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

https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/19-01-2021/we-need-to-throw-out-a-mindblowing-amount-of-science-and-start-again/

by lemming • 5 years ago

33 27 5 years ago

thespinoff.co.nz

rpiguyshy5• 5 years ago

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

throwawaygimp2• 5 years ago

driving a car does not, by itself, cause car accidents

rpiguyshy5• 5 years ago

and people who say that saturated fat causes heart disease are like people who say we should stop driving cars because they have been shown to raise death rates. there is no randomized trial that shows saturated fat is harmful. there is no study where people were assembled, divided randomly into fat + and fat - groups, kept under supervision and only allowed to eat the meals provided by the study (without being excluded from the study). it is so blindingly simple and yet nobody does it. meanwhile, our ancestors ate nothing but meat for millions of years.

rpiguyshy5• 5 years ago

vaccines do cause autism, as do regular infections and other forms of stress. these things also cause chronic fatigue syndrome, and the two are intimately related. these diseases and many other well known diseases are all basically the same disease and they will be resolved in what will be known as the "metabolic revolution" in medicine.

the reason why the studies done so far have not been able to find a link between vaccines and autism is that they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism. even though there is a connection between vaccines and autism, vaccines save too many lives for any rational person to want to stop their administration.

https://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/

amcoastal• 5 years ago

lmfao

simondw• 5 years ago

they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism

Fortunately, we have figured out how to tease out the influence of a single variable among many: test vs. control groups. If the sample size is large enough, most variables will average out to have the same effect in both groups.

rpiguyshy5• 5 years ago

there has not been a single randomized large scale study on any vaccine that investigates its relationship to autism. without that, the bars are too big. and the relationship is extremely tiny. from a practical perspective, it isnt even worth going after. the studies that have been done so far prove that it wouldnt be worth it to stop vaccinations, not even close. but they dont definitively disprove a connection. they only disprove a meaningful connection.

arein24• 5 years ago

Not sure why you are downvoted.

Maybe because your comment is not the assuring "vaccines don't cause autism" and people already chose the assuring narative.

Vaccines do cause a lot of bad stuff, however for mass population it makes sense to vaccinate, as the benefits outweight the drawbacks.

solarmist• 5 years ago

How about the “are all basically the same disease and they will be resolved in what will be known as the "metabolic revolution" in medicine” part?

If that’s not snake oil I don’t know what is.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

nmfisher• 5 years ago

Let me get this straight - are you saying “vaccines cause autism, we just don’t have the proof yet”?

peter_d_sherman• 5 years ago

I don't agree with everything in this article (I don't disagree with everything either), but that being said, I liked the following quoted text:

"By the mid 2000s there was also an extensive body of work on the biology behind the gene’s function and malfunction. And all of this was part of a much wider field of research called candidate gene association studies, a methodology that enjoyed massive media exposure from the early 90s to the late 2000s as biologists identified the genes they claimed were responsible for obesity, mental illness, diabetes, addiction, gambling, cancer, crime, and numerous other behavioural disorders and diseases.

This was a golden age for high-profile genetics research. Almost every week brought another announcement that a candidate gene for some social problem or illness had been found. And, these announcements concluded, now that the gene causing the problem was known and the biological nature of the malady identified, a cure was surely close. Grants were funded and biotech companies were launched, billions of dollars were invested and exciting new technologies were trialed, all based on candidate gene discoveries.

And none of them worked because all of this was bullshit."

arein24• 5 years ago

Some time ago corruption was direct. Now a lot of corruption and business is done trough "science".

If any science is related to politics or there is some business/financial incentive I just assume it's skewed.

Take for example the harvard study that is responsible for the US obesity. The study found that sugar does not make you fat, because of food conpanies.

Or the guy that discovered the ulcer cause and cure. It was ignored because the fake ulcer treatment industry was a multi billion dollar one.

The "I F***g LOVE science" guys that will beleive anything, because SCIENCE are the worst

genericone• 5 years ago

I think you are being downvoted for your overloading of the word science exactly the way politics has corrupted it. Are we supposed to just start using another word?

How about we start calling it rationality? A bit more self-descriptive, and perhaps a harder to word to weigh down with political gibberish and marketing speak. Scientific Method -> Rational Method, For Science! -> For Rationality!

Science traditionally demanded speaking in clear terms, now it is all about obscuring incentives and methods in order to P-hack a conclusion.

arein24• 5 years ago

The math and physics are exact sciences, I am assuming there is no way to fool that.

For the "non-exact" ones there is always possibility of corruption. I think the current establishment for some areas in science is politicised, and there is a system in place - you have to be published in certain prestigious publications to receive money, but if you do not follow the political status quo, everybody will cut ties with you.

I guess more transparency about data collected and videos of experiments would help, but I don't think that's a solution. This is a problem only few worry about, the system is perfectly happy the way it is.

This whole incentive - corruption relation reminds me about greek democracy: You want to chose the leader that doesn't want to be chosen, so that he would not have incentives. The athenians also chose people at random instead of elections, to minimize the chance of picking someone with special interests.

rangoon626• 5 years ago

Brave soul posting this kind of truth to HN comments. But you are right, there is corruption, arrogance and ego in the science fields just the same as any things else.

derbOac• 5 years ago

Not disagreeing with you on your latter point. I think the frustration lies in part with an awareness that these problems exist, and that the system proceeds as if they don't, and the way the problems manifest in public policy-type discussions is distorted (for instance, in the US, it tends to manifest in these anti-science versus pro-science positions, as if science is nobel and pure all the way down, or fraudulent and flawed all the way down).

Maybe it's like that in every field, but it's frustrating to see documentation of the problems, know that everyone knows about them at some level, but nothing is done about them, and everyone goes on as if the problems don't exist. It's going to take a lot of massive change, like at the level of congressional intervention or something, and once it does, there won't be any restitution or anything. Everyone who benefited still benefits, there's no correction, nothing.

ssivark• 5 years ago

The “Fuck yeah SOYENCE” crowd doesn’t realize that science (as a process) can only hope to get to the truth in the asymptotic (infinite) future. The path to getting there is incredibly messy, especially because it is carried out by sacks of meat and emotions (cue: Planck’s observation that science progresses one funeral at a time).

At any finite time, it is difficult to guarantee that science has the correct answer — especially in ”complex systems” where many factors interact, including through feedback loops. The very idea of repeatable controlled experiments (at the heart of the scientific method) is fundamentally limited in its ability to address such systems. So for all practical purposes, decisions (be it individual, or policy) need to often accommodate uncertainty/incompleteness in knowledge and try to “convexify exposure” — rather than trying to bank on having the correct & complete knowledge.

jariel• 5 years ago

I wonder if there is a way to award points for 'effort' and 'ingenuity'.

Maybe PhDs should be able to give out points there to offset the fact that most experiments aren't going to show much.

Maybe there's a correlation between what we recognize as 'thoughtful experiments' and 'good outcomes'.

Or just some other measure other than 'non-nill results' otherwise everyone will be predisposed towards those.

robwwilliams• 5 years ago

I have not read the book Science Fictions, but will comment that the core problem in academic science is the intense structural reward of telling “stories” rather than focusing on high quality data generation and robust causal models. A snappy story gets you a paper in Cell, Science, or Nature, a grant award, and promotion. That is the pressure driving many of the distortions.

In contrast, a decade-long effort to generate foundational data sets gets you a footnote or acknowledgement. Think Tycho Brahe versus Copernicus.

The imperative of generating snappy, and preferably simple series of stories is that scientists focus intensely on reductionist systems and neat little “mechanisms”. To get to mechanism, the modus operandi is to trim away fundamental system complexity. Complex state-dependent feedback systems get converted into sad but comprehensible cartoons. And we are surprised that findings do not replicate? The one phrase that makes me cringe in the biomedical literature is “necessary and sufficient”. In your dreams!

Yuri Lazebnik’s wonderful “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio” is a classic commentary published in 2002, well worth reading in this context. “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor” by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording (2017, PLoS Comp Biology) is the update for all of you on Hacker News.

The current structure of science usually does not reward high quality persistent data and metadata. This seems antithetical to what we are usual taught about the scientific method. The reality is that doing data justice has been getting lip service from day 1. I still see little evidence of serious efforts in this regard (genomics being a welcome exception) since the true cost of data preservation and sharing is staggering.

A salutary final note from Richard Hamming, that I do not mean in any way as an excuse: “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.”

In both cases though high quality data/metadata are just as important—perhaps more so, than the big ideas.

HaoZeke• 5 years ago

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

YeGoblynQueenne• 5 years ago

> Which is to say: how much science only looks like science but has no actual truth value because it’s junk science that just hasn’t been debunked yet?

I wonder, if every scientific theory that is eventually disproved "only looks like science but has no actualy truth value", how about Newtonian physics? Was that "junk science that just hadn't been debunked" until Einstein and General Relativity?

Are all scientists who have followed an avenue of research that didn't pan out in the end quacks, pseuds and wackos?

Or is there maybe a simpler, more nuanced view that doesn't happen to tar every past generation of science with a very offensive brush?

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

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