16 ms·

The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science

307 points by apsec112 2y ago

thebeardisred 2y ago
https://archive.is/URjfk https://archive.is/URjfk
LarsDu88 2y ago
Based on the scale and impact of fraudulent results, I wonder if some form of LLM based approach with supervised fine-tuning could help highlight the actually useful research. Papers are typically weighted by citations, but in the case of fraud, citations can be misleading. Perhaps there's a way to embed all the known alzheimer's research, then finetune the embeddings using negative labels for known fraudulent studies. The the resulting embedding space (depending on how its constructed; perhaps with a citation graph under the hood?) might be one way to reweight the existing literature?
- deleted 2y ago
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- rossdavidh 2y ago
  I honestly cannot tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    Me neither. But it’s very much in keeping with other seriously-intended suggestions I’ve heard. Optimism is fine until it becomes just dreaming and wishing out loud.
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    Can you explain to me what about the idea I presented is flawed or infeasible?
    - rossdavidh 2y ago
      Sorry, I guess you were not being sarcastic. LLM's are good at vocabulary and syntax, but not good at content (because nothing in their architecture is designed to do that). Since the kind of article we're looking for would be fine if written exactly the same, but it was true, an LLM is not a good match for finding this. Now there might be algorithms that could, for example automatically checking for photo doctoring or reuse of previously used images that are not attributed. These sorts of things would also not be an LLM's forte. My apologies again, it's just that LLMs are the subject of so much hype nowadays that I genuinely thought you might be saying this in jest.
      - LarsDu88 2y ago
        I think you misunderstood my proposal LLMs are good a producing embeddings which are latent representations of the content in the text. That content for research papers includes things like authorship, research directions, and citations to other papers. When you fine-tune a model that generates such embeddings with a labeled dataset representing fraud (consisting of say 1000s of samples), the resulting model will produce different embeddings which can be clustered. The clusterings will be different between the model with the fraudulent information and without the fraudulent information. Now using this embedding generation model, you (may) have a way to discern what truly significant research looks like, versus research that has been tainted from excess regurgitation of untrustworthy data.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Highlighting research that's useful is probably too difficult, but highlighting research that definitely isn't should be well within the bounds of the best existing reasoning LLMs. There are a lot of common patterns in papers that you learn to look for after a while, and it's now absolutely within reach of automation. For example, papers whose conclusions section doesn't match the conclusions in the abstract are a common problem, likewise papers that contain fake citations (the cited document doesn't support the claim, or has nothing to do with the claim, or sometimes is even retracted). For that matter you can get a long way with pre-neural NLP. This database tracks suspicious papers using hand-crafted heuristics: https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1 https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1:::::: What you'll quickly realize though is that none of this matters. Detection happens every day, the problem is that the people who run grant-funded science itself just don't care. At all. Not even a little bit. You can literally send them 100% bulletproof evidence of scientific fraud and they'll just ignore it unless it goes viral and the sort of media they like to read begins asking questions. If it merely goes viral on social media, or if it gets picked up by FOX News or whatever, then they'll not only ignore it but double down and defend or even reward the perpetrators.
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    I think you misunderstand my proposal. I am not describing a fraud classifier. I am describing fine-tuning an embedding space based on papers with known fraud. The content of the fraudelent paper which includes information such as authorship and other citations can be made to exist on an embedding space. Supervised fine-tuning on labels will alter the shape of that embedding space. The resulting embeddings that would come from such a fine-tuned model would generate different clusterings of papers than what you'd get than if you did not have the labeled fraudelent data at all.
okintheory 2y ago
It's nice to live in a world where actions have consequences. When the media coverage got too much, Marc Tessier-Lavigne finally had to resign as president of Stanford, so he could focus on his job as a Stanford professor.
- jbullock35 2y ago
  I can't tell whether your post is a joke. Yes, Tessier-Lavigne was forced to resign. But Stanford let him stay on as a professor. That was terrible: they should have kicked him out of the university.
  - tyre 2y ago
    They are joking.
  - okintheory 2y ago
    I also can't tell whether Stanford is joking, but the notion that he's a good fit for the job of biology professor is definitely funny!
- rossdavidh 2y ago
  I'm no expert, but I suspect it is a longer process to remove someone from a tenured professor position, than to remove them as President. We don't know that they won't eventually happen.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    There are betrayals so severe that a grindingly slow due process is actually itself an addition betrayal. Not arguing for a kangaroo court, but tenure should not be a defense for blatant cheating.
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
The amyloid hypothesis, as described to me by someone working in the field, is not only wrong, but it is harmful to the patients. His research is studying that it is more probable that the plaques are actually protective and do not cause the memory loss and other disease symptoms directly. This idea was pushed aside and ridiculed for years all because of the greed and lies by people like Eliezer Masliah. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2907530/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2907530/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/JAD-2009-1151 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/JAD-2009-1151 https://www.utmb.edu/mdnews/podcast/episode/alzheimer's---could-the-brain-be-trying-to-protect-us https://www.utmb.edu/mdnews/podcast/episode/alzheimer's---co...
- aardvark92 2y ago
  Yes! This plays into my favorite pet theory - that herpesviruses (and/or other microbes) are the cause of Alzheimers: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5457904/pdf/nihms857693.pdf https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5457904/pdf/nihms85...
leoc 2y ago
I am going to point out how much the vibes have shifted here. When earthquake scientists gave false reassurances in the run-up to the 2009 earthquake at L'Acquila, likely contributing to the many deaths there, Italian criminal proceedings resulted. At that time, though, the usual suspects decided that this was science under attack and there was high-level protest and indignation that scientists might face legal consequences for their statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Prosecutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Pro...
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y ago
  Why should scientists be held to higher account than, say, politicians?
- imperfect_light 2y ago
  You're conflating outright fraud with a difference of scientific opinion?
  - leoc 2y ago
    The issue isn't whether someone else had a contrary opinion: the issue is that (just going by the linked reports) Bernardo De Bernardinis came out from the meeting with the scientists and informed the public that there was "no danger". Now, either the scientists felt that this was a reasonable summary of what they had said, or they didn't: either of those is bad, in different ways.
  - o11c 2y ago
    To be fair, it looks like there was fraud in the Italy case - just of the builders not the scientists.
- o11c 2y ago
  Okay, honest question: in what world is a magnitude 5.9 a "major" earthquake? 5.x earthquakes happen multiple times per day somewhere, and the same area had known much worse earthquakes in the preceding century. How bad do your buildings have to be to get a 3-digit death toll from something that weak? I'd expect a 3-digit toll for "number of fine-china plates broken".
nextos 2y ago
Sadly this stems from a structural problem in biology and medicine, and is far from exclusive to the field of Alzheimer's. Some reforms are urgent, otherwise progress is going to be incredibly slow. The same pattern is repeated again and again. Someone publishes something that looks novel, but is either an exaggeration or a downright lie. This person begins to attract funding, grant reviews and article reviews. Funding is used to expand beyond reasonable size and co-author as many articles as possible. Reviews mean this person now has the power to block funding and/or publication of competing hypotheses. The wheel spins faster and faster. And then, we know what the outcome is. The solution is to make sure reviews are truly independent plus limitations on funding, group size and competing interests. I think that tenured researchers that receive public funding should have no stock options nor receive "consulting" fees from private companies. If they want to collaborate with industry, that's absolutely fine, but it should be done pro bono. Furthermore, if you are a professor who publishes 2 articles per week and is simultaneously "supervising" 15 postdocs and 20 PhD students at 2 different institutions then, except in very few cases, you are no longer a professor but a rent seeker that has no clue what is going on. You just have a very well oiled machine to stamp your name into as many articles as possible.
- echelon 2y ago
  Instead of amyloid and tau, we now have a bunch of promising new leads: - insulin and liver dysregulation impacting the brain downstream via metabolic dysfunction - herpesviruses crossing the blood brain barrier, eg after light head injury or traveling the nervous system - gut microbiota imbalance causing immune, metabolic, or other dysregulation - etc. These same ideas are also plausible for MS, ADHD, etc.
  - apsec112 2y ago
    curious if you could link to relevant papers? Thanks!
    - GioM 2y ago
      There’s a good discussion in the previous article discussed on HN, including links to various papers. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893627 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8234998/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8234998/
DavidSJ 2y ago
The article says: Yet despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it. Nowhere in the article does it mention that anti-amyloid therapies such as donanemab and lecanemab have so far successfully slowed decline by about 30%. They may not yet be "arresting" (fully stopping) the disease, but it's pretty misleading for the article to completely omit reference to this huge success. We are currently in the midst of a misguided popular uprising against the amyloid hypothesis. There were several fraudulent studies on amyloid, and those responsible should be handled severely by the scientific community. But these fraudulent studies do not constitute the foundational evidence for the amyloid hypothesis, which remains very solid.
- caycep 2y ago
  yeeeess...but when you look at the slope of the decline on the NEJM papers describing the clinical trials of lecanumab and donemumab...are you really slowing the decline?
  - DavidSJ 2y ago
    To be clear, I think you're asking whether maybe the drugs just provide a temporary "lift" but then the disease continues on the same basic trajectory, just offset a bit? The studies aren't statistically powered to know for sure, but on lecanemab figure 2, the between-group difference on CDS-SB, ADAS-Cog14, ADCOMS, and ADCS-MCI-ADL (the four cognitive endpoints) widens on each successive visit. Furthermore, while not a true RCT, the lecanemab-control gap also widens up to 3 years in an observational study: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/leqembi-case-long-term-dosing https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/leqembi-ca... On donanemab figure 2, there is generally the same pattern although also some tightening towards the end on some endpoints. This could be due to the development of antidrug antibodies, which occurs in 90% of those treated with donanemab; or it could be statistical noise; or it could be due to your hypothesis.
    - caycep 2y ago
      What kind of soured me on whether to recommend lecanumab in the clinic or not - the effect size and the slope, vs. the risk of hemorrhages/"ARIAS". I mean, if you're looking at an steady 0.8 pt difference in CRS-SB, but the entire scale is 18 points, yes, it's "statistically significant" w/ good p-values and all, but how much improvement is there really in real life given that effect size? Plus, if one is really going to hawk something as disease modifying, I'd want to see a clearer plateauing of the downward slow of progression, but it's pretty much parallel to the control group after a while. There is some chatter in the Parkinson's world - the issue and maybe the main effort isn't so much clearing out the bad stuff (abnormal amyloid clumps/synuclein clumps) in the cells, it's trying to figure out what biological process converts the normal, functioning form of the protein into the abnormal/insoluble/nonfunctional protein.....at least assuming amyloid or synuclein is the root problem to begin with...
pedalpete 2y ago
I work in neurotech and sleep, and our focus on slow-wave enhancement has recently had 3 papers looking at the impact in Alzheimer's. I'm not a scientist or expert, but we do speak with experts in the field. What I've gathered from these discussions is that Alzheimer's is likely not a single disease but likely multiple diseases which are currently being lumped into the one label. The way Alzheimer's is diagnosed is by ruling out other forms of dementia, or other diseases. There is not a direct test for Alzheimer's, which makes sense, because we don't really know what it is, which is why we have the Amyloid Hypothesis, the Diabetes Type 3 hypothesis, etc etc. I fear the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater here, and we need to be very careful not to vilify the Amyloid Hypotheses, but at the same time, take action against those who falsify research. Here's some of the recent research in sleep and Alzheimer's 1) Feasibility study with a surprisingly positive result - take with a grain of salt - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37593850/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37593850/ 2) Stimulation in older adults (non-AD) shows positive amyloid response with corresponding improvement in memory - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10758173/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10758173/
- DavidSJ 2y ago
  The way Alzheimer's is diagnosed is by ruling out other forms of dementia, or other diseases. There is not a direct test for Alzheimer's, which makes sense, because we don't really know what it is, Correction here: while other tests are sometimes given to rule out additional factors, there is an authoritative, direct test for Alzheimer's: clinically detectable cognitive impairment in combination with amyloid and tau pathology (as seen in cerebrospinal fluid or PET scan). This amyloid-tau copathology is basically definitional to the disease, even if there are other hypotheses as to its cause.
- caycep 2y ago
  So in the clinic - what we usually do is a detailed neuropsychology battery. Also a patient history, but the neuropsych does provide some quantitative measures. If there's clear amnestic memory loss, verbal fluency decline and visualspatial processing decline, it's more probably Alzheimer's. vs. if there's other features in terms of frontaldysexecutive functioning, behavioral changes, etc, then you think FTD or possibly LBD if there's reports of early visual hallucinations. Amyloid PETs are getting a bit better so there's that. Amyloid-negative PETs w/ amnestic memory loss are being lumped under this new LATE (Limbic-Predominant Age-Related TDP-43 Encephalopathy) but that definition always felt a bit...handwavey to me. 11-32 adults is a good pilot paper but you have to raise funding for Phase II and III trials.
seltzered_ 2y ago
related: https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/ https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte... (2019)
my2centsWorth 2y ago
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hitekker 2y ago
Similar well-founded concerns were raised before: "How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225
kens 2y ago
The higher-level problem is that there are tons of scientific papers with falsified data and very few people who care about this. When falsified data is discovered, journals are very reluctant to retract the papers. A small number of poorly-supported people examine papers and have found a shocking number of problems. (For instance, Elisabeth Bik, who you should follow: @elisabethbik.bsky.social) My opinion is that the rate of falsified data is a big deal; there should be an order of magnitude more people checking papers for accuracy and much more action taken. This is kind of like the replication crisis in psychology but with more active fraud.
- nextos 2y ago
  This is why funding replication studies and letting people publish null results and reproductions of important results is fundamental. It will introduce a strong incentive to be honest. Liars will get caught rather quickly. Right now, it often takes decades to uncover fraud.
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
    > Right now, it often takes decades to uncover fraud. Where? Many in this thread are talking as if there is monoculture in academia.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Unfortunately as you spend more time investigating this problem it becomes clear that replication studies aren't the answer. They're a bandage over the bleeding but don't address the root causes, and would have nearly no impact even if funded at a much larger scale. Because this suggestion comes up in every single HN thread about scientific fraud I eventually wrote an essay on why this is the case: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... (press escape to dismiss the banner). If you're really interested in the topic please read it but here's a brief summary: • Replication studies don't solve many of the most common types of scientific fraud. Instead, you just end up replicating the fraud itself. This is usually because the methodology is bad, but if you try to fix the methodology to be scientific the original authors just claim you didn't do a genuine replication. • Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. It's not clear what happens to the money if someone gets funded to replicate such a paper. Today it's not a problem because replicators choose which papers to replicate themselves, it's not a systematic requirement. • The idea implicitly assumes that very few researchers are corrupt thus the replicators are unlikely to also be. This isn't the case because replication failures are often due to field-wide problems, meaning replications will be done by the same insiders who benefit from the status quo and who signed off on the bad papers in the first place. This isn't an issue today because the only people who do replication studies are genuinely interested in whether the claims are true, it's not just a procedural way to get grant monies. • Many papers aren't worth replicating because they make trivial claims. If you punish non-replication without fixing the other incentive problems, you'll just pour accelerant on the problem of academics making obvious claims (e.g. the average man would like to be more muscular), and that just replaces one trust destroying problem with another. Replication failure is a symptom not a cause. The cause is systematically bad incentives.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
Now journalists dunk with science publication fraud, claiming its wider than it could possibly be! It will certainly get engagement! More burn the bridges science journalism; "the worst that can happen is somehow the common place"; erode trust in institutions more, so and on so on so forth. We are currently plummeting into nihilism, see you at the bottom, hope the clicks were worth it.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
The article starts with a non-sequitur -- "we have tackled some disease, so we should be able to tackle alzheimer's, but we haven't" It would be great if opinion articles never made it to the front page, on any media aggregator, anywhere. They don't make it to the front page of a newspaper.
- borski 2y ago
  HN is not a newspaper. Opinion pieces fit perfectly well within the guidelines as long as they are factual and interesting.
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
    ... sure? There is a trend of flagging many other categories of media on this site, even if its "factual and interesting". I was making a plea to the void of this community to stop eating this category of bullshit.
rob_c 2y ago
Say it again and loud. No null publications leads to reproducibility crisis. Especially in an academic discipline that fundamentally bowing to it's industry counterparts for scraps. This coming to you from a field which in modern times which reinvented the trapezium rule...
po 2y ago
Science needs an intervention similar to what the CRM process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management) did to tamp down cowboy pilots flying their planes into the sides of mountains because they wouldn't listen to their copilots who were too timid to speak up. ...on the evening of Dec 28, 1978, they experienced a landing gear abnormality. The captain decided to enter a holding pattern so they could troubleshoot the problem. The captain focused on the landing gear problem for an hour, ignoring repeated hints from the first officer and the flight engineer about their dwindling fuel supply, and only realized the situation when the engines began flaming out. The aircraft crash-landed in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, over six miles (10 km) short of the runway It has been applied to other fields: Elements of CRM have been applied in US healthcare since the late 1990s, specifically in infection prevention. For example, the "central line bundle" of best practices recommends using a checklist when inserting a central venous catheter. The observer checking off the checklist is usually lower-ranking than the person inserting the catheter. The observer is encouraged to communicate when elements of the bundle are not executed; for example if a breach in sterility has occurred Maybe not this system exactly, but a new way of doing science needs to be found. Journals, scientists, funding sources, universities and research institutions are locked in a game that encourages data hiding, publish or perish incentives, and non-reproducible results.
- boxed 2y ago
  Not to mention that scientists spend a crazy amount of time writing grant proposals instead of doing science. Imagine if programmers spent 40% of their time writing documents asking for money to write code. Madness.
  - Arwill 2y ago
    Project managers and consultants do actually write those documents/specifications justifying the work before the programmers get to do it.
    - DrScientist 2y ago
      Indeed. You do need some idea of what you are going to do before being funded. The tricky bit is that in research, and this a bit like the act of programming, you often discover import stuff in the process of doing - and the more innovative the area - the more likely this is to happen. Big labs deal with this by having enough money to self-fund prospective work, or support things for extra time - the real problem is that new researchers - who often have the new ideas, are the most constrained.
crocowhile 2y ago
The big problem is not science per se but capitalist pharma. Science eventually self corrects but capitalism creates a huge inertia driven by the fact people do not want to lose money and do everything possible to push things as much as they can. So much investments went into the amyloid hypothesis. The story of $SAVA is paradigmatic. Every neuroscientist knew that stuff was based 100% on fraudulent results but they nevertheless managed to capitalise billions.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Cassava Science is mentioned in the article and their problem is that the drug they backed was based on fraudulent academic research. The professor has been indicted by the DOJ for defrauding the NIH of $16M in grants. This isn't an indictment of capitalist pharma because the original fraud wasn't done in a capitalist system.
gcanyon 2y ago
Those who would condemn "science" need to explain why their concept is different from listening to the weather report and doing the exact opposite -- that's not a recipe for success, and "science" has gotten far more right than wrong over the years.
arivle 2y ago
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randsp 2y ago
It is hard to describe how painful was to read about the overwhelming evidence of study manipulation by Masliah and others a few months ago. My father-in-law was diagnosed with this terrible disease in his late fifties, but before that he went through several misdiagnoses, including depression. He lost his job and i am now convinced that it was because he was on early stage of the disease, which affected his memory and ability to communicate. I later learned about this being something under study because apparently is a pattern: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/economy/alzheimers-disease-personal-finance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/economy/alzheime... This triggered all kind of troubles as you might imagine. After that, he went through a violent period and within a few months he could no longer speak or eat on his own. He now wears diapers and we had to hire a professional caregiver to help with his daily routines. Our family impact has been dramatic, we are not a large family so we had to spend a significant amount of resources to help his wife who is his main care giver. We have since received some assistance from the public healthcare system, but it took time, and the support did not keep pace with the rapid progression of his symptoms. I have seen relatives pass away from other causes but this is by far one of the cruelest ways to die. After a few years of dealing with this disease, i cannot fathom any justification - good or bad - for the massive deception orchestrated, apparently for the sake of Masliag and others' careers. I hope they are held accountable and brought to trial soon for the damage they have caused to society and science.
- implmntatio 2y ago
  if you can think of things that you or your family might have done to start managing the consequences earlier, please write them down and share. early onset Alzheimers is a slow burn beast but you can't blame anyone for not seeing what you see or even denying the evidence. my pops always thought his mom is just fucking with him when she showed symptoms and then (grandma) laughed about it a few minutes later ... when I witness others or hear them talk about their parents, I'm quite often reminded of my grandma and wonder how to manage these early symptoms and set up frameworks and strategies to reduce the subliminal and subtextual reinforcement of negative reactions to triggers, both in the care-taker and the Alzheimers "patient"/ loved one ...
  - 2y ago
anonymous344 2y ago
not to cure, but to prevent alzheimer's, just eat teaspoon of virgin coconut oil every evening. As bonus you'll get more vivid dreams
ysofunny 2y ago
adult age is not a disease anymore than childhood is a disease
throwawaymaths 2y ago
What is the incentive to call out a competitor on their lies? If you want to be truly cynical, it's to your benefit to NOT call them out; then other-competitors might spin their wheels following the negative results of your competitor when you're not wasting your time chasing the fiction.
- airstrike 2y ago
  That applies if one were maximizing for patient outcomes, but not if maximizing for grants
pjdesno 2y ago
Like most HN readers I'm in computer science, but I do academic research so I review papers - not a lot, but probably 20-25 a year, sometimes more. I get paid nothing to do this - it's considered "service", i.e. it's rude to submit a lot of papers and not review any in turn. (it turns out there are a lot of rude people out there) In general no one in academic publishing gets paid anything, although an "area editor" who tries to convince people like me to review papers might get paid a bit if they work at a lower-quality for-profit journal. (other fields have high-quality for-profit journals, but not CS) Some of the papers I review may be fraudulent. I have no way of figuring this out, it's not my job, and I don't have access to the information I'd need to determine whether they are. The use of images in certain life sciences papers has made it much easier to detect a certain class of fraud, although even these checks would be difficult for an individual reviewer to perform. (the checks could be integrated with the plagiarism checker typically run on submissions before they are reviewed, and I think some journals are starting to do this) In CS it would be much more difficult to detect fraud, because there's no equivalent to the standard and easily-compared western blot and photomicrograph images in life sciences papers. However I'll note that a lot of CS venues are starting to have an "artifact evaluation" phase, where authors of accepted papers submit their software and a team of students try to get it to work themselves. It's not mandatory, but most authors try for it - the main purpose is to encourage reproducible science, but it also creates an environment where fraud is more difficult. (I'm only aware of conferences which have artifact evaluation - none of the journals I know have tried this)
- implmntatio 2y ago
  thank you for your service. > no one in academic publishing gets paid anything How come none of those crypto and or VC bros are closing in on this issue? Better and more peer-reviewed research means more areas to raise economically viable ideas in and so the gravitational pull would get stronger in coming generations. And those chain-guys talk a lot about trust, verification, decentralization, (proof of work) and so on ... It's a "boring niche" that needs some ruckus, if you ask me.
_1tem 2y ago
How can I trust anything now? I recently asked ChatGPT if learning multiple languages could slow dementia, and now I realized there’s no way to know the answer to this even if I confirm it isn’t hallucinating.
- pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  Fwiw, we touched in this topic in some of my linguistics classes. Even then (~7 years ago), the claim was that learning multiple languages _slowed the appearance of some symptoms_. We debated whether that was really the same as slowing the disease, or if it was just hiding the affects. It probably depends who you ask.
virginwidow 2y ago
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davidcraven399 2y ago
I’m a caregiver for my WWP. I wanted to inform PWP that there’s hope, the Uinehealthcentre. com has been of great help. the PD-5 treatment programme they offer has completely help with reversing my wife Parkinson's symptoms.
helenamaria7335 2y ago
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dcravens844 2y ago
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dcravens844 2y ago
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307 points by apsec112 2y ago

https://archive.is/URjfk https://archive.is/URjfk

Based on the scale and impact of fraudulent results, I wonder if some form of LLM based approach with supervised fine-tuning could help highlight the actually useful research. Papers are typically weighted by citations, but in the case of fraud, citations can be misleading. Perhaps there's a way to embed all the known alzheimer's research, then finetune the embeddings using negative labels for known fraudulent studies. The the resulting embedding space (depending on how its constructed; perhaps with a citation graph under the hood?) might be one way to reweight the existing literature?

deleted 2y ago
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rossdavidh 2y ago
I honestly cannot tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Me neither. But it’s very much in keeping with other seriously-intended suggestions I’ve heard. Optimism is fine until it becomes just dreaming and wishing out loud.
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  Can you explain to me what about the idea I presented is flawed or infeasible?
  - rossdavidh 2y ago
    Sorry, I guess you were not being sarcastic. LLM's are good at vocabulary and syntax, but not good at content (because nothing in their architecture is designed to do that). Since the kind of article we're looking for would be fine if written exactly the same, but it was true, an LLM is not a good match for finding this. Now there might be algorithms that could, for example automatically checking for photo doctoring or reuse of previously used images that are not attributed. These sorts of things would also not be an LLM's forte. My apologies again, it's just that LLMs are the subject of so much hype nowadays that I genuinely thought you might be saying this in jest.
    - LarsDu88 2y ago
      I think you misunderstood my proposal LLMs are good a producing embeddings which are latent representations of the content in the text. That content for research papers includes things like authorship, research directions, and citations to other papers. When you fine-tune a model that generates such embeddings with a labeled dataset representing fraud (consisting of say 1000s of samples), the resulting model will produce different embeddings which can be clustered. The clusterings will be different between the model with the fraudulent information and without the fraudulent information. Now using this embedding generation model, you (may) have a way to discern what truly significant research looks like, versus research that has been tainted from excess regurgitation of untrustworthy data.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Highlighting research that's useful is probably too difficult, but highlighting research that definitely isn't should be well within the bounds of the best existing reasoning LLMs. There are a lot of common patterns in papers that you learn to look for after a while, and it's now absolutely within reach of automation. For example, papers whose conclusions section doesn't match the conclusions in the abstract are a common problem, likewise papers that contain fake citations (the cited document doesn't support the claim, or has nothing to do with the claim, or sometimes is even retracted). For that matter you can get a long way with pre-neural NLP. This database tracks suspicious papers using hand-crafted heuristics: https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1 https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1:::::: What you'll quickly realize though is that none of this matters. Detection happens every day, the problem is that the people who run grant-funded science itself just don't care. At all. Not even a little bit. You can literally send them 100% bulletproof evidence of scientific fraud and they'll just ignore it unless it goes viral and the sort of media they like to read begins asking questions. If it merely goes viral on social media, or if it gets picked up by FOX News or whatever, then they'll not only ignore it but double down and defend or even reward the perpetrators.
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  I think you misunderstand my proposal. I am not describing a fraud classifier. I am describing fine-tuning an embedding space based on papers with known fraud. The content of the fraudelent paper which includes information such as authorship and other citations can be made to exist on an embedding space. Supervised fine-tuning on labels will alter the shape of that embedding space. The resulting embeddings that would come from such a fine-tuned model would generate different clusterings of papers than what you'd get than if you did not have the labeled fraudelent data at all.

okintheory 2y ago

It's nice to live in a world where actions have consequences. When the media coverage got too much, Marc Tessier-Lavigne finally had to resign as president of Stanford, so he could focus on his job as a Stanford professor.

jbullock35 2y ago
I can't tell whether your post is a joke. Yes, Tessier-Lavigne was forced to resign. But Stanford let him stay on as a professor. That was terrible: they should have kicked him out of the university.
- tyre 2y ago
  They are joking.
- okintheory 2y ago
  I also can't tell whether Stanford is joking, but the notion that he's a good fit for the job of biology professor is definitely funny!
rossdavidh 2y ago
I'm no expert, but I suspect it is a longer process to remove someone from a tenured professor position, than to remove them as President. We don't know that they won't eventually happen.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  There are betrayals so severe that a grindingly slow due process is actually itself an addition betrayal. Not arguing for a kangaroo court, but tenure should not be a defense for blatant cheating.

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

The amyloid hypothesis, as described to me by someone working in the field, is not only wrong, but it is harmful to the patients. His research is studying that it is more probable that the plaques are actually protective and do not cause the memory loss and other disease symptoms directly. This idea was pushed aside and ridiculed for years all because of the greed and lies by people like Eliezer Masliah. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2907530/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2907530/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/JAD-2009-1151 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/JAD-2009-1151 https://www.utmb.edu/mdnews/podcast/episode/alzheimer's---could-the-brain-be-trying-to-protect-us https://www.utmb.edu/mdnews/podcast/episode/alzheimer's---co...

aardvark92 2y ago
Yes! This plays into my favorite pet theory - that herpesviruses (and/or other microbes) are the cause of Alzheimers: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5457904/pdf/nihms857693.pdf https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5457904/pdf/nihms85...

leoc 2y ago

I am going to point out how much the vibes have shifted here. When earthquake scientists gave false reassurances in the run-up to the 2009 earthquake at L'Acquila, likely contributing to the many deaths there, Italian criminal proceedings resulted. At that time, though, the usual suspects decided that this was science under attack and there was high-level protest and indignation that scientists might face legal consequences for their statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Prosecutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Pro...

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y ago
Why should scientists be held to higher account than, say, politicians?
imperfect_light 2y ago
You're conflating outright fraud with a difference of scientific opinion?
- leoc 2y ago
  The issue isn't whether someone else had a contrary opinion: the issue is that (just going by the linked reports) Bernardo De Bernardinis came out from the meeting with the scientists and informed the public that there was "no danger". Now, either the scientists felt that this was a reasonable summary of what they had said, or they didn't: either of those is bad, in different ways.
- o11c 2y ago
  To be fair, it looks like there was fraud in the Italy case - just of the builders not the scientists.
o11c 2y ago
Okay, honest question: in what world is a magnitude 5.9 a "major" earthquake? 5.x earthquakes happen multiple times per day somewhere, and the same area had known much worse earthquakes in the preceding century. How bad do your buildings have to be to get a 3-digit death toll from something that weak? I'd expect a 3-digit toll for "number of fine-china plates broken".

nextos 2y ago

Sadly this stems from a structural problem in biology and medicine, and is far from exclusive to the field of Alzheimer's. Some reforms are urgent, otherwise progress is going to be incredibly slow. The same pattern is repeated again and again. Someone publishes something that looks novel, but is either an exaggeration or a downright lie. This person begins to attract funding, grant reviews and article reviews. Funding is used to expand beyond reasonable size and co-author as many articles as possible. Reviews mean this person now has the power to block funding and/or publication of competing hypotheses. The wheel spins faster and faster. And then, we know what the outcome is. The solution is to make sure reviews are truly independent plus limitations on funding, group size and competing interests. I think that tenured researchers that receive public funding should have no stock options nor receive "consulting" fees from private companies. If they want to collaborate with industry, that's absolutely fine, but it should be done pro bono. Furthermore, if you are a professor who publishes 2 articles per week and is simultaneously "supervising" 15 postdocs and 20 PhD students at 2 different institutions then, except in very few cases, you are no longer a professor but a rent seeker that has no clue what is going on. You just have a very well oiled machine to stamp your name into as many articles as possible.

echelon 2y ago
Instead of amyloid and tau, we now have a bunch of promising new leads: - insulin and liver dysregulation impacting the brain downstream via metabolic dysfunction - herpesviruses crossing the blood brain barrier, eg after light head injury or traveling the nervous system - gut microbiota imbalance causing immune, metabolic, or other dysregulation - etc. These same ideas are also plausible for MS, ADHD, etc.
- apsec112 2y ago
  curious if you could link to relevant papers? Thanks!
  - GioM 2y ago
    There’s a good discussion in the previous article discussed on HN, including links to various papers. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893627 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8234998/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8234998/

DavidSJ 2y ago

The article says: Yet despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it. Nowhere in the article does it mention that anti-amyloid therapies such as donanemab and lecanemab have so far successfully slowed decline by about 30%. They may not yet be "arresting" (fully stopping) the disease, but it's pretty misleading for the article to completely omit reference to this huge success. We are currently in the midst of a misguided popular uprising against the amyloid hypothesis. There were several fraudulent studies on amyloid, and those responsible should be handled severely by the scientific community. But these fraudulent studies do not constitute the foundational evidence for the amyloid hypothesis, which remains very solid.

caycep 2y ago
yeeeess...but when you look at the slope of the decline on the NEJM papers describing the clinical trials of lecanumab and donemumab...are you really slowing the decline?
- DavidSJ 2y ago
  To be clear, I think you're asking whether maybe the drugs just provide a temporary "lift" but then the disease continues on the same basic trajectory, just offset a bit? The studies aren't statistically powered to know for sure, but on lecanemab figure 2, the between-group difference on CDS-SB, ADAS-Cog14, ADCOMS, and ADCS-MCI-ADL (the four cognitive endpoints) widens on each successive visit. Furthermore, while not a true RCT, the lecanemab-control gap also widens up to 3 years in an observational study: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/leqembi-case-long-term-dosing https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/leqembi-ca... On donanemab figure 2, there is generally the same pattern although also some tightening towards the end on some endpoints. This could be due to the development of antidrug antibodies, which occurs in 90% of those treated with donanemab; or it could be statistical noise; or it could be due to your hypothesis.
  - caycep 2y ago
    What kind of soured me on whether to recommend lecanumab in the clinic or not - the effect size and the slope, vs. the risk of hemorrhages/"ARIAS". I mean, if you're looking at an steady 0.8 pt difference in CRS-SB, but the entire scale is 18 points, yes, it's "statistically significant" w/ good p-values and all, but how much improvement is there really in real life given that effect size? Plus, if one is really going to hawk something as disease modifying, I'd want to see a clearer plateauing of the downward slow of progression, but it's pretty much parallel to the control group after a while. There is some chatter in the Parkinson's world - the issue and maybe the main effort isn't so much clearing out the bad stuff (abnormal amyloid clumps/synuclein clumps) in the cells, it's trying to figure out what biological process converts the normal, functioning form of the protein into the abnormal/insoluble/nonfunctional protein.....at least assuming amyloid or synuclein is the root problem to begin with...

pedalpete 2y ago

I work in neurotech and sleep, and our focus on slow-wave enhancement has recently had 3 papers looking at the impact in Alzheimer's. I'm not a scientist or expert, but we do speak with experts in the field. What I've gathered from these discussions is that Alzheimer's is likely not a single disease but likely multiple diseases which are currently being lumped into the one label. The way Alzheimer's is diagnosed is by ruling out other forms of dementia, or other diseases. There is not a direct test for Alzheimer's, which makes sense, because we don't really know what it is, which is why we have the Amyloid Hypothesis, the Diabetes Type 3 hypothesis, etc etc. I fear the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater here, and we need to be very careful not to vilify the Amyloid Hypotheses, but at the same time, take action against those who falsify research. Here's some of the recent research in sleep and Alzheimer's 1) Feasibility study with a surprisingly positive result - take with a grain of salt - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37593850/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37593850/ 2) Stimulation in older adults (non-AD) shows positive amyloid response with corresponding improvement in memory - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10758173/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10758173/

DavidSJ 2y ago
The way Alzheimer's is diagnosed is by ruling out other forms of dementia, or other diseases. There is not a direct test for Alzheimer's, which makes sense, because we don't really know what it is, Correction here: while other tests are sometimes given to rule out additional factors, there is an authoritative, direct test for Alzheimer's: clinically detectable cognitive impairment in combination with amyloid and tau pathology (as seen in cerebrospinal fluid or PET scan). This amyloid-tau copathology is basically definitional to the disease, even if there are other hypotheses as to its cause.
caycep 2y ago
So in the clinic - what we usually do is a detailed neuropsychology battery. Also a patient history, but the neuropsych does provide some quantitative measures. If there's clear amnestic memory loss, verbal fluency decline and visualspatial processing decline, it's more probably Alzheimer's. vs. if there's other features in terms of frontaldysexecutive functioning, behavioral changes, etc, then you think FTD or possibly LBD if there's reports of early visual hallucinations. Amyloid PETs are getting a bit better so there's that. Amyloid-negative PETs w/ amnestic memory loss are being lumped under this new LATE (Limbic-Predominant Age-Related TDP-43 Encephalopathy) but that definition always felt a bit...handwavey to me. 11-32 adults is a good pilot paper but you have to raise funding for Phase II and III trials.

seltzered_ 2y ago

related: https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/ https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte... (2019)

my2centsWorth 2y ago

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hitekker 2y ago

Similar well-founded concerns were raised before: "How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225

kens 2y ago

The higher-level problem is that there are tons of scientific papers with falsified data and very few people who care about this. When falsified data is discovered, journals are very reluctant to retract the papers. A small number of poorly-supported people examine papers and have found a shocking number of problems. (For instance, Elisabeth Bik, who you should follow: @elisabethbik.bsky.social) My opinion is that the rate of falsified data is a big deal; there should be an order of magnitude more people checking papers for accuracy and much more action taken. This is kind of like the replication crisis in psychology but with more active fraud.

nextos 2y ago
This is why funding replication studies and letting people publish null results and reproductions of important results is fundamental. It will introduce a strong incentive to be honest. Liars will get caught rather quickly. Right now, it often takes decades to uncover fraud.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
  > Right now, it often takes decades to uncover fraud. Where? Many in this thread are talking as if there is monoculture in academia.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Unfortunately as you spend more time investigating this problem it becomes clear that replication studies aren't the answer. They're a bandage over the bleeding but don't address the root causes, and would have nearly no impact even if funded at a much larger scale. Because this suggestion comes up in every single HN thread about scientific fraud I eventually wrote an essay on why this is the case: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science-0e195234a280 https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... (press escape to dismiss the banner). If you're really interested in the topic please read it but here's a brief summary: • Replication studies don't solve many of the most common types of scientific fraud. Instead, you just end up replicating the fraud itself. This is usually because the methodology is bad, but if you try to fix the methodology to be scientific the original authors just claim you didn't do a genuine replication. • Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. It's not clear what happens to the money if someone gets funded to replicate such a paper. Today it's not a problem because replicators choose which papers to replicate themselves, it's not a systematic requirement. • The idea implicitly assumes that very few researchers are corrupt thus the replicators are unlikely to also be. This isn't the case because replication failures are often due to field-wide problems, meaning replications will be done by the same insiders who benefit from the status quo and who signed off on the bad papers in the first place. This isn't an issue today because the only people who do replication studies are genuinely interested in whether the claims are true, it's not just a procedural way to get grant monies. • Many papers aren't worth replicating because they make trivial claims. If you punish non-replication without fixing the other incentive problems, you'll just pour accelerant on the problem of academics making obvious claims (e.g. the average man would like to be more muscular), and that just replaces one trust destroying problem with another. Replication failure is a symptom not a cause. The cause is systematically bad incentives.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago

Now journalists dunk with science publication fraud, claiming its wider than it could possibly be! It will certainly get engagement! More burn the bridges science journalism; "the worst that can happen is somehow the common place"; erode trust in institutions more, so and on so on so forth. We are currently plummeting into nihilism, see you at the bottom, hope the clicks were worth it.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago

The article starts with a non-sequitur -- "we have tackled some disease, so we should be able to tackle alzheimer's, but we haven't" It would be great if opinion articles never made it to the front page, on any media aggregator, anywhere. They don't make it to the front page of a newspaper.

borski 2y ago
HN is not a newspaper. Opinion pieces fit perfectly well within the guidelines as long as they are factual and interesting.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
  ... sure? There is a trend of flagging many other categories of media on this site, even if its "factual and interesting". I was making a plea to the void of this community to stop eating this category of bullshit.

rob_c 2y ago

Say it again and loud. No null publications leads to reproducibility crisis. Especially in an academic discipline that fundamentally bowing to it's industry counterparts for scraps. This coming to you from a field which in modern times which reinvented the trapezium rule...

po 2y ago

Science needs an intervention similar to what the CRM process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management) did to tamp down cowboy pilots flying their planes into the sides of mountains because they wouldn't listen to their copilots who were too timid to speak up. ...on the evening of Dec 28, 1978, they experienced a landing gear abnormality. The captain decided to enter a holding pattern so they could troubleshoot the problem. The captain focused on the landing gear problem for an hour, ignoring repeated hints from the first officer and the flight engineer about their dwindling fuel supply, and only realized the situation when the engines began flaming out. The aircraft crash-landed in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, over six miles (10 km) short of the runway It has been applied to other fields: Elements of CRM have been applied in US healthcare since the late 1990s, specifically in infection prevention. For example, the "central line bundle" of best practices recommends using a checklist when inserting a central venous catheter. The observer checking off the checklist is usually lower-ranking than the person inserting the catheter. The observer is encouraged to communicate when elements of the bundle are not executed; for example if a breach in sterility has occurred Maybe not this system exactly, but a new way of doing science needs to be found. Journals, scientists, funding sources, universities and research institutions are locked in a game that encourages data hiding, publish or perish incentives, and non-reproducible results.

boxed 2y ago
Not to mention that scientists spend a crazy amount of time writing grant proposals instead of doing science. Imagine if programmers spent 40% of their time writing documents asking for money to write code. Madness.
- Arwill 2y ago
  Project managers and consultants do actually write those documents/specifications justifying the work before the programmers get to do it.
  - DrScientist 2y ago
    Indeed. You do need some idea of what you are going to do before being funded. The tricky bit is that in research, and this a bit like the act of programming, you often discover import stuff in the process of doing - and the more innovative the area - the more likely this is to happen. Big labs deal with this by having enough money to self-fund prospective work, or support things for extra time - the real problem is that new researchers - who often have the new ideas, are the most constrained.

crocowhile 2y ago

The big problem is not science per se but capitalist pharma. Science eventually self corrects but capitalism creates a huge inertia driven by the fact people do not want to lose money and do everything possible to push things as much as they can. So much investments went into the amyloid hypothesis. The story of $SAVA is paradigmatic. Every neuroscientist knew that stuff was based 100% on fraudulent results but they nevertheless managed to capitalise billions.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Cassava Science is mentioned in the article and their problem is that the drug they backed was based on fraudulent academic research. The professor has been indicted by the DOJ for defrauding the NIH of $16M in grants. This isn't an indictment of capitalist pharma because the original fraud wasn't done in a capitalist system.

gcanyon 2y ago

Those who would condemn "science" need to explain why their concept is different from listening to the weather report and doing the exact opposite -- that's not a recipe for success, and "science" has gotten far more right than wrong over the years.

arivle 2y ago

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randsp 2y ago

It is hard to describe how painful was to read about the overwhelming evidence of study manipulation by Masliah and others a few months ago. My father-in-law was diagnosed with this terrible disease in his late fifties, but before that he went through several misdiagnoses, including depression. He lost his job and i am now convinced that it was because he was on early stage of the disease, which affected his memory and ability to communicate. I later learned about this being something under study because apparently is a pattern: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/economy/alzheimers-disease-personal-finance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/economy/alzheime... This triggered all kind of troubles as you might imagine. After that, he went through a violent period and within a few months he could no longer speak or eat on his own. He now wears diapers and we had to hire a professional caregiver to help with his daily routines. Our family impact has been dramatic, we are not a large family so we had to spend a significant amount of resources to help his wife who is his main care giver. We have since received some assistance from the public healthcare system, but it took time, and the support did not keep pace with the rapid progression of his symptoms. I have seen relatives pass away from other causes but this is by far one of the cruelest ways to die. After a few years of dealing with this disease, i cannot fathom any justification - good or bad - for the massive deception orchestrated, apparently for the sake of Masliag and others' careers. I hope they are held accountable and brought to trial soon for the damage they have caused to society and science.

implmntatio 2y ago
if you can think of things that you or your family might have done to start managing the consequences earlier, please write them down and share. early onset Alzheimers is a slow burn beast but you can't blame anyone for not seeing what you see or even denying the evidence. my pops always thought his mom is just fucking with him when she showed symptoms and then (grandma) laughed about it a few minutes later ... when I witness others or hear them talk about their parents, I'm quite often reminded of my grandma and wonder how to manage these early symptoms and set up frameworks and strategies to reduce the subliminal and subtextual reinforcement of negative reactions to triggers, both in the care-taker and the Alzheimers "patient"/ loved one ...
- 2y ago

anonymous344 2y ago

not to cure, but to prevent alzheimer's, just eat teaspoon of virgin coconut oil every evening. As bonus you'll get more vivid dreams

ysofunny 2y ago

adult age is not a disease anymore than childhood is a disease

throwawaymaths 2y ago

What is the incentive to call out a competitor on their lies? If you want to be truly cynical, it's to your benefit to NOT call them out; then other-competitors might spin their wheels following the negative results of your competitor when you're not wasting your time chasing the fiction.

airstrike 2y ago
That applies if one were maximizing for patient outcomes, but not if maximizing for grants

pjdesno 2y ago

Like most HN readers I'm in computer science, but I do academic research so I review papers - not a lot, but probably 20-25 a year, sometimes more. I get paid nothing to do this - it's considered "service", i.e. it's rude to submit a lot of papers and not review any in turn. (it turns out there are a lot of rude people out there) In general no one in academic publishing gets paid anything, although an "area editor" who tries to convince people like me to review papers might get paid a bit if they work at a lower-quality for-profit journal. (other fields have high-quality for-profit journals, but not CS) Some of the papers I review may be fraudulent. I have no way of figuring this out, it's not my job, and I don't have access to the information I'd need to determine whether they are. The use of images in certain life sciences papers has made it much easier to detect a certain class of fraud, although even these checks would be difficult for an individual reviewer to perform. (the checks could be integrated with the plagiarism checker typically run on submissions before they are reviewed, and I think some journals are starting to do this) In CS it would be much more difficult to detect fraud, because there's no equivalent to the standard and easily-compared western blot and photomicrograph images in life sciences papers. However I'll note that a lot of CS venues are starting to have an "artifact evaluation" phase, where authors of accepted papers submit their software and a team of students try to get it to work themselves. It's not mandatory, but most authors try for it - the main purpose is to encourage reproducible science, but it also creates an environment where fraud is more difficult. (I'm only aware of conferences which have artifact evaluation - none of the journals I know have tried this)

implmntatio 2y ago
thank you for your service. > no one in academic publishing gets paid anything How come none of those crypto and or VC bros are closing in on this issue? Better and more peer-reviewed research means more areas to raise economically viable ideas in and so the gravitational pull would get stronger in coming generations. And those chain-guys talk a lot about trust, verification, decentralization, (proof of work) and so on ... It's a "boring niche" that needs some ruckus, if you ask me.

_1tem 2y ago

How can I trust anything now? I recently asked ChatGPT if learning multiple languages could slow dementia, and now I realized there’s no way to know the answer to this even if I confirm it isn’t hallucinating.

pinkmuffinere 2y ago
Fwiw, we touched in this topic in some of my linguistics classes. Even then (~7 years ago), the claim was that learning multiple languages _slowed the appearance of some symptoms_. We debated whether that was really the same as slowing the disease, or if it was just hiding the affects. It probably depends who you ask.

virginwidow 2y ago

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davidcraven399 2y ago

I’m a caregiver for my WWP. I wanted to inform PWP that there’s hope, the Uinehealthcentre. com has been of great help. the PD-5 treatment programme they offer has completely help with reversing my wife Parkinson's symptoms.

helenamaria7335 2y ago

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