[boomboomsubban]

Reposting from an earlier post.

Here's a pair of twitter threads detailing why this seems like unsubstantiated nonsense, one posted after this was announced and one with access to the report.

https://mobile.twitter.com/weinbergersa/status/1335096557079...

https://mobile.twitter.com/weinbergersa/status/1335304431756...

Just a ton of hot air blown for no purpose

[totalZero]

I see three problems with your dismissal of the NAS finding:

* Whatever skepticism you have toward NAS, I have a thousand times more skepticism toward a tweet thread from Sharon Weinberger.

* Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications. The peer review process is not itself a form of research. The paper should be judged on its own merits and the credibility of its authors.

* Contrary to what Weinberger said, a 64-page NAS document is available at https://www.nap.edu/read/25889/chapter/1

[omgwtfbyobbq]

I agree with everything except that the I think the paper, and other papers in general, should be judged on their merits alone. The credibility of the authors should not influence how the paper is judged.

[danielheath]

There is more published every second than you can read/watch in a week, and this asymmetry is accelerating.

Credibility is one heuristic that let’s us figure out what might be worth investing time into, since your answer cannot be “everything”.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Definitely. Using credibility, or any other metric, to determine what to review is fine. Using credibility as part of the review itself is not something I agree with.

With respect to publishing, there is a significant volume of work, and we should be able to keep up with it long as people review as much as they publish.

[scoot_718]

If that's what you think, then enjoy reading the many thousands of papers published by shitty paper mill operations.

[matham]

You seem to be conflating the problem of weak or no pear review (i.e. the reason why paper-mill publications are shitty), with the problem of judging a paper by the author's name and not purely by its content (i.e. what the OP proposed).

[boomboomsubban]

>Contrary to what Weinberger said, a 64-page NAS document is available at

That tweet was made before the report was released, but there were a few press stories about it. The second thread opens with a link to the report.

>Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications.

And this paper is of such low quality they couldn't even manage that. It has no merits, and even the paper admits the data is shit and the conclusion is unfounded.

[CamperBob2]

The paper should be judged on its own merits

Peer review is the process by which that judgment is made.

Criticizing peer review is a little bit like criticizing democracy. It's the worst possible way to go about doing things, except for all of the others we've tried.

[totalZero]

> Peer review is the process by which that judgment is made.

Not if you are yourself a scientist.

Peer review is a social method of establishing the validity of research, but it's not the only method. Another would be collaboration between well-credentialed investigators. Yet another is having the backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution.

Peer review is lauded by people who either (A) don't know anything about research, or (B) do research without stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution. Its chief proponents are the publications and conferences themselves, whose entire business model depends upon a perception of the elevated status of peer review.

Plenty of fictitious and fraudulent claims have been validated by peer review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...

If you want to review the research, read it yourself and evaluate the methodology.

[sebastialonso]

It seems you have discovered the egg and the chicken problem.

What is a "well-credentialed" Investigator if it's not measured by peer review? It seems to me like an argument from authority, which is ten thousand times worse than "problematic peer review" you claim. Define well-credentialed without peer review without a cycle please.

What is "backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution"? They already exist, they are called journals, which perform, surprise, peer reviews. Other alternatives you mention are probably private organizations, you seriously believe it's less problematic than already less problematic journals? Much naivety in this argument.

Peer review has its problems, but as you've been told before, it's the best we have come up with. Your proposals are much worse than what we have.

[throwaway201103]

Peer review basically confirms that there are no obvious, glaring problems with the methodology or conclusions. It's not like the peers actually reproduce the experiments.

If you are a "brand name" researcher (i.e. already well known and respected by your peers) peer review is even less meaningful as it's pretty much a rubber stamp.

[philippoi]

My wife is a researcher and says she can often guess who the authors are when she performs reviews because it's her domain and their references and context tend to give it away. But it's still a guess because the review process is blind. I'm pretty sure it's just the journal's editorial staff that can see who's who. It's not perfect, but it's not as blatantly biased by 'brand name' stature the way you suggest.

[matham]

Isn't it expected that as scientists understand their field in greater depth, they make less mistakes and their papers would be closer to the truth and be rejected less?

It's not like many of these fields are just starting up.

[thu2111]

You'd expect that yes, but weirdly, you'd be wrong. Journal impact factor and likelihood of replication don't seem to correlate:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...

Studies that don't replicate are cited at the same rate as those that do:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...

This year I've read a lot of epidemiology papers, and sometimes their peer reviews. There's something deeply wrong with peer reviewers in this field because they often write long, detailed reviews that completely ignore glaring problems in the papers, problems that jump out to 'lay' readers on the first glance through. My guess is that there are very complicated sets of unwritten rules about the sorts of problems that are and are not legitimate to criticise in peer reviews, and problems that are a little bit too fundamental, of the form "this entire paper should be rejected out of hand", don't get given when a paper has 25 authors at prestigious universities, even if the methodology or conclusions are absurd.

[sudosysgen]

Attempting to review the research of the NAS makes it obvious that their findings are way under the standard of evidence for such a claim. They also fail to give any kind of parameters for what this kind of RF would look like, as well as fail to make specific, falsifiable, claims on what it is.

While plenty of bad claims have been validate by peer review, it doesn't mean that peer review doesn't massively reduce the number of outrageously incorrect claims.

In any case, as it stands, the NAS article wouldn't pass peer review, because it makes borderline unphysical claims without providing enough evidence, even though doing so is quite easy. As for stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution, one of the authors is fairly kooky and the institute itself has a massive conflict of interest.

There's a reason even the State Department is distancing itself from this thesis.

[cpncrunch]

It's really just all speculation, and doesn't fit the facts very well. If two people are in the same room and only one has symptoms, it is unlikely to be microwaves. Also, the brain imaging study just found differences in grey/white matter compared to controls, but that tends to vary quite a lot in the general population, and isn't evidence of brain damage.

Overall, FND seems to be the most plausible explanation at the moment.

[Sporktacular]

Microwaves can be highly directional, beams can be transmitted in much narrower than the width of rooms. It fits some facts fairly well, modulated microwaves could induce audible frequencies at various points of the head involved in audio perception.

As mentioned elsewhere though, signals intelligence at diplomatic posts (see Stateroom and the SCS) would likely have detected at least lower frequency microwave energy. At higher frequencies it is less commonly used for communications and hence less likely to be monitored.

Don't know why everyone is expecting solid proof here. There's a reasonable chance this would have been detected, but we're unlikely to know even if it was. Microwaves are still a plausible explanation.

[cpncrunch]

>Don't know why everyone is expecting solid proof here

Occam's razor. Doctors see these symptoms many times every day. For some reason, embassy staff are different from the rest of us humans, and we have to concoct some incredibly implausible reason for their symptoms.

[Sporktacular]

So the occurrence rate of brain abnormalities, dizziness, loss of balance, early onset Parkinson's, hearing loss and anxiety in the US embassy in Havana are all in line with those of the general public? or those among diplomats in other posts? Is this a fact, because I am not aware.

"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day" Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.

The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before. The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.

It's fair to invoke Occam's razor if you need an immediate hard conclusion but there's no reason for experts to not explore this and state what they're finding. The problem is when there are so many non-experts with limited information jumping to the conclusion that this must be nothing but a drum beat-up to war because of the conspiracy amongst warmongers for which there is also no proof.

If it is due to some weapon, the operation would be designed to be unattributable. And if it could be attributed no one is going to tip their hand as to their capability of finding out. So we're unlikely to get solid proof for any of this and need to follow up on plausible explanations. I said that microwaves are a one, not saying other explanations aren't also. And I'm not rushing to conclusions.

[cpncrunch]

>brain abnormalities

There are no brain abnormalities. They simply found different values for grey/white matter in certain areas of the brain from controls, but these values vary among the population, and it isn't evidence of brain damage.

>"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day" Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.

Indeed, and these symptoms can be very serious in many cases (having experienced them myself, to a much worse degree of impairment than described here).

>The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before.The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.

It's not "nothing". FND (and variations thereof) is incredibly serious, and not "mass hysteria", and it is the most common complaint seen by neurologists. People who actually understand about FND are saying it is the most plausible explanation for these symptoms:

https://www.edinburghneuroscience.ed.ac.uk/news/functional-n...

[Sporktacular]

"It's not "nothing"" By nothing I mean there's no syndrome. Symptoms can be real.

From what I understand, you're saying the FND occurrence rate among these embassy workers is the same as that of the general population, but for some presumably conspiratorial reason, they're being treated specially.

Let's give credit to the many neurologists on this who know about FND, and many other disorders, and assume that they and the authors probably have considered it.

[boomboomsubban]

> The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.

The report stated that they were lacking too much data to determine it was a mass psychogenic illness, and could not make a conclusion on the subject. It would still fit the available data though.

[asn0]

I also found this 'Open Letter to the Diplomats With "Havana Syndrome"' provided helpful context.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/201911/...

[owenmarshall]

Mass hysteria strikes me as even more plausible if you consider that some of the people reporting symptoms are American intelligence agents who could be participating in a disinformation campaign to give a pretext to act against Cuba.

[totalZero]

> a disinformation campaign to give a pretext to act against Cuba.

That doesn't make sense, because the supposed culprits in the narrative are non-Cubans.

[owenmarshall]

Then we blame the Russians while tut tutting the Cubans for allowing this to happen.

That’s the rather tidy thing about claiming to be attacked by a weapon no one can see and that leaves no evidence of use: you’re free to build theories that suit your geopolitical ambitions.

[totalZero]

A tut tut isn't the same thing as an "act against Cuba."

If you believe that there are several diplomats with real injuries and persistent symptoms, then it stands to reason that something happened. No amount of FUD can controvert that.

Personally I have no geopolitical ambitions. What I do have is a great deal of faith in the American investigative apparatus, and none whatsoever in the honesty of Russia and China.

[skrebbel]

> a ton of hot air blown

I see what you did there!