Gwern did a follow-up on this. The reason it was ignored was mostly because it was never published, because the group just... never bothered, with ANY of their research.
As far as I understand things semaglutide was originally introduced to treat obese patients with type 2 diabetes and other co-morbidities so exactly the type of reduced life expectancy patients you mention. And semaglutide has been very successful with these patients. Expecting normal-life-expectancy patients to react the same is worth a look but the experimental protocols need to very careful or they do lead. as you write, to cargo cult science.
I have to say I have more faith in the self-correcting mechanisms of open science conducted well. Indeed, there is a reverse tendency in science where someone wants to make their name not by confirming an existing nostrum but by disproving or at least qualifying it. That’s a way to gain prominence, not by piling in on a cult following, where you might just get lost in the crowd.
Actually, one of the problems we have in the behavioural and social sciences is that the majority of published results are not reproducible! So there are few cargo cults here. Just hard, shoe-leather work trying to establish what the well-grounded intellectual parameters are and adding one’s penny worth, while avoiding confirmation bias and displaying defensible research designs and conclusions.
An impressive piece (and all the more so for having completed it in less than an hour).
You paint a bleak picture of the darker side of cargo cult science. But if I may offer a hopeful alternative... When it comes to neuroscience and trying to apply it to your own behaviour, the experiment and experimenter are one and the same. This presents a unique situation where the observer's own perceived truth influences the true success of the "experiment" itself. To borrow Feynman's parlance, fooling yourself (into changing your behaviour) is the whole point.
Gwern did a follow-up on this. The reason it was ignored was mostly because it was never published, because the group just... never bothered, with ANY of their research.
One point in favor of "publish or perish"!
https://gwern.net/maze
As far as I understand things semaglutide was originally introduced to treat obese patients with type 2 diabetes and other co-morbidities so exactly the type of reduced life expectancy patients you mention. And semaglutide has been very successful with these patients. Expecting normal-life-expectancy patients to react the same is worth a look but the experimental protocols need to very careful or they do lead. as you write, to cargo cult science.
I have to say I have more faith in the self-correcting mechanisms of open science conducted well. Indeed, there is a reverse tendency in science where someone wants to make their name not by confirming an existing nostrum but by disproving or at least qualifying it. That’s a way to gain prominence, not by piling in on a cult following, where you might just get lost in the crowd.
Actually, one of the problems we have in the behavioural and social sciences is that the majority of published results are not reproducible! So there are few cargo cults here. Just hard, shoe-leather work trying to establish what the well-grounded intellectual parameters are and adding one’s penny worth, while avoiding confirmation bias and displaying defensible research designs and conclusions.
An impressive piece (and all the more so for having completed it in less than an hour).
You paint a bleak picture of the darker side of cargo cult science. But if I may offer a hopeful alternative... When it comes to neuroscience and trying to apply it to your own behaviour, the experiment and experimenter are one and the same. This presents a unique situation where the observer's own perceived truth influences the true success of the "experiment" itself. To borrow Feynman's parlance, fooling yourself (into changing your behaviour) is the whole point.
(I wrote about this in more detail here (less impressively than in one hour) if curious: https://hereisyourbrain.substack.com/p/sometimes-waving-sticks-in-the-air)