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by dekhn2 hours ago |
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upvoteby john_strinlai2 hours ago|
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>My opinion is that amyloid-as-cause moved from a majority to a minority view over the past few years, but it's not yet reflected in the literature

>I don't have a "read" on the evidence, because I don't read Alz literature

these two sentences seem contradictory to me. i am not sure how you would keep up on the research (to know it's moved from majority-held to minority-held view), and know that the move is not reflected in the literature, without reading the literature.

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upvoteby dekhn2 hours ago|
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Most scientists who are not experts in their field don't read the literature for a field directly. Instead, they synthesize their opinions about the field by consulting experts, and weighing various sorts of evidence. In my case, I work in an adjacent field and see presentations from scientists, have casual conversations with them, and read the news articles in major journals.

The raw literature for alzheimer's, as well as biomed in general, is not really easily interpretable. It's rife with errors, misleading statements, and intentional obfuscation.

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upvoteby DavidSJ2 hours ago|
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You said the camp promoting the amyloid hypothesis has struggled greatly to come up with evidence to support its position. What did you mean by that if not a read of the quality of the evidence?

Why do you continue to frame this as a choice between a single cherry-picked expert's opinion, and my own non-expert opinion? Either fairly represent the spectrum of experts' views, or decide based on the actual evidence and arguments.

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upvoteby dekhn2 hours ago|
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My estimate of the quality of the evidence is based on daily discussions with people who work in that field and reading summary articles in major journals. I typically don't read raw scientific articles directly- those are aimed at people in the field. Instead, my understanding comes from a synthesis of expert opinions weighted by my own priors (based on 30+ years in the field). Derek's opinion is now the prevailing one that I hear from a wide range of researchers.

I've seen this happen before, btw- overturning establishment paradigms, especially ones where the underlying etiology is complex- is extremely hard and often takes decades of experimental results.

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upvoteby DavidSJ1 hours ago|
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What started as an argument to ignore arguments and evidence and instead rely on authority, seems now to have morphed into an argument that we should ignore the authority of the establishment, because of your own personal assessment of the evidence (which you have not yourself read) and your own personal synthesis of conversations you've had with researchers you've personally come into contact with (despite this being apparently unrepresentative of objective measures of typical researcher opinions).

Arguing from authority really only takes you so far when it ends up as an appeal to your personal experience. I'd rather you either address the arguments directly, or drop the dubious appeal to authority.

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