation == academic success we’ve seen grow the last 50 years. In many ways, fundamental research has stalled, with applications of research advancing (giving us the illusion of advancing the fundamentals).&lt;p&gt;To fix this problem, an overhaul is needed. Most importantly, the gate keeping mechanisms should be removed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>It’s okay to recognize a problem without proposing a solution. I agree that there are alarming levels of fraud. But heading straight to “tear down the journals” seems mistaken.&lt;p&gt;New progress is rarely made by burning down old structures. New work tends to transcend old work. So the best way to remove the gate keeping mechanisms is to make them irrelevant.&lt;p&gt;I suspect that a few more generations of tech progress might make that a reality. It seems like a matter of time till some teenage upstart is hacking on their brain the same way I hack on ML, for better or worse. And teenagers tend to notice correlations that the old guard miss.&lt;p&gt;We’re just not there yet. And that’s fine. Our options are to work within the confines of existing systems, or build new systems. Removing mechanisms is a bit like removing a dam because it’s leaking. The best strategy is probably to fix the leaks.</text></comment>