10 ms·

FTA, contradicting the headline (emphasis mine): > Despite being described as a “cabal,” the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious. Those who champi

FTA, contradicting the headline (emphasis mine): > Despite being described as a “cabal,” the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious. Those who championed the amyloid hypothesis truly believed it, and thought that focusing money and attention on it rather than competing ideas was the surest way to an effective drug. This discrepancy indicates part of the problem: the investigators narrowing the search for causes honestly believe in what they're doing. The NIH review panelists really believe they're safeguarding the NIH budget, and the Pharma execs really believe they're wisely allocating their R&D budget.

jvanderbot 4y ago
Probably unrelated, but I've realized from dealing with certain people in the criminal justice system, that almost nobody believes they are evil or doing bad things. They just want to do what they think is right, believe that what they are doing is common and acceptable, think often justice takes strange forms, or otherwise can justify what they do till the day they die. The worse someone is, the more strongly they can justify what they do.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 300bps 4y ago
  Not unrelated at all. We judge ourselves by our intentions. We judge others by their actions. This leads to people with evil actions judging themselves as good. “I didn’t want to do it. They gave me no choice.”
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Do you think Adolf Eichmann saw himself as evil? I do not. He was “following orders” and thereby being good soldier. I would bet Hitler and Stalin also believed themselves to be good people. Same for most all dictators and mass murderers.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      Agreed. I don't think anyone can truly see themselves as evil. I think it would go against our very nature of self-preservation. The rare few that do probably commit suicide. I'm reminded of some murderers that know what they are doing is wrong and knowing they're mentally unwell and end up killing themselves.
      - macdust 4y ago
        I knew some who claimed to be evil, whose only regret was not being more famous for it.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I assume you're familiar, but a whole book was written about the various forms of evil perpetuated by the Nazi leadership. Eichmann isn't a good example- he knew he wasn't just following orders. The example you're thinking of is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Keitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Keitel who apparently wasn't even smart enough to realize the magnitude of what he was doing.
      - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        Yes, thanks for the clarification. My point still stands: I don’t think many people consider themselves evil or even consistently “doing bad”
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      I think it's a mistake to believe they all believed in good and evil in the first place. I don't. Those ideas exist for the purpose of domination. Social life, in that respect, is actually just conflict. Attempting to make ones will seem objective are what concepts like "good" and "evil" are for. Ethics should rather be focused on what we all want and equitable conflict resolution. Anyway, I think a lot of those people just reject the concepts as well, but probably for less enlightened reasons.
      - 4y ago
- tootie 4y ago
  Hannah Arendt proved this decades ago when she wrote of the "banality of evil" about her interviews with Adolph Eichmann.
nextos 4y ago
My experience is that many prominent professors behave in a monopolistic way. That is, they try to sabotage theses, grant applications and publications in review that go against their own research. Lots of different areas, particularly in medicine, have slowed down or stagnated as a consequence of this. For example, the connection between immunity and cancer was obvious in the 1990s but it took many uphill battles to get funding for immunotherapies. Proponents of somatic mutations as a cause of cancer have typically taken most of the research funds and blocked alternative ideas. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, T1D, etc. have pretty similar stories. Luckily less politically driven funding agencies and, ultimately, VCs are introducing some efficiency back into the system.
- forum_ghost 4y ago
  ...but VC and private equity funding for biotech has been available in the 90s too?
  - nextos 4y ago
    It was an order of magnitude more difficult to raise VC money for biotech back then. These days you can even raise a seed with no experimental data. That was extraordinarily unusual even well into the 2000s. There are articles around discussing how in case of Alzheimer's it was impossible to get VC funding for immune ideas, even though they already had interesting evidence. The same cabal was also blocking them. I think you need to be an insider to realize how incredibly political most research in medicine is.
    - throwaway5752 4y ago
      I have to ask, do you have experience in this area? Because it doesn't agree with my limited experience and I'm curious when/where you were involved with biotech startups and funding in the 90s/early 00s.
      - openknot 4y ago
        I'm an outsider, but to quote credible external sources, Science AAAS writer Derek Lowe documented that the biotech startup scene was large and relatively easier to get investments in from 1991 to 1994, with stagnation in 2012 [0]. McKinsey separately reported that there has since been another boom in the biotech sector in the 2020s [1]. [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-early-90s https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-earl... [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/whats-ahead-for-biotech-another-wave-or-low-tide https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insigh...
ncmncm 4y ago
In every case I have read about, their reasoning is that money for AS is so scarce that spreading it around means there is not enough for their wrinkle on blocking amyloids. They feel duty bound to sabotage anything that might dilute their thing. If it turns out to be an infection, their whole career has been a waste. Can they even find something to do, then?
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  It’s too bad all the quantitative easing money isn’t required by law to be directed only at funding basic science research, instead of buying assets. I suspect we would have much better returns.
dekhn 4y ago
Many of us have been pointing out the amyloid hypothesis was full of holes (heh) for two decades. the counterargument always was "we're looking for our keys where the streetlight is brightest, not building bigger flashlights"
derbOac 4y ago
I think there's another subtle or not-so subtle effect, which is pure peer pressure and trying to anticipate what will be popular. That is, the system is currently structured such that no one wants to put money into something that won't work. The problem with this is that that's almost required if you don't know what's going on: you have to fund a bunch of studies, 90% of which will fail, to find the 10% that don't. But no one -- absolutely no one -- will get credit for a failed but good attempt at trying something reasonable. So instead people just keep doing the obvious. It's like this with tons of biomedical research: chasing authority figures and popular trends. I don't think the people doing it are evil, or are necessarily consciously aware of what they're doing, it's just everyone is incentivized this way. I'm not even sure they "honestly believe in what they're doing" sometimes, I think it's more a sense of "this is our best guess" where "best guess" is defined as "popular". It's like FOMO with this alternative of proposing shots in the dark being the thing that no one talks about because it won't get grant dollars and if if fails, won't result in any credit. The whole mentality is backwards to me. It's as if space agencies kept sending probes around the earth because we don't know much about what's further out in the solar system. We don't do that because instead we celebrate the information gained about other planets, not whether or not that information conforms to some particular a priori hypothesis of a particular person. Add in indirect funds dependence and you have a recipe for perpetuating the obvious.
WillPostForFood 4y ago
the investigators narrowing the search for causes honestly believe in what they're doing. Basically, don't blindly trust science, because science isn't just some imagined ideal of objective research. It is fund raising, reputation, ladder climbing, ego, dogma, etc...
civilized 4y ago
I find it hard to draw a bright line between sabotage by ignorant hubris and sabotage by intentional malice. People believe all sorts of idiotic things with utter confidence, then act on those beliefs to the detriment of others. Many of the worst things to happen in the past few decades happened because of ignorant hubris.
aaron695 4y ago
smsm42 4y ago
That's why the real diversity - the diversity of ideas - is important. There aren't many mustache-twirling villains that wake up with the thought of suppressing ideas for the fun of it. Most people who suppress ideas think that's because they have the right ideas and the others have wrong ideas. Except turns out even very very smart people can be mistaken from time to time. And maybe it's worth to allow some ideas that we think are wrong to be around - just in case some of them turn out to be correct later.
- shireboy 4y ago
  I think this is the most important take away, with lots of nexus into other medical and non-medical science. Cognitive bias is a real tricky beast and even the best are not immune. Strategies to celebrate and learn from failure, and to allow for alternative and moonshot ideas to be tested should help.
  - trinsic2 4y ago
    I agree, but as many already have commented, I think believing "I'm wrong and someone else is right" goes against self-preservation for most. I have been working for years on my own mental-emotional health and I still get caught into patterns of destructive ego. I think this is mostly an evolution problem. Our minds are built, layer by layer over time to incorporate certain patterns of thinking that helps perpetuate our species. But now with our current technological achievements, the mammal part of our brain is an actual detriment to human progress, at least to a certain extent. Until we evolve past those part of our brain that have a hand in creating these blind spots, I'm guessing we are going to be subjected to the problems like cognitive bias for a long while, at least a couple of more generations.
    - smsm42 4y ago
      You don't need to go as far as "I'm wrong and someone else is right". It's enough if you admit that "while I am sure I am right, many smart people before claimed that, and some of them turned out to be wrong. Knowing that, I will sacrifice some of the perceived efficiency and agree to admit the chance I might be wrong, and so allocate costs and effort to be spent on the case when I'm wrong, even if I am currently convinced that these costs and effort will be wasted". This goes against the technocratic instinct of optimizing everything, but one has to remember about "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

jvanderbot 4y ago

Probably unrelated, but I've realized from dealing with certain people in the criminal justice system, that almost nobody believes they are evil or doing bad things. They just want to do what they think is right, believe that what they are doing is common and acceptable, think often justice takes strange forms, or otherwise can justify what they do till the day they die. The worse someone is, the more strongly they can justify what they do.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
300bps 4y ago
Not unrelated at all. We judge ourselves by our intentions. We judge others by their actions. This leads to people with evil actions judging themselves as good. “I didn’t want to do it. They gave me no choice.”
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Do you think Adolf Eichmann saw himself as evil? I do not. He was “following orders” and thereby being good soldier. I would bet Hitler and Stalin also believed themselves to be good people. Same for most all dictators and mass murderers.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    Agreed. I don't think anyone can truly see themselves as evil. I think it would go against our very nature of self-preservation. The rare few that do probably commit suicide. I'm reminded of some murderers that know what they are doing is wrong and knowing they're mentally unwell and end up killing themselves.
    - macdust 4y ago
      I knew some who claimed to be evil, whose only regret was not being more famous for it.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I assume you're familiar, but a whole book was written about the various forms of evil perpetuated by the Nazi leadership. Eichmann isn't a good example- he knew he wasn't just following orders. The example you're thinking of is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Keitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Keitel who apparently wasn't even smart enough to realize the magnitude of what he was doing.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      Yes, thanks for the clarification. My point still stands: I don’t think many people consider themselves evil or even consistently “doing bad”
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I think it's a mistake to believe they all believed in good and evil in the first place. I don't. Those ideas exist for the purpose of domination. Social life, in that respect, is actually just conflict. Attempting to make ones will seem objective are what concepts like "good" and "evil" are for. Ethics should rather be focused on what we all want and equitable conflict resolution. Anyway, I think a lot of those people just reject the concepts as well, but probably for less enlightened reasons.
    - 4y ago
tootie 4y ago
Hannah Arendt proved this decades ago when she wrote of the "banality of evil" about her interviews with Adolph Eichmann.

nextos 4y ago

My experience is that many prominent professors behave in a monopolistic way. That is, they try to sabotage theses, grant applications and publications in review that go against their own research. Lots of different areas, particularly in medicine, have slowed down or stagnated as a consequence of this. For example, the connection between immunity and cancer was obvious in the 1990s but it took many uphill battles to get funding for immunotherapies. Proponents of somatic mutations as a cause of cancer have typically taken most of the research funds and blocked alternative ideas. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, T1D, etc. have pretty similar stories. Luckily less politically driven funding agencies and, ultimately, VCs are introducing some efficiency back into the system.

forum_ghost 4y ago
...but VC and private equity funding for biotech has been available in the 90s too?
- nextos 4y ago
  It was an order of magnitude more difficult to raise VC money for biotech back then. These days you can even raise a seed with no experimental data. That was extraordinarily unusual even well into the 2000s. There are articles around discussing how in case of Alzheimer's it was impossible to get VC funding for immune ideas, even though they already had interesting evidence. The same cabal was also blocking them. I think you need to be an insider to realize how incredibly political most research in medicine is.
  - throwaway5752 4y ago
    I have to ask, do you have experience in this area? Because it doesn't agree with my limited experience and I'm curious when/where you were involved with biotech startups and funding in the 90s/early 00s.
    - openknot 4y ago
      I'm an outsider, but to quote credible external sources, Science AAAS writer Derek Lowe documented that the biotech startup scene was large and relatively easier to get investments in from 1991 to 1994, with stagnation in 2012 [0]. McKinsey separately reported that there has since been another boom in the biotech sector in the 2020s [1]. [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-early-90s https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biotech-class-earl... [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/whats-ahead-for-biotech-another-wave-or-low-tide https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insigh...

ncmncm 4y ago

In every case I have read about, their reasoning is that money for AS is so scarce that spreading it around means there is not enough for their wrinkle on blocking amyloids. They feel duty bound to sabotage anything that might dilute their thing. If it turns out to be an infection, their whole career has been a waste. Can they even find something to do, then?

epicureanideal 4y ago
It’s too bad all the quantitative easing money isn’t required by law to be directed only at funding basic science research, instead of buying assets. I suspect we would have much better returns.

dekhn 4y ago

Many of us have been pointing out the amyloid hypothesis was full of holes (heh) for two decades. the counterargument always was "we're looking for our keys where the streetlight is brightest, not building bigger flashlights"

derbOac 4y ago

I think there's another subtle or not-so subtle effect, which is pure peer pressure and trying to anticipate what will be popular. That is, the system is currently structured such that no one wants to put money into something that won't work. The problem with this is that that's almost required if you don't know what's going on: you have to fund a bunch of studies, 90% of which will fail, to find the 10% that don't. But no one -- absolutely no one -- will get credit for a failed but good attempt at trying something reasonable. So instead people just keep doing the obvious. It's like this with tons of biomedical research: chasing authority figures and popular trends. I don't think the people doing it are evil, or are necessarily consciously aware of what they're doing, it's just everyone is incentivized this way. I'm not even sure they "honestly believe in what they're doing" sometimes, I think it's more a sense of "this is our best guess" where "best guess" is defined as "popular". It's like FOMO with this alternative of proposing shots in the dark being the thing that no one talks about because it won't get grant dollars and if if fails, won't result in any credit. The whole mentality is backwards to me. It's as if space agencies kept sending probes around the earth because we don't know much about what's further out in the solar system. We don't do that because instead we celebrate the information gained about other planets, not whether or not that information conforms to some particular a priori hypothesis of a particular person. Add in indirect funds dependence and you have a recipe for perpetuating the obvious.

WillPostForFood 4y ago

the investigators narrowing the search for causes honestly believe in what they're doing. Basically, don't blindly trust science, because science isn't just some imagined ideal of objective research. It is fund raising, reputation, ladder climbing, ego, dogma, etc...

civilized 4y ago

I find it hard to draw a bright line between sabotage by ignorant hubris and sabotage by intentional malice. People believe all sorts of idiotic things with utter confidence, then act on those beliefs to the detriment of others. Many of the worst things to happen in the past few decades happened because of ignorant hubris.

aaron695 4y ago

smsm42 4y ago

That's why the real diversity - the diversity of ideas - is important. There aren't many mustache-twirling villains that wake up with the thought of suppressing ideas for the fun of it. Most people who suppress ideas think that's because they have the right ideas and the others have wrong ideas. Except turns out even very very smart people can be mistaken from time to time. And maybe it's worth to allow some ideas that we think are wrong to be around - just in case some of them turn out to be correct later.

shireboy 4y ago
I think this is the most important take away, with lots of nexus into other medical and non-medical science. Cognitive bias is a real tricky beast and even the best are not immune. Strategies to celebrate and learn from failure, and to allow for alternative and moonshot ideas to be tested should help.
- trinsic2 4y ago
  I agree, but as many already have commented, I think believing "I'm wrong and someone else is right" goes against self-preservation for most. I have been working for years on my own mental-emotional health and I still get caught into patterns of destructive ego. I think this is mostly an evolution problem. Our minds are built, layer by layer over time to incorporate certain patterns of thinking that helps perpetuate our species. But now with our current technological achievements, the mammal part of our brain is an actual detriment to human progress, at least to a certain extent. Until we evolve past those part of our brain that have a hand in creating these blind spots, I'm guessing we are going to be subjected to the problems like cognitive bias for a long while, at least a couple of more generations.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    You don't need to go as far as "I'm wrong and someone else is right". It's enough if you admit that "while I am sure I am right, many smart people before claimed that, and some of them turned out to be wrong. Knowing that, I will sacrifice some of the perceived efficiency and agree to admit the chance I might be wrong, and so allocate costs and effort to be spent on the case when I'm wrong, even if I am currently convinced that these costs and effort will be wasted". This goes against the technocratic instinct of optimizing everything, but one has to remember about "premature optimization is the root of all evil".