8 ms·

We need to throw out a mindblowing amount of science and start again

33 points by lemming 6y ago

rpiguyshy 6y ago
saturated animal fat does not, by itself, cause heart disease.
- throwawaygimp 6y ago
  driving a car does not, by itself, cause car accidents
  - rpiguyshy 6y ago
    and people who say that saturated fat causes heart disease are like people who say we should stop driving cars because they have been shown to raise death rates. there is no randomized trial that shows saturated fat is harmful. there is no study where people were assembled, divided randomly into fat + and fat - groups, kept under supervision and only allowed to eat the meals provided by the study (without being excluded from the study). it is so blindingly simple and yet nobody does it. meanwhile, our ancestors ate nothing but meat for millions of years.
    - throwawaygimp 6y ago
      > meanwhile, our ancestors ate nothing but meat for millions of years Our ancestors ate almost entirely plants. Even we modern humans only recently started getting a significant proportion of our caleries from meat/animal fat. Now we have cardiovascular diseases being the main cause of death and one of the leading causes of poor quality life in peoples final years. It's unfortunate
rpiguyshy 6y ago
vaccines do cause autism, as do regular infections and other forms of stress. these things also cause chronic fatigue syndrome, and the two are intimately related. these diseases and many other well known diseases are all basically the same disease and they will be resolved in what will be known as the "metabolic revolution" in medicine. the reason why the studies done so far have not been able to find a link between vaccines and autism is that they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism. even though there is a connection between vaccines and autism, vaccines save too many lives for any rational person to want to stop their administration. https://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/ https://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/
- amcoastal 6y ago
  lmfao
- simondw 6y ago
  > they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism Fortunately, we have figured out how to tease out the influence of a single variable among many: test vs. control groups. If the sample size is large enough, most variables will average out to have the same effect in both groups.
  - rpiguyshy 6y ago
    there has not been a single randomized large scale study on any vaccine that investigates its relationship to autism. without that, the bars are too big. and the relationship is extremely tiny. from a practical perspective, it isnt even worth going after. the studies that have been done so far prove that it wouldnt be worth it to stop vaccinations, not even close. but they dont definitively disprove a connection. they only disprove a meaningful connection.
    - arein2 6y ago
      I saw a funny facebook group that convinced me that people whose children's lives were ruined by vaccines are dumb. And not just dumb but very dumb. Because if it's SCIENCE you have to believe it. Never mind the countless examples where the science is political and motivated by money.
- arein2 6y ago
  Not sure why you are downvoted. Maybe because your comment is not the assuring "vaccines don't cause autism" and people already chose the assuring narative. Vaccines do cause a lot of bad stuff, however for mass population it makes sense to vaccinate, as the benefits outweight the drawbacks.
  - solarmist 6y ago
    How about the “are all basically the same disease and they will be resolved in what will be known as the "metabolic revolution" in medicine” part? If that’s not snake oil I don’t know what is.
JungleGymSam 6y ago
Let's be sure to keep the science that says there are more than two genders. Because _that_ is definitely very much science!
- czzr 6y ago
  Well, yes, it is. Not sure what point you’re trying to make?
  - arein2 6y ago
    The point is obvious. This is not science but politics.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      This is very much science - see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-pe...
      - arein2 6y ago
        So the author argues that trans people's receptors are inhibited and estrogen helps unihibit them. Why is then transition from female to male allowed, this would inhibit the estrogen and worsen the situation. Putting kids on hormones is wrong. I am thinking about the next nareative, and I am pretty sure it's going to be pedophilia.
        selimthegrim 6y ago
        If you read the article FtM people dissociate too - the dissociation is the point. Why do you club this with pedophilia or think it's going to be the next narrative?
        arein2 6y ago
        The stuff they are doing to trans people - hormones to change the traits, cutting off genitals is very strange, and the people who enable that are sick. https://i.imgur.com/p1AFgjL.png https://i.imgur.com/p1AFgjL.png not sure if this is real, but might be. The same sick people are giving orphan kids for adoption to pedophile parents in Germany https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-with-pedophiles-for-30-years/a-53814208 https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-wit... All this stuff is used to confuse people into submission to nonsense, and after some years when the trans narrative is worn out something new will have to appear, and looks like pedophilia is a good candidate. I also think we will have implanted cips in the future. Everybody ridicules people that say that Bill Gates wants to cip people because it's too ridiculous. But I think we are not too far away from that (maybe 20 years). Social Credit Score is doing well in China, and there is https://id2020.org/ https://id2020.org/ by Microsoft and Gavi The Vaccine Alliance. When I read the website I can't not laugh. They present the idea in a nice way but if you look trough it is actually just enabling government to have maximum control over you. Also there is this phrase: But doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties and putting control over personal data back where it belongs...in the hands of the individual.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
I don't agree with everything in this article (I don't disagree with everything either), but that being said, I liked the following quoted text: >"By the mid 2000s there was also an extensive body of work on the biology behind the gene’s function and malfunction. And all of this was part of a much wider field of research called candidate gene association studies, a methodology that enjoyed massive media exposure from the early 90s to the late 2000s as biologists identified the genes they claimed were responsible for obesity, mental illness, diabetes, addiction, gambling, cancer, crime, and numerous other behavioural disorders and diseases. This was a golden age for high-profile genetics research. Almost every week brought another announcement that a candidate gene for some social problem or illness had been found. And, these announcements concluded, now that the gene causing the problem was known and the biological nature of the malady identified, a cure was surely close. Grants were funded and biotech companies were launched, billions of dollars were invested and exciting new technologies were trialed, all based on candidate gene discoveries. And none of them worked because all of this was bullshit."
arein2 6y ago
Some time ago corruption was direct. Now a lot of corruption and business is done trough "science". If any science is related to politics or there is some business/financial incentive I just assume it's skewed. Take for example the harvard study that is responsible for the US obesity. The study found that sugar does not make you fat, because of food conpanies. Or the guy that discovered the ulcer cause and cure. It was ignored because the fake ulcer treatment industry was a multi billion dollar one. The "I F***g LOVE science" guys that will beleive anything, because SCIENCE are the worst
- genericone 6y ago
  I think you are being downvoted for your overloading of the word science exactly the way politics has corrupted it. Are we supposed to just start using another word? How about we start calling it rationality? A bit more self-descriptive, and perhaps a harder to word to weigh down with political gibberish and marketing speak. Scientific Method -> Rational Method, For Science! -> For Rationality! Science traditionally demanded speaking in clear terms, now it is all about obscuring incentives and methods in order to P-hack a conclusion.
  - arein2 6y ago
    The math and physics are exact sciences, I am assuming there is no way to fool that. For the "non-exact" ones there is always possibility of corruption. I think the current establishment for some areas in science is politicised, and there is a system in place - you have to be published in certain prestigious publications to receive money, but if you do not follow the political status quo, everybody will cut ties with you. I guess more transparency about data collected and videos of experiments would help, but I don't think that's a solution. This is a problem only few worry about, the system is perfectly happy the way it is. This whole incentive - corruption relation reminds me about greek democracy: You want to chose the leader that doesn't want to be chosen, so that he would not have incentives. The athenians also chose people at random instead of elections, to minimize the chance of picking someone with special interests.
- rangoon626 6y ago
robwwilliams 6y ago
I have not read the book Science Fictions, but will comment that the core problem in academic science is the intense structural reward of telling “stories” rather than focusing on high quality data generation and robust causal models. A snappy story gets you a paper in Cell, Science, or Nature, a grant award, and promotion. That is the pressure driving many of the distortions. In contrast, a decade-long effort to generate foundational data sets gets you a footnote or acknowledgement. Think Tycho Brahe versus Copernicus. The imperative of generating snappy, and preferably simple series of stories is that scientists focus intensely on reductionist systems and neat little “mechanisms”. To get to mechanism, the modus operandi is to trim away fundamental system complexity. Complex state-dependent feedback systems get converted into sad but comprehensible cartoons. And we are surprised that findings do not replicate? The one phrase that makes me cringe in the biomedical literature is “necessary and sufficient”. In your dreams! Yuri Lazebnik’s wonderful “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio” is a classic commentary published in 2002, well worth reading in this context. “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor” by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording (2017, PLoS Comp Biology) is the update for all of you on Hacker News. The current structure of science usually does not reward high quality persistent data and metadata. This seems antithetical to what we are usual taught about the scientific method. The reality is that doing data justice has been getting lip service from day 1. I still see little evidence of serious efforts in this regard (genomics being a welcome exception) since the true cost of data preservation and sharing is staggering. A salutary final note from Richard Hamming, that I do not mean in any way as an excuse: “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.” In both cases though high quality data/metadata are just as important—perhaps more so, than the big ideas.
jariel 6y ago
I wonder if there is a way to award points for 'effort' and 'ingenuity'. Maybe PhDs should be able to give out points there to offset the fact that most experiments aren't going to show much. Maybe there's a correlation between what we recognize as 'thoughtful experiments' and 'good outcomes'. Or just some other measure other than 'non-nill results' otherwise everyone will be predisposed towards those.
HaoZeke 6y ago
An overly click baity title which actually refers to the well known reproducibility crisis. It is also unfair to paint with such a brush. Biology and the medical sciences have always been less exact and more malleable.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> Which is to say: how much science only looks like science but has no actual truth value because it’s junk science that just hasn’t been debunked yet? I wonder, if every scientific theory that is eventually disproved "only looks like science but has no actualy truth value", how about Newtonian physics? Was that "junk science that just hadn't been debunked" until Einstein and General Relativity? Are all scientists who have followed an avenue of research that didn't pan out in the end quacks, pseuds and wackos? Or is there maybe a simpler, more nuanced view that doesn't happen to tar every past generation of science with a very offensive brush?

33 points by lemming 6y ago

rpiguyshy 6y ago

saturated animal fat does not, by itself, cause heart disease.

throwawaygimp 6y ago
driving a car does not, by itself, cause car accidents
- rpiguyshy 6y ago
  and people who say that saturated fat causes heart disease are like people who say we should stop driving cars because they have been shown to raise death rates. there is no randomized trial that shows saturated fat is harmful. there is no study where people were assembled, divided randomly into fat + and fat - groups, kept under supervision and only allowed to eat the meals provided by the study (without being excluded from the study). it is so blindingly simple and yet nobody does it. meanwhile, our ancestors ate nothing but meat for millions of years.
  - throwawaygimp 6y ago
    > meanwhile, our ancestors ate nothing but meat for millions of years Our ancestors ate almost entirely plants. Even we modern humans only recently started getting a significant proportion of our caleries from meat/animal fat. Now we have cardiovascular diseases being the main cause of death and one of the leading causes of poor quality life in peoples final years. It's unfortunate

rpiguyshy 6y ago

vaccines do cause autism, as do regular infections and other forms of stress. these things also cause chronic fatigue syndrome, and the two are intimately related. these diseases and many other well known diseases are all basically the same disease and they will be resolved in what will be known as the "metabolic revolution" in medicine. the reason why the studies done so far have not been able to find a link between vaccines and autism is that they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism. even though there is a connection between vaccines and autism, vaccines save too many lives for any rational person to want to stop their administration. https://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/ https://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/

amcoastal 6y ago
lmfao
simondw 6y ago
> they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism Fortunately, we have figured out how to tease out the influence of a single variable among many: test vs. control groups. If the sample size is large enough, most variables will average out to have the same effect in both groups.
- rpiguyshy 6y ago
  there has not been a single randomized large scale study on any vaccine that investigates its relationship to autism. without that, the bars are too big. and the relationship is extremely tiny. from a practical perspective, it isnt even worth going after. the studies that have been done so far prove that it wouldnt be worth it to stop vaccinations, not even close. but they dont definitively disprove a connection. they only disprove a meaningful connection.
  - arein2 6y ago
    I saw a funny facebook group that convinced me that people whose children's lives were ruined by vaccines are dumb. And not just dumb but very dumb. Because if it's SCIENCE you have to believe it. Never mind the countless examples where the science is political and motivated by money.
arein2 6y ago
Not sure why you are downvoted. Maybe because your comment is not the assuring "vaccines don't cause autism" and people already chose the assuring narative. Vaccines do cause a lot of bad stuff, however for mass population it makes sense to vaccinate, as the benefits outweight the drawbacks.
- solarmist 6y ago
  How about the “are all basically the same disease and they will be resolved in what will be known as the "metabolic revolution" in medicine” part? If that’s not snake oil I don’t know what is.

JungleGymSam 6y ago

Let's be sure to keep the science that says there are more than two genders. Because _that_ is definitely very much science!

czzr 6y ago
Well, yes, it is. Not sure what point you’re trying to make?
- arein2 6y ago
  The point is obvious. This is not science but politics.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    This is very much science - see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-pe...
    - arein2 6y ago
      So the author argues that trans people's receptors are inhibited and estrogen helps unihibit them. Why is then transition from female to male allowed, this would inhibit the estrogen and worsen the situation. Putting kids on hormones is wrong. I am thinking about the next nareative, and I am pretty sure it's going to be pedophilia.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        If you read the article FtM people dissociate too - the dissociation is the point. Why do you club this with pedophilia or think it's going to be the next narrative?
        arein2 6y ago
        The stuff they are doing to trans people - hormones to change the traits, cutting off genitals is very strange, and the people who enable that are sick. https://i.imgur.com/p1AFgjL.png https://i.imgur.com/p1AFgjL.png not sure if this is real, but might be. The same sick people are giving orphan kids for adoption to pedophile parents in Germany https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-with-pedophiles-for-30-years/a-53814208 https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-wit... All this stuff is used to confuse people into submission to nonsense, and after some years when the trans narrative is worn out something new will have to appear, and looks like pedophilia is a good candidate. I also think we will have implanted cips in the future. Everybody ridicules people that say that Bill Gates wants to cip people because it's too ridiculous. But I think we are not too far away from that (maybe 20 years). Social Credit Score is doing well in China, and there is https://id2020.org/ https://id2020.org/ by Microsoft and Gavi The Vaccine Alliance. When I read the website I can't not laugh. They present the idea in a nice way but if you look trough it is actually just enabling government to have maximum control over you. Also there is this phrase: But doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties and putting control over personal data back where it belongs...in the hands of the individual.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

I don't agree with everything in this article (I don't disagree with everything either), but that being said, I liked the following quoted text: >"By the mid 2000s there was also an extensive body of work on the biology behind the gene’s function and malfunction. And all of this was part of a much wider field of research called candidate gene association studies, a methodology that enjoyed massive media exposure from the early 90s to the late 2000s as biologists identified the genes they claimed were responsible for obesity, mental illness, diabetes, addiction, gambling, cancer, crime, and numerous other behavioural disorders and diseases. This was a golden age for high-profile genetics research. Almost every week brought another announcement that a candidate gene for some social problem or illness had been found. And, these announcements concluded, now that the gene causing the problem was known and the biological nature of the malady identified, a cure was surely close. Grants were funded and biotech companies were launched, billions of dollars were invested and exciting new technologies were trialed, all based on candidate gene discoveries. And none of them worked because all of this was bullshit."

arein2 6y ago

Some time ago corruption was direct. Now a lot of corruption and business is done trough "science". If any science is related to politics or there is some business/financial incentive I just assume it's skewed. Take for example the harvard study that is responsible for the US obesity. The study found that sugar does not make you fat, because of food conpanies. Or the guy that discovered the ulcer cause and cure. It was ignored because the fake ulcer treatment industry was a multi billion dollar one. The "I F***g LOVE science" guys that will beleive anything, because SCIENCE are the worst

genericone 6y ago
I think you are being downvoted for your overloading of the word science exactly the way politics has corrupted it. Are we supposed to just start using another word? How about we start calling it rationality? A bit more self-descriptive, and perhaps a harder to word to weigh down with political gibberish and marketing speak. Scientific Method -> Rational Method, For Science! -> For Rationality! Science traditionally demanded speaking in clear terms, now it is all about obscuring incentives and methods in order to P-hack a conclusion.
- arein2 6y ago
  The math and physics are exact sciences, I am assuming there is no way to fool that. For the "non-exact" ones there is always possibility of corruption. I think the current establishment for some areas in science is politicised, and there is a system in place - you have to be published in certain prestigious publications to receive money, but if you do not follow the political status quo, everybody will cut ties with you. I guess more transparency about data collected and videos of experiments would help, but I don't think that's a solution. This is a problem only few worry about, the system is perfectly happy the way it is. This whole incentive - corruption relation reminds me about greek democracy: You want to chose the leader that doesn't want to be chosen, so that he would not have incentives. The athenians also chose people at random instead of elections, to minimize the chance of picking someone with special interests.
rangoon626 6y ago

robwwilliams 6y ago

I have not read the book Science Fictions, but will comment that the core problem in academic science is the intense structural reward of telling “stories” rather than focusing on high quality data generation and robust causal models. A snappy story gets you a paper in Cell, Science, or Nature, a grant award, and promotion. That is the pressure driving many of the distortions. In contrast, a decade-long effort to generate foundational data sets gets you a footnote or acknowledgement. Think Tycho Brahe versus Copernicus. The imperative of generating snappy, and preferably simple series of stories is that scientists focus intensely on reductionist systems and neat little “mechanisms”. To get to mechanism, the modus operandi is to trim away fundamental system complexity. Complex state-dependent feedback systems get converted into sad but comprehensible cartoons. And we are surprised that findings do not replicate? The one phrase that makes me cringe in the biomedical literature is “necessary and sufficient”. In your dreams! Yuri Lazebnik’s wonderful “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio” is a classic commentary published in 2002, well worth reading in this context. “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor” by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording (2017, PLoS Comp Biology) is the update for all of you on Hacker News. The current structure of science usually does not reward high quality persistent data and metadata. This seems antithetical to what we are usual taught about the scientific method. The reality is that doing data justice has been getting lip service from day 1. I still see little evidence of serious efforts in this regard (genomics being a welcome exception) since the true cost of data preservation and sharing is staggering. A salutary final note from Richard Hamming, that I do not mean in any way as an excuse: “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.” In both cases though high quality data/metadata are just as important—perhaps more so, than the big ideas.

jariel 6y ago

I wonder if there is a way to award points for 'effort' and 'ingenuity'. Maybe PhDs should be able to give out points there to offset the fact that most experiments aren't going to show much. Maybe there's a correlation between what we recognize as 'thoughtful experiments' and 'good outcomes'. Or just some other measure other than 'non-nill results' otherwise everyone will be predisposed towards those.

HaoZeke 6y ago

An overly click baity title which actually refers to the well known reproducibility crisis. It is also unfair to paint with such a brush. Biology and the medical sciences have always been less exact and more malleable.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> Which is to say: how much science only looks like science but has no actual truth value because it’s junk science that just hasn’t been debunked yet? I wonder, if every scientific theory that is eventually disproved "only looks like science but has no actualy truth value", how about Newtonian physics? Was that "junk science that just hadn't been debunked" until Einstein and General Relativity? Are all scientists who have followed an avenue of research that didn't pan out in the end quacks, pseuds and wackos? Or is there maybe a simpler, more nuanced view that doesn't happen to tar every past generation of science with a very offensive brush?