<story><title>A prospective Alzheimer’s trial reports</title><url>https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/02/10/a-prospective-alzheimers-trial-reports</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>As I tell my students all the time -- properly-executed, an experiment that doesn&amp;#x27;t work is not a failure.  If you don&amp;#x27;t internalize this idea, you will find experimental physics to be psychologically untenable.&lt;p&gt;If you build an experiment (at any scale) to test out an idea that you think is going to work, and it doesn&amp;#x27;t work, &lt;i&gt;you made progress&lt;/i&gt;. Now you know something really essential -- that thing that seemed like a well-motivated idea has some kind of unknown flaw. With that in hand, you can proceed to try something better, whether it is a refined approach or something entirely new.&lt;p&gt;Without doing the experiment, that well-motivated idea would still look like something worth trying.&lt;p&gt;If a large team of people were willing to spend years and lots of resources on an Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s clinical trial, it was likely to be because they thought it had a real chance of working. If it didn&amp;#x27;t work, we all benefit from their effort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dekhn</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in both experimental physics and experimental biology (specifically in drug discovery, an early phase that can lead to clinical trials).&lt;p&gt;Failed experiments in biology don&amp;#x27;t make much progress compared to failed experiments in physics.  beyond the inability to control for wide range of variables that are normally managed in physics, most people in biology aren&amp;#x27;t good at running high quality, reproducible experiments that falsify hypothesis.  I have seen many coworkers run the same exact gel over and over until they get one that &amp;quot;looks like what they were expecting&amp;quot;.  I don&amp;#x27;t see the same level of experimental inadequacy in physics.&lt;p&gt;The best approaches in biology now seem to throw away the idea that we can construct a rational narrative to explain the biology that causes a complex disease, and more on collecting very large amounts of high quality data to produce sophisticated statistical models that deal with the underlying complexity in a useful way.</text></comment>
<story><title>A prospective Alzheimer’s trial reports</title><url>https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/02/10/a-prospective-alzheimers-trial-reports</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>As I tell my students all the time -- properly-executed, an experiment that doesn&amp;#x27;t work is not a failure.  If you don&amp;#x27;t internalize this idea, you will find experimental physics to be psychologically untenable.&lt;p&gt;If you build an experiment (at any scale) to test out an idea that you think is going to work, and it doesn&amp;#x27;t work, &lt;i&gt;you made progress&lt;/i&gt;. Now you know something really essential -- that thing that seemed like a well-motivated idea has some kind of unknown flaw. With that in hand, you can proceed to try something better, whether it is a refined approach or something entirely new.&lt;p&gt;Without doing the experiment, that well-motivated idea would still look like something worth trying.&lt;p&gt;If a large team of people were willing to spend years and lots of resources on an Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s clinical trial, it was likely to be because they thought it had a real chance of working. If it didn&amp;#x27;t work, we all benefit from their effort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hprotagonist</author><text>The issue here is that for the past 25 years, multiple teams have spent years and lots of resources on the same idea despite it failing to work every previous time.&lt;p&gt;Negative results are valuable. The same negative result over and over starts to feel a lot more like sunk-cost fallacy.</text></comment>