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Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies. They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solv
by cjbprime 8y ago
Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies. They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to notice the same due to limitations of peer review in catching results that were created by some form of chance.
This result looks very exciting and if it replicates and is built upon in five years' time then we can all talk about it then, you know?
I note that Science Translational Medicine's impact factor is not awesome. But even that doesn't mean much to me: lately it feels like _Science_ and _Nature_ are in fact especially likely to collect results that are very exciting and also wrong, because they feel like they're the best journals so their results should be surprising.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> lately it feels like _Science_ and _Nature_ are in fact especially likely to collect results that are very exciting and also wrong, because they feel like they're the best journals so their results should be surprising. I believe this is accurate on all counts. Slate Star Codex put the issue fairly pithily: there's only one way to get surprising-if-true results that isn't surprising.
- steve19 8y agoCan you explain the joke?
- outlace 8y agoThe only way to get a surprising-if-true result that is not surprising is if the result is not true. Hence the joke is that most of these surprising findings are probably B.S.
- dekhn 8y agoHere's how I explain it: Science and Nature play a role different from other journals. Their role is to stimulate new thoughts amongst the most skilled in the field. Any really good scientist in a field can read a paper published by another really good scientist and hone away the bullshit, but be inspired by the ideas. People who are not skilled in the art of reading a competitive paper are going to be disappointed by the sloppy lab work, sloppy writing, sloppy thinking, because it appears that the overall benefit of disseminating new ideas widely for experts to cogitate on may exceed the value from having "perfectly correct" papers. Case in point: the original DNA structure paper (W&C, 1953) actually had a wrong detailed structure for the DNA (but the right conclusion about how the structure provided a hypothesis for a templating mechanism) because the alcohol concentration used to form the crystal was too high. The value of getting the paper out the community ASAP greatly exceeded the small details that were wrong (which eventually got resolved), because it stimulated the thought of the community around the templating mechanism.
- dralley 8y agoObligatory: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ScienceNewsCycle.gif http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ScienceNewsCycle.gif
- autokad 8y agoone of the authors discovered prions, so I am not so quick to discount their work.
- 8note 8y agothat's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it
- brownbat 8y agoThis fallacy is usually taught as appeal to irrelevant authority. It concerns relying on those who purport to be experts but lack any actual expertise. "The ad verecundiam fallacy concerns appeals to authority or expertise. Fundamentally, the fallacy involves accepting as evidence for a proposition the pronouncement of someone who is taken to be an authority but is not really an authority." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (9): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/ Here we have a researcher who is an expert in the thing he's talking about. There are still absolutely reasons to be guarded-- the matter is not fully decided, it's just one study. Maybe this is an example of an ongoing controversy, and we're selectively ignoring other experts? But it is different to extend a cautious benefit of the doubt here than it would be to take, say, Paul Rudd's word on the topic as final.
- arcticbull 8y agoParent is right this is an appeal to authority. It doesn’t make it more or less right whether a Nobel prize winner comes up with the idea or my mom does, we need to evaluate it on its merits alone. The corollary as I mentioned in a sibling post is that when you have a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.
- mikeash 8y agoWe rely on a million appeals to authority every day of our lives. Try some new food, trusting that it won’t kill you because somebody says it won’t, and nobody bats an eye. Say you give more weight to a study performed by an expert, when that has no immediate bearing on your life, and everybody loses their mind.
- traek 8y agoSure, but this particular study came out of the lab of the Nobel-prize-winning scientist who literally discovered prions. I think it's at least worthy of discussion.
- Marsymars 8y agoPrusiner has been on the path to this study for quite a while, at least since a talk of his I attended in 2011.
- dnautics 8y agoHe was on that path in 1999 when I skipped a day of high school to attend a lecture he gave. (I also later became a prion researcher, specifically in a lab that worked with Alzheimer's).
- arcticbull 8y agoYou know what they say, when you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail. I’m an armchair physician at best, and I’d say that this doesn’t disprove the viral infection thesis at all. That amyloid and tau act as prions isn’t really relevant if they’re in fact produced initially in response to an infectious agent in an attempt to stop its spread. I’d suggest this is particularly likely to be true as attempts to clear out or suppress the amyloid and tau plaques in fact clear them out with no impact on cognition. This is mentioned in the article itself.
- dekhn 8y agoplaques are proxies of disease, not disease-causing or necessarily harmful in themselves.
- arcticbull 8y agoPardon me if I misread, it seemed that the thesis here was Amyloid and Tau 'prion' self-propagation was being identified as a cause of Alzheimers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- barrystaes 8y ago> Y'all Instant throwback to 1997's Redneck Rampage game about US hillbillys..
- dang 8y agoCan you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rossenberg79 8y agoThe worst part is that while articles about a disease like this are a mere annoyance to us, for people with loved ones with the disease or suffering from the disease itself it becomes a cruel joke. These are people who scour the internet looking for any information they can find and carefully read articles like this looking for a bit of hope that there may be a solution. But it’s bullshit. Don’t share these articles, for their sake.
- cjbprime 8y agoTotally agree.
- jacques_chester 8y agoI'm the OP. I do not have, but I am personally affected, by this disease. I appreciate your point, but this is one of the more interesting alternative hypotheses I've seen in the past ~8 years as an unwillingly-interested layperson.
- dekhn 8y agosenior author of the article was the person who established that prions are a legitimate disease caused by protein folding he had to fight an uphill battle for over 20 years to get his ideas established so I'm going to actually give him a ton of credit and the ability to publish what he wants to because he's already demonstrated he's responsible. He also won the Nobel prize for that work.
- cjbprime 8y agoYou could modify your belief in his authority based on the fact that this result was presumably rejected by top-tier journals, and probably for non-trivial reasons. I don't know anything about the field so I can't say whether that's appropriate here. But if you're willing to grant credence based on a prior Nobel, you should be willing to consider taking some away based on the publishing journal's reputation. Why wouldn't a top-tier journal want to publish a Nobel winner's Alzheimer's breakthrough?
- dekhn 8y agoWhere did you get the idea his work was rejected? Also, his work was rejected by top journals for decades until people finally realized he was correct.
- jessriedel 8y agoIf it could have been published in Science, then it wouldn't have been submitted to Science Translational Medicine, a completely different journal with much less visibility (and a much lower impact factor). For some of these Nobel guys you could argue they want to avoid supporting the flashy magazines and don't care about getting into the high impact journals because they are already established, but in this case he actually submitted to a Science-family journal, so he's very unlikely to be making some principled stand.
- dekhn 8y agoYou claim is entirely speculative. There may be good reasons why it didn't show in Science (page space is extremely limited)