3 ms·

Pretty clearly not. It would seem that beta amyloids correlate with Alzheimer's, but do not cause it. The problem us "consensus science". You could get funding

Pretty clearly not. It would seem that beta amyloids correlate with Alzheimer's, but do not cause it. The problem us "consensus science". You could get funding to research beta amyloids, but not to research any competing hypotheses. It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.

enraged_camel 6mo ago
>> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. Nonsense. It is actually quite unlike climate science, where the consensus of catastrophe and the evidence for it are both overwhelming. Dissenters are listened to only to the extent they can provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which they so far cannot.
stingraycharles 6mo ago
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. I think this is not a great example, as there’s a huge group of people that, in fact, does not agree with the consensus and would happily fund research that (tries to) prove otherwise. I fully agree with your point, though, just not the example.
- defrost 6mo ago
  Over the past decades the group that are not happy with the AGW consensus in the hard earth sciences crowd have principally funded FUD via think tanks, ala the pro-tobacco lobby back in the day, rather than research. The few examples of research driven from the skeptic PoV (eg: urban heat skewing, etc) have landed on the side of the AGW consensus.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
    And when they funded research, it confirmed the known science. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... If anything the current consensus on the scientific front lines is that the alarmism is understated, and the real orthodoxy is astroturfed denial of the facts. The global fossil industry is worth around $11 trillion a year. It supports some of the worst regimes in the world. Of course they're going to try to FUD away the science, with the usual copy-paste narratives about how it's really scientists and academics who are corrupt. It's all about money, power, and entitlement. Not about truth or responsibility. But no amount of PR nonsense, astroturfing, and false accusation is going to make the slightest difference to climate reality.
- hotstickyballs 6mo ago
  That’s not true. If you want to have a job at a prestigious institution then the research committees are pretty consistent in their biases.
  - acdha 6mo ago
    Expecting scientific rigor is not a bad bias: everyone who has been willing to do actual science agrees that climate change is real and significant. For example, Richard Muller was a climate skeptic who had a great job at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, got funding to establish a team to critically review climate science research … and concluded it was right: “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.” https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/after_climate_research_physicist_richard_muller_says_call_me_a_converted_sk/ https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/after_climate_research_phy... If you haven’t read up on both, it’s hard to appreciate how unlike climate science is from the beta amyloid theory. The latter has some evidence but there were always alternate theories by serious researchers because it involved multiple systems which scientists were still working to understand and basic questions around causation and correlation had significant debate. In contrast, climate scientists reached consensus about climate change four decades ago and by now have established many separate lines of evidence which all support what has been the consensus position. More importantly, since the 1970s they have been making predictions which were subsequently upheld by measured data from multiple sources. The ongoing research is in fine-tuning predictions, estimating efficacy of proposed interventions, etc. but nobody is seriously questioning the basic idea. Almost all of the people you hear dismissing climate change are funded by a handful of companies like Exxon, whose own internal research showing climate change was a significant threat produced a chart in 1982 which has proven accurate: https://skepticalscience.com/pics/Exxonpredictions.png https://skepticalscience.com/pics/Exxonpredictions.png https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxons-own-resea...
    - deleted 6mo ago
- dnautics 6mo ago
  having worked in amyloid, and in an a-beta lab in the second half of the 2000s, we always said under our breath in group meetings that we were skeptical about the amyloid hypothesis, but our grant applications certainly did not say that (or if they did it was a quick throwaway sentence). And I think the lab that I landed in was one of the most honest scientific labs in biochemistry/chemical biology.
pas 6mo ago
half the stuff currently in clinical trials is not targeting amyloids. https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trc2.70098 https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trc...
- inquirerGeneral 6mo ago
  [dead]
jhedwards 6mo ago
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense. Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.
- jvanderbot 6mo ago
  Yes I believe GP was focused on the catastrophe part. It's very likely correct that our CO2 emissions are warming the atmosphere ocean etc, but it's not clear that runaway warming is inevitable or that life or geology have feedback mechanisms that turn an exponential into an S curve. That is, after all, basically what natural selection tends to do. Turning the table again, even if there are corrective factors humans might have immense suffering before it stabilizes. So we don't know. You didn't ask, but my opinion on it is that we'll probably stabilize on a cleaner energy source and find natural countermeasures when suffering ticks up. Any top down pressure to change things whole cloth seems doomed, no matter how benevolent. We're closed loop creatures.
  - ori_b 6mo ago
    > but it's not clear What better way to find out than to just try it and see if we end up with runaway warming? That surely can't cause any harm.
- tim333 6mo ago
  Climate science is much more complicated - there are many things you could disagree with beyond will tons of carbon change things, yes or no. Like are we doomed or will it just get a bit warmer before we switch to solar for example. There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.
throw4847285 6mo ago
"Consensus science" is science.
- yxhuvud 6mo ago
  Yes, though when the consensus doesn't work for predictions then it is a matter of time until it stops being science.
  - throw4847285 6mo ago
    A degenerating research programme.
- tim333 6mo ago
  Not by my prefered definition. I like science being the study of nature through reason and experiment. Reality trumps consensus.
btilly 6mo ago
The problem is that the top researchers in the field have spent their lives devoted to amyloid beta. They may well have helped direct hundreds of millions in grants to this line of research. The idea that they have blocked the treatment of Alzheimer's rather than helping it, is very, very painful. This is perfect for creating cognitive dissonance. And so, no matter what the evidence, they remain committed to the conclusion. As a result, the latest Alzheimer's drug to enter stage 3 FDA trials is Trontinemab. (It is currently in stage 3.) It targets the amyloid target. A relative drop in the bucket is going to, say, the infection hypothesis. This despite the fact that the only intervention that has been shown to reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's, is the shingles vaccine.
pfdietz 6mo ago
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. The financial motivation for fraud is all on the side of climate-change denial. Literally trillions of dollars of motivation.
- tastyfreeze 6mo ago
  Hah! What do you call the cap and trade group? The whole trillion dollar "carbon credit market" is a farce built to profit from climate change catastrophism.
  - pfdietz 6mo ago
    Small change compared to global fossil fuels. Energy (which is still mostly fossil fuels) is 10% of the world GDP. Climate-change denial is just like tobacco-cancer denial. It's the same banal "I win, you all lose" mechanism. Enormous resources are available (along with the useful idiots) to propagate falsehoods.
  - Yizahi 6mo ago
    You are mistaking the beneficiaries here. Carbon credit scheme is indeed a greenwashing scam and it is pushed by the oil and gas (plus adjacent) industries. It is plainly obvious that shuffling emissions between jurisdictions does jack shit against reducing the actual real amount of emissions to the atmosphere. Basically the main proponents of the carbon credit fraud are the same people financially motivated to reject long term climate change consequences (aka anti-"catastrophists" in your lingo).
    - larkost 6mo ago
      If cap-and-trade held the same levels forever you would be correct. But all of the cap-and-trade systems I am aware of have a built-in lowering of the cap over time. So they start out doing nothing/very little, then ramp up to meaningful reductions over time. The idea being both to make it easy to get people to agree today (the reductions are tomorrow's problem), and to allow time (and foresight) for industry to adapt to where things are going.

enraged_camel 6mo ago

>> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. Nonsense. It is actually quite unlike climate science, where the consensus of catastrophe and the evidence for it are both overwhelming. Dissenters are listened to only to the extent they can provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which they so far cannot.

stingraycharles 6mo ago

> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. I think this is not a great example, as there’s a huge group of people that, in fact, does not agree with the consensus and would happily fund research that (tries to) prove otherwise. I fully agree with your point, though, just not the example.

defrost 6mo ago
Over the past decades the group that are not happy with the AGW consensus in the hard earth sciences crowd have principally funded FUD via think tanks, ala the pro-tobacco lobby back in the day, rather than research. The few examples of research driven from the skeptic PoV (eg: urban heat skewing, etc) have landed on the side of the AGW consensus.
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
  And when they funded research, it confirmed the known science. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-... If anything the current consensus on the scientific front lines is that the alarmism is understated, and the real orthodoxy is astroturfed denial of the facts. The global fossil industry is worth around $11 trillion a year. It supports some of the worst regimes in the world. Of course they're going to try to FUD away the science, with the usual copy-paste narratives about how it's really scientists and academics who are corrupt. It's all about money, power, and entitlement. Not about truth or responsibility. But no amount of PR nonsense, astroturfing, and false accusation is going to make the slightest difference to climate reality.
hotstickyballs 6mo ago
That’s not true. If you want to have a job at a prestigious institution then the research committees are pretty consistent in their biases.
- acdha 6mo ago
  Expecting scientific rigor is not a bad bias: everyone who has been willing to do actual science agrees that climate change is real and significant. For example, Richard Muller was a climate skeptic who had a great job at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, got funding to establish a team to critically review climate science research … and concluded it was right: “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.” https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/after_climate_research_physicist_richard_muller_says_call_me_a_converted_sk/ https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/after_climate_research_phy... If you haven’t read up on both, it’s hard to appreciate how unlike climate science is from the beta amyloid theory. The latter has some evidence but there were always alternate theories by serious researchers because it involved multiple systems which scientists were still working to understand and basic questions around causation and correlation had significant debate. In contrast, climate scientists reached consensus about climate change four decades ago and by now have established many separate lines of evidence which all support what has been the consensus position. More importantly, since the 1970s they have been making predictions which were subsequently upheld by measured data from multiple sources. The ongoing research is in fine-tuning predictions, estimating efficacy of proposed interventions, etc. but nobody is seriously questioning the basic idea. Almost all of the people you hear dismissing climate change are funded by a handful of companies like Exxon, whose own internal research showing climate change was a significant threat produced a chart in 1982 which has proven accurate: https://skepticalscience.com/pics/Exxonpredictions.png https://skepticalscience.com/pics/Exxonpredictions.png https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxons-own-resea...
  - deleted 6mo ago
dnautics 6mo ago
having worked in amyloid, and in an a-beta lab in the second half of the 2000s, we always said under our breath in group meetings that we were skeptical about the amyloid hypothesis, but our grant applications certainly did not say that (or if they did it was a quick throwaway sentence). And I think the lab that I landed in was one of the most honest scientific labs in biochemistry/chemical biology.

pas 6mo ago

half the stuff currently in clinical trials is not targeting amyloids. https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trc2.70098 https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trc...

inquirerGeneral 6mo ago
[dead]

jhedwards 6mo ago

> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense. Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.

jvanderbot 6mo ago
Yes I believe GP was focused on the catastrophe part. It's very likely correct that our CO2 emissions are warming the atmosphere ocean etc, but it's not clear that runaway warming is inevitable or that life or geology have feedback mechanisms that turn an exponential into an S curve. That is, after all, basically what natural selection tends to do. Turning the table again, even if there are corrective factors humans might have immense suffering before it stabilizes. So we don't know. You didn't ask, but my opinion on it is that we'll probably stabilize on a cleaner energy source and find natural countermeasures when suffering ticks up. Any top down pressure to change things whole cloth seems doomed, no matter how benevolent. We're closed loop creatures.
- ori_b 6mo ago
  > but it's not clear What better way to find out than to just try it and see if we end up with runaway warming? That surely can't cause any harm.
tim333 6mo ago
Climate science is much more complicated - there are many things you could disagree with beyond will tons of carbon change things, yes or no. Like are we doomed or will it just get a bit warmer before we switch to solar for example. There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.

throw4847285 6mo ago

"Consensus science" is science.

yxhuvud 6mo ago
Yes, though when the consensus doesn't work for predictions then it is a matter of time until it stops being science.
- throw4847285 6mo ago
  A degenerating research programme.
tim333 6mo ago
Not by my prefered definition. I like science being the study of nature through reason and experiment. Reality trumps consensus.

btilly 6mo ago

The problem is that the top researchers in the field have spent their lives devoted to amyloid beta. They may well have helped direct hundreds of millions in grants to this line of research. The idea that they have blocked the treatment of Alzheimer's rather than helping it, is very, very painful. This is perfect for creating cognitive dissonance. And so, no matter what the evidence, they remain committed to the conclusion. As a result, the latest Alzheimer's drug to enter stage 3 FDA trials is Trontinemab. (It is currently in stage 3.) It targets the amyloid target. A relative drop in the bucket is going to, say, the infection hypothesis. This despite the fact that the only intervention that has been shown to reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's, is the shingles vaccine.

pfdietz 6mo ago

> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. The financial motivation for fraud is all on the side of climate-change denial. Literally trillions of dollars of motivation.

tastyfreeze 6mo ago
Hah! What do you call the cap and trade group? The whole trillion dollar "carbon credit market" is a farce built to profit from climate change catastrophism.
- pfdietz 6mo ago
  Small change compared to global fossil fuels. Energy (which is still mostly fossil fuels) is 10% of the world GDP. Climate-change denial is just like tobacco-cancer denial. It's the same banal "I win, you all lose" mechanism. Enormous resources are available (along with the useful idiots) to propagate falsehoods.
- Yizahi 6mo ago
  You are mistaking the beneficiaries here. Carbon credit scheme is indeed a greenwashing scam and it is pushed by the oil and gas (plus adjacent) industries. It is plainly obvious that shuffling emissions between jurisdictions does jack shit against reducing the actual real amount of emissions to the atmosphere. Basically the main proponents of the carbon credit fraud are the same people financially motivated to reject long term climate change consequences (aka anti-"catastrophists" in your lingo).
  - larkost 6mo ago
    If cap-and-trade held the same levels forever you would be correct. But all of the cap-and-trade systems I am aware of have a built-in lowering of the cap over time. So they start out doing nothing/very little, then ramp up to meaningful reductions over time. The idea being both to make it easy to get people to agree today (the reductions are tomorrow's problem), and to allow time (and foresight) for industry to adapt to where things are going.