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"One possibility: a leading hypothesis pursued by researchers (and funders) was built on science that now appears to be fraudulent."

Possibly the most likely possibility?


There are multiple factors, but the one that contributes the most is that it's actually a very challenging disease to study and improve on.

1. It acts on the brain, one of the organs we understand the least.

2. It's relatively slow acting, and easy to miss in the early stages.

3. It impacts the older population which will have confounding health factors.

4. It doesn't fit neatly into a big category we already know a lot about, like infection or cancer.


Elaborating a bit - brain is hard to study since you can't easily take a biopsy of it (from a living person at least), and various brain scans are not great at identifying the stuff we care about.

The slow acting nature of it means also you have to wait a long time to see results of clinical trials; also because early stages are easy to miss that also means you are stuck studying people who are already pretty senile and thus might be beyond the point where you can make a big difference.

Ruxandra has a nice piece, focused on cancer, but the reasoning is basically the same here: biology is just really hard. Sometimes we get lucky but in general it's a long, slow slog.

[1] https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/why-havent-biologists-c...


You can't definitively diagnose it without an autopsy of the brain.

Trump hasn't been in charge of US military doctrine for the last few decades. Iran has been touted as a threat to Western Civilization and everyone knows that's only because they can mine the strait of Hormuz. That nothing was done to counter that is not Trump's fault.

You can try to blame on Trump that Iran closing the strait is something he should have known would happen, but it's not really the US's problem- the US doesn't get much oil from and the replacement for the bottlenecked oil is going to come from the US.


It extremely is our problem; we can have our own supply of oil, but not our own price.

Isn't that similar to how neighborhood heat pumps work?

https://www.araner.com/blog/district-heating-in-sweden-effic...


Heat pumps require a specific temperate differential to work. So they work in zones with are a bit hotter or colder than you would like and so require moderate amounts of heating or cooling. They don't work in temperate zones nor in very hot or cold places. So Santa Fe or Minneapolis for example they work but Mexico City or San Francisco they don't. If you are in a place where they work and that isn't too dense or has earthquakes, go for it. If not, don't. There are businesses that will help you understand when they do and don't make sense. Those businesses don't sell heat pumps though (the businesses that sell things will almost always tell you it works, even when it doesn't, for example PV in the UK doesn't work).

> pv in the UK doesn't work

tell that to 6% of UK electric production https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz947djd3d3o (up from 5% in 2024


I’ve never heard a claim that heat pumps won’t work well in a climate like San Francisco and, from looking at the annual temperature patterns, it seems like both air source and ground source heat pumps should work extremely well as they do in the “shoulder seasons” here in New England.

Wait Minneapolis is definitely very cold for about half the year.

Notably, the article is looking at coffee, both caffeinated and decaffeinated. There is a lot more to coffee than just caffeine...

The overwhelming majority of the enjoyable coffee experiences are caffeinated. While there is good decaf out there it's not the norm, specially in smaller markets.

I think they meant that coffee contains a lot of other compounds than just caffeine, which something like energy drinks or teas will not include. So you can't necessarily extend conclusions from a study on consumption of coffee to effects that other drinks that happen to include caffeine might have.

Edit: this is especially relevant here, as the study found similar effects in decaffeinated coffee drinkers. So the effects they observed, if real, are not related to caffeine.


Workplace democracy would work better than democracy does anywhere else?

And, of course, every tech worker already has a vote. As the saying goes: they can vote with their feet.


It's a catchy turn of phrase, but of course a vote and an option to leave aren't the same thing at all.

How is this affecting the replicability crisis?

All around, black days for Science.

In a society where we tend to care for one another, they're very few private acts.

Nice try. In a society where there are not enough private acts to constitute a private self, who's even caring for whom?

Oh, "tending to". (As in actually failing but successfully pretending. Neato!)


Give this one MS-DOS shell headline would be " why I never am using Microsoft again" or something dramatic like that.

It is a problem in iterm, Apple's overlay, not in the cat program. Program. At least from Reading the article. That's what I got


It's actually a third party terminal emulator: https://iterm2.com/

Yes. It’s a Mac problem. That’s why Macs do the worst at pwn2own. It’s compounded by the fact that Mac users deny that there are problems in their beloved OS.

cat is a file concatenation utility. UNIX people know to view text files with more.


"Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals."

   -- Robert Caro
It's not the marination in money, it's the loss of constraint that fear brings.

Most of us aren't good people at heart.


“But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.” — https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1127738-but-although-the-cl...

> Most of us aren't good people at heart.

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450864-the-line-separating-...


Those people live in a museum-- Rome would be nearly empty if not for the tourist attractions, as it was for so many centuries.

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