Peer rejection in science | Hacker News Reader

Peer rejection in science

nintil.com

58 pointsartir15 comments

This is a really good list of Scientific (and Engineering frankly) ideas that are now fully accepted, but faced huge headwinds at their time. It includes mRNA medical treatments, airplanes (and jet engines), and H.Pylori effect on ulcers.

Wait. What? --

> [T]he fantastic takeaway of McConnell’s study [was] that cells other than neurons could store information [...]. [...] Widely known as "the cannibalism experiment," the study [...] fed bits of trained flatworms to their untrained brethren. As a result, McConnell claimed, the untrained flatworms performed behaviors that the trained flatworms had previously learned. In short, the dead flatworms’ memories had found a new home.

Guess I need to track down some knowledgeable people and eat them raw.*

Looks like this is still controversial with iffy replication, but, if real, the effect seems to be based on RNA.

Oh, and McConnell was even targeted by the Unabomber, for whatever that's worth. (He survived.)

* Googling, I now see that everyone makes this joke.

It does make you wonder though... huge ethical and health issues aside, is there even the tiniest chance that eating certain parts of another human could be advantageous or even partly grant you some of the positive traits that other human possesses?

There's growing interest in infusion of young people's plasma to counter aging, for example. Fecal transplants (more like gut biome transplants) also come to mind.

And Cerebrolysin is a slurry of peptides from pig brain matter which, when injected or taken intranasally, is used to treat brain damage but has also (riskily, of course) been used "off-label" as a cognitive enhancer in healthy people. It's reported by some to significantly improve cognitive function, with unique effects. (And reported by some others to have caused long-term or permanent brain damage. No risk, no reward, I guess.)

It wouldn't horribly shock me if - ignoring the ethics and the risks of prions and possibly harmful "mismatches" for a moment - eating part of someone's brain could provide some cognitive benefits, and if maybe the brains of more intelligent people could in some cases provide stronger benefits.

Per the tapeworm experiments, maybe you could even get some cognitive benefit from eating other organs besides the brain. And per Cerebrolysin, maybe if you grind up parts of a smart person's brain into a smoothie, aerosolize it, and take it intranasally, you could get especially powerful benefits (...and/or terrible side effects or brain damage).

(Obviously this is still unlikely and complete, uninformed speculation on my part, though. And even if it were theoretically plausible obviously I don't think it should ever be tried for any reason because it would harm or kill at least one party, and it probably would be bad to do with a dead brain that died of natural causes.)

What about transplants? You don't need to digest everything to be incorporated to you.

I don't know if there are research about one's behavior changing after receiving an organ (but there are anecdotes about it). Considering that many donors are people who suffered transit accidents, some of those caused by impetuous driving...

>It's reported by some to significantly improve cognitive function, with unique effects.

Take the blue pill, and it's a placebo. Take the red pill, and although you will become ten times smarter, your goals will change and you will only be interested in wallowing in mud and hunting for truffles.

> * Googling, I now see that everyone makes this joke.

Well once they've eaten someone else who had the idea for that joke, yeah, of course they do.

  > From many of these examples, a common thread is the following or a combination thereof:

    - Someone is seen as an outsider within a field

    - The data that supports or undermines claims is noisy. This I think is the core underlying reason, the root of most evil. In turn, the reason for this is lack of tooling to produce precise observations,  or funding to increase sample sizes.

    - Being right, for the wrong reasons. The reasons may be shot down. Rejecting "A->B" does not mean "B" is false, it just means "A"was not a good reason for B.

I think it's important to note that these are actually pretty valid reasons to be sceptical of a claim. (Well, at least the second and third are, but even the first is generally a useful heuristic.)

So I think the issue is not so much that peer-review is broken and needs to be fixed, as that it is by nature conservative and could do with a supplementary process to reduce the false-negatives.

Interestingly, it has been argued that the Galileo affair was actually a case of him "being right for the wrong reasons". Obviously there was also a lot of politics involved, but the Vatican did have some of the best astronomers of the time on their pay roll - and Galileo's arguments failed to convince them on a scientific level, not primarily a religious one.

Perhaps some non-binary classification could be of use. You could imagine one or two additional categories of acceptance/rejection, something like plausible and implausible. Journals could publish articles falling into these classifications making sure that it is abundantly clear that they have not been fully approved/ disapproved.

Having such options should allow for promotion/demotion of ideas as they garner more/less support.

The concept is similar to that of working papers and preprints, in the belief that getting more eyes (both expert and amateur) on a paper is better for truth discovery than if only a few experts evaluate.

Let's not jump to conclusions. Yes, there have been numerous cases of "misses." But to evaluate the value of peer review for science, we need to know the "correct rejection" rates as well. Also note that we now know of these cases because science self-corrected, presumably via peer-reviewed replication / validation.

To have a truly fair evaluation, you would also need to know all the cases where science has not self-corrected yet.

This always occurs to me. How many great ideas are out there, that our future will accept as totally normal, but are now just "crackpot" ideas being pursued by weird people. (and a shout out to all the weird people pursuing crackpot ideas: I have no idea how you handle this much rejection, but I'm glad you can).

And how many never got accepted, despite being right? How many times has Academia failed the scientific process and rejected a correct hypothesis?

That's not even the full content of the frequency cell. What you also need to know are the people who left or were dissuaded because of what they ran into. Eg the mRNA researcher made it clear she almost left; you can be guaranteed if she didn't, others did. It's not the papers that were rejected, it's the ones never written.

We still have this sort of just world narrative about science that I no longer see as warranted. Maybe it was true in the past but not anymore.

Agree completely. Unfortunately expressing any doubts about "Science" these days gets you lumped in with the deniers and anti-vaxxers. Trying to explain "no, I'm totally with the Scientific Method, it's just I don't think Academia does a good job of following it" doesn't seem to cut through that.

Great article. A must-read for any researcher, especially in today's climate of research-mill academic production. It missed a nugget about the H.Pylori bacterial cause of stomach ulcer. To prove his hypothesis, Barry Marshall deliberately infected himself with the suspected bacteria. From Wikipedia:

"After failed attempts to infect piglets in 1984, Marshall, after having a baseline endoscopy done, drank a broth containing cultured H. pylori, expecting to develop, perhaps years later, an ulcer.[13] He was surprised when, only three days later, he developed vague nausea and halitosis (due to the achlorhydria, there was no acid to kill bacteria in the stomach, and their waste products manifested as bad breath), noticed only by his mother."

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