[matthewdgreen]

TFA tries to claim that this single paper misled the field for 16 years, but that’s an incredibly strong claim for which it offers no real evidence. In fact, in the first few paragraphs the author admits that there were many other papers that drove scientists to pursue this hypothesis. The fraud is clearly tragic, but the tenuous arguments made in this piece are pretty flimsy.

The nature of science is that there are a lot of papers. Not all are replicated but generally “we pursued this direction for 16 years” type of hypothesis are based on many results, which acts as an error correcting code on mistakes and fraud — and is exactly how the system is supposed to work.

[csaid81]

Blog post author here. The paper was the 4th most cited paper in Alzheimer's research since 2006. So I feel reasonably confident that if it had never been written, some researchers at the margin would have chosen to work on other hypotheses instead, and perhaps those other avenues would have been more fruitful.

How much time could have been saved towards an effective treatment? It could be as high as a decade, but of course more likely it was zero years. I averaged it out to 1 year.

Now suppose you think that 1 year is orders of magnitude too high, and that in expectation it averages out to a 1 day delay. Even then, I estimate 100,000 QALYs would be lost, making this a tragically high impact case of misconduct.

--- Final point: Nobody doubts that science is error correcting. The point is that the errors are corrected far too slowly and many never get corrected at all. It's incredibly hard to develop good theories when you know that 30-50% of the results in your lit review are false.

[mistermann]

> Nobody doubts that science is error correcting.

What is the precise, singular meaning (or implementation) of "science is error correcting"?

Is there one?