
Scientific Regress - eastbayjake
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress
======
biomcgary
I am a post-doctoral research scientist that has wanted to be a scientist
since early childhood (6-7 years old). The structure of how science is
practiced seems to have changed substantially in that time frame, not for the
better. Some of my childhood naivete plays a role in those perceptions, but
many older scientists share that perspective.

A lot of the problems in modern science revolve around the growing focus on
bringing large quantities of research funds to your institution (which gets a
large cut). Getting grants has an increasingly large need for political clout
due to peer-review and increased competition due to reduced funding.
Consequently, labs are getting larger and more hierarchical (i.e., an
increased number of long-term post-docs and research scientists). As the
organizational structure of science becomes less flat, the influence of those
at the top is just reinforced and tends to constrain dialogue to fit
established ideas. I think that the long-term progress of science depends on
placing small bets on a greater variety of ideas rather than doubling down on
fewer. Unfortunately, it will always be perceived to be safer to fund
conventional ideas. Peer review enforces short-term, safe bet approaches.

Large labs can churn out lots of papers, even if they are relatively
financially inefficient. One way to correct this (if you agree that is a
problem) might be to normalize grant scores by previous grant funding to the
PI. i.e., (X papers of Y impact)/Z dollars of funding over the past 10 years.
Double-blind review of grants might also help, but blinding is relatively
easily circumvented.

~~~
danieltillett
The problem is purely one of incentives. If you design a pathological system
and make highly intelligent people use it then don’t be surprised with the
terrible results.

The solution to science is actually very simple - move from a peer review
ranked grant allocation system (which is totally gamed by those at the top) to
a basic screen and lottery system. The idea is to do a basic screen on grant
applications to make sure they are scientifically viable and not majorly
flawed (at least 75% of grants should pass this test) and then put them all
into a pool and draw winners from this pool until you have allocated all the
money you have.

Lets stop using a system that can’t actually do the job (peer review can't
separate the top 10% from the top 20%), and which is open to corruption and
old boy networks, and move to one that is at least fair and better than all
the alternatives.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Or you could take the anarcho-syndicalist approach and split the money evenly
to the entire pool, with a lower bound on grant size which makes the money
inconsequential and if the lower limit is reached require all grantees to
contribute a portion of their time to growing the money pool.

~~~
danieltillett
Two problem with this idea. If you don’t have some sort of barrier to entry
then anyone can apply for a grant. This funding is made available on the basis
that it will be used for science. I know this sounds elitist (it is), but
science is really hard and it takes many years of learning to reach the
forefront of knowledge where you can actually make a contribution. You only
want to give funding to those that can actually use the money to do science.
It would be a good idea to have another pool open to everyone to see if this
barrier is really required - it might actually not be.

The second problem is if you split the money too much then you won’t actually
be able to do any research. To see an experiment through to completion
requires a not insignificant amount of money (in most cases). If you start to
hand out amounts of only a few thousand dollars at a time then nobody would be
able to get any done.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Under an anarcho-syndicalist system you don't need to worry what your neighbor
does with their share. You have your share. If you want to work towards a
common goal you need to convince them to work with you voluntarily.

I addressed the second point in my original post but maybe that was unclear:
if there are so many applicants that individual grants become too small to
serve their purpose, you stop accepting applicants. But then you require the
applicant pool to spend some portion of their time growing the grant pool
until the waiting list is empty. Flipping burgers if need be. Although we're
talking about PhDs so I am sure there are better ways to use that labor pool.

~~~
danieltillett
Stopping the acceptance of potential grantees is just putting an inefficient
barrier to entry of new people. The end result of limiting people rather than
a base quality is that it would favour the old over the young which I don’t
think is a good outcome.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You will have to argue it's less efficient than the current system. You can't
just state that it is so.

As for favoring the old, all you have to do is require people to regularly re-
apply. There's no reason you need to hop the line after the end of your term.

And you seem to be assuming that the waitlist will be prohibitively long, but
the longer the waitlist the more labor you have for growing the grant pool, so
it naturally self-regulates.

------
navait
>But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed
ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on
Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for
profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a day without seeing a
t-shirt reading “Science: It works, b—es!” The hero of the recent popular
movie The Martian boasts that he will “science the sh— out of” a situation.
One of the largest groups on Facebook is titled “I f—ing love Science!” (a
name which, combined with the group’s penchant for posting scarcely any actual
scientific material but a lot of pictures of natural phenomena, has prompted
more than one actual scientist of my acquaintance to mutter under her breath,
“What you truly love is pictures”). Some of the Cult’s leaders like to play
dress-up as scientists—Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly
prominent examples— but hardly any of them have contributed any research
results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of
educators, popularizers, and journalists.

As much as I think the essay is great, this paragraph is a terrible ad-hominem
argument for the existence of a "cult of science" or why it is dangerous. It
doesn't matter if people wear xkcd shirts, Matt Damon uses profanity with
"science", or if people like a facebook page. Laypeople having fun with
"science" does not make a cult. A better argument would be to show how people
cargo-cult science, and why it causes problems with science. The author fails
to do both.

IFL is dangerous not because it is only pictures of scientific phenomena, but
that bullshit is constantly posted on the page to be consumed by laypeople.
The cult of science is dangerous because it has failed to teach people how to
properly evaluate claims, and believe anything with the word "study" in it.
Woo-pushers have appropriated the vocabulary of science indistinguishable to a
layperson. Andrew Wakefield resurrected long dead pandemics by falsely
publishing in the Lancet. This is what makes the cult of science dangerous,
not the word "bitches".

~~~
logicrook
I agree with most of your comment, but here are two nitpicks.

>This is what makes the cult of science dangerous, not the word "bitches".

Nobody said that, so there's no need to burn your strawman there.

Science is all about the method and proper use of critical thinking, so you
could assume it is a direct contradiction to have a vapid attitude of shitty
reposts of forced-meme-tier macros that are often inaccurate, without trying
to think about it an instant because it's nice virtue signaling (IFL in a
nutshell). But you're right, he could write it explicitly.

There's a nice writeup of this problem on the language log [0], arguing that
science is basically filling the role of biblical parables.

>Woo-pushers have appropriated the vocabulary of science indistinguishable to
a layperson.

They are not responsible for that, and honestly, nobody is. Recently, I read
the description of some machine learning algorithm that was filled with
buzzwords and dubious physics analogies to a point that I thought it was a
clever Sokal, but after some reading all of it was genuine. That's just how
jargon works, you assume that the one who using it understands what he is
saying, as long as he's using it seemingly properly, but you can't know unless
you have a sufficiently good grasp of the semantics.

[0][http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003847.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003847.html)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>They are not responsible for that, and honestly, nobody is. Recently, I read
the description of some machine learning algorithm that was filled with
buzzwords and dubious physics analogies to a point that I thought it was a
clever Sokal, but after some reading all of it was genuine. That's just how
jargon works, you assume that the one who using it understands what he is
saying, as long as he's using it seemingly properly, but you can't know unless
you have a sufficiently good grasp of the semantics.

I don't think machine learning was a good place to pick an example from. A lot
of so-called explanations of ML algorithms basically _are_ Sokal hoaxes, and
the fact is that the writer doesn't understand what the algorithm does and
how.

------
rm_-rf_slash
My father spent every night of his 30 year career researching semiconductors
with a deep belief he would be fired next week if he couldn't bring in enough
grant money. He is an amazing scientist and you wouldn't be on the internet
today without his spadework but he couldn't give a rat's ass about funding.

One day a former grad student showed him some pictures.

"That's my lab!" He said.

"No, that's the replica I built of your lab in China for 1/100 of the cost."

Science is such a noble pursuit. If only it were separable from humanity's
endless supply of greedy pricks.

~~~
ddorian43
What's the problem with the lab in China? I don't get it.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
The Chinese steal everything they can and reproduce it for cheap. No respect
for intellectual property at all. We are being robbed.

~~~
gozur88
Sure... the same way we robbed the UK of its mechanical looms in the 19th
century. The US economy was _based_ on IP theft.

It's perfectly normal if you're behind to copy the frontrunner and add your
own improvements.

------
thaw13579
While these problems clearly exist, I would argue that we're still making more
progress than "regress". The whole premise of the article seems to be that the
"good old days" are gone, but I'm not convinced that things were much better
then, after all, human psychology hasn't changed. For example, psychological
bias can be found even in physics, as described by Feynman:

"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we
fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an
experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to
be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for
the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements
of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function
of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the
next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit
bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing
that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people
did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above
Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and
find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to
Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers
that were too far off, and did other things like that..."

------
blakesterz
>>>First Things is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an
interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is
to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of
society.

I'm not quite sure what to think about the bias we might be seeing in this
post from this site. This is quite a long essay and there's not a single link
on a site that seems like it would be likely to be quite biased. I'm not
saying anything is wrong with this, but I guess just consider the source? It
could very well be fine.

~~~
wwilson
Hi, I'm the author. Just wanted to pop in and say:

(1) I originally had the thing stuffed full of citations and links, but since
they wanted to print it in the paper magazine, we stripped all those out. If
you want a reference for any particular claim, I'm happy to provide.

(2) First Things didn't pressure me to make any content or editorial
modifications to the article. The sole exception was one or two more technical
points that they asked me to cut for length and flow concerns (and because
many readers don't have a quantitative background).

Any bias in there is purely mine.

~~~
cjmb
It might be helpful to compile a list of those citations online (your own
website, perhaps?). This is the sort of essay that might get shared around a
whole bunch....it would be a shame for its impact to be lessened because of
the inevitable judgment people will have for the hosting publication.

It may be a perfect example of the "secular bias" the publication references,
but I too groaned inwardly when I went to check out the "about" section after
completing my read. Not because I changed my mind on the content of the
article, but because I was imagining sharing it and having to deal with an
argument about publication bias (in the media) for an essay about (among other
things) publication bia (in the sciences)

~~~
wwilson
That's a great point, I'll try to put something together.

------
convivialdingo
Many years ago I started out as a Chem major. After 3 years and many hours I
quit.

My grades were swell, I still loved science - but I couldn't be honest with
myself that I was going to be a real scientists in the end.

So here's what typically goes wrong: You get a lab assignment. Somewhere along
4th hour or second week you screw up and grab the lab ass for help. He says
"sorry - just keep going."

You won't get a do-over. You can't afford to start over because the expected
competence requires immediate good results.

Your lab time is limited and resources are scarce. If you want the grade you'd
better "learn from your mistakes" and "be more careful next time."

What about the results? Well you already have a pre-conceived notion of what
they should be. Maybe you get them from your mates, or look them up.

Learning from our mistakes is "science code language" for pushing small known
nudges and data "massaging" as an acceptable method for passing the course.

Perhaps at one time students really did learn and grow from these mistakes -
but the modern concept of failing is simply a quick exit from a highly
competitive major.

All the while my own scientific rigor which I was supposed to be enforcing on
my own results was slowly corrupted.

I couldn't truly say that my practise in the scientific method was honestly
the truthful result of my own observations and methods. Perhaps I was just too
anal at the time - so be it.

I worked in an environmental testing lab and the sloppy procedures practiced
were sometimes much the same.

Circumstantial? Yes. Take of it what you will. But if my experience is like
that of others - such corruption as reported here doesn't surprise me.

Science should be about failure as much as it is about success. Failure is a
valid result - but we often fail to oblige real and honest failure as
scientifically and (most importantly) educationally valid.

That was my draw to CompSci. Our very embrace of failure as a tool for
learning. I absolutely love it.

~~~
oconnor663
I'm going to read that as short for "lab assistant" :-D

~~~
convivialdingo
Yes, that's right. It was our term of endearment for the poor grad student
that was stuck with the undergrads. He or she had to deal with our mistakes
and assist in proper methodology and procuring lab materials.

------
nycticorax
Certainly, the reproducibility crisis in social science and cancer biology is
important, and deserves attention. But this article mostly strikes me as
profoundly overstated. Yes, science is done by humans, and is thus imperfect.
Yes, science's approach to truth is nonmonotonic. (I think most working
scientists would consider this obvious.) Yes, scientists have various
incentives to hype surprising results, cut corners, and even cheat. Yes, a lot
of bad science gets published. But clearly science is making progress, since
we clearly know more than we did 5, 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Are there things
that could be done to improve the way science is conducted? Almost certainly
(e.g. preregistering experimental trials, requiring power analysis in
published papers), but this article is remarkable quiet about such things. In
the end, what is author even really saying? That lay people should trust
scientists less than they do? That doesn't seem correct to me. For instance,
on climate change, it seems that normal people trust scientists a good deal
_less_ than they should, instead placing their trust in talking heads,
politicians, and people who are unambiguously paid by oil companies to
advocate on their behalf. So: yes, science as practiced in 2016 is imperfect.
But what exactly do you propose replacing it with?

~~~
WalterSear
It's academia that is broken, which is being referred to here as 'science'.
What do we replace it with? Organizations that do not damage actual science in
order perpetuate themselves, obviously.

~~~
nycticorax
In my experience, academia's brokenness has been greatly exaggerated. All
medium-to-large human organizations are broken to some extent. And exactly
what are the concrete outlines of these mythical "organizations that do not
damage actual science in order perpetuate themselves" that you propose to
replace academia with?

------
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
I agree that there are real structural issues, especially in certain fields,
and especially involving the incentives for funding and publishing. However, I
think that the overall impression gives some mis-characterization, at least
from my perspective as a molecular biologist / geneticist.

First, I think that the most prominent studies are the most likely to have
issues; generally they're doing something new, often with new methodology.
It's here where extrapolations tend to be made that are the most dangerous.
It's also not surprising that social sciences have such issues; they don't
have rigorous tools (i.e. genetics) that can effectively ground their work. It
makes compounding issues much harder to catch.

Related is the re-testing issue; in many fields, subsequent work will catch
errors in previous work. If you work with a mutant and then someone else works
with it, they'll see if it behaves differently than expected from the previous
work. Germplasm travels, and it's the ultimate arbiter of truth. This usually
does lead to further scrutiny and fixing the issue. The real problem that I've
observed isn't that the errors aren't caught, but that a formal retraction
isn't always done. Sometimes it just gets contradicted in a subsequent paper
(and often with some relish) without ever resulting in a retraction. The
editors of that journal clearly have a responsibility here that they are
failing to uphold.

However, despite these faults, it's quite clear to those of us with 'boots on
the ground' that you can't hide from the data; as long as you're using solid
genetics and doing 'real' experiments (e.g. western blots, in situ/immuno-
localization, simple gels/pcr, etc.) you can only hide for so long. The
exception is if no one keeps working on it, in which case it's probably not
that interesting to begin with. This also leads to a deep suspicion of
bioinformatics among geneticists because we see how often things go wrong, and
what is needed to make it right. Fortunately, genetics can still be used to
great effect.

Ultimately, I'm not suspicious of the large body of work in my field. Most of
it is based on extremely solid forward genetics that withstands lots of
testing. Even now, great value is placed on these 'old school' methods because
of how robust they are known to be.

------
__mbm__
This article appears to be bent on buttressing an anti-scientific religious
viewpoint rather than improving science. (Read the last few paragraphs.) The
conclusion strikes the same themes that I've seen many times in the religious
anti-science movement: science is a religion, a cult, etc.

Sure, statistics are difficult and can lead to incorrect conclusions, but
that's why we make sure that a scientific claim is falsifiable. The fact that
we can test the claims are where much of the power lies. Let's not forget that
a few centuries of the scientific method have made human lives so much better
than millennia of religion.

~~~
le0n
It seems to me more bent on buttressing a pro-scientific religious viewpoint.

------
coliveira
Strange to see that HN is supporting the views of anti-science propaganda,
promoted by religious groups. The great thing about science is that it is
falsifiable. So, yes, mistakes will be made, specially with so much pressure
to publish more papers. But finding the mistakes in these papers is another
incentive that leads science to progress, while religion will forever keep
pointing fingers without anything better to offer.

------
Fede_V
I think this is largely a case of 'moloch' as described by Scott Alexander:
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

In that long (but excellent essay) Scott points out that self organizing
systems like human society can sometimes arrange themselves in horrible local
minimas which can be very difficult to escape.

I think the way modern science is organized is decidedly suboptimal. Note that
I'm talking purely sociologically: science, as a method, is still by far the
best thing we've developed to understand the natural world. However, the
incentives around publishing / grants / hiring work are broken in a myriad of
ways, from small to massive.

For example:

\- High prestige journals/conferences are basically a crapshoot:
[http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-
experiment.html](http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html) \-
consider that getting a paper accepted in NIPS/published in Nature might
completely change the way your career shapes up.

\- Grant funding is incredibly competitive, and the way they are awarded is
also a crapshot: [https://psmag.com/why-the-national-institutes-of-health-
shou...](https://psmag.com/why-the-national-institutes-of-health-should-
replace-peer-review-with-a-lottery-41d09bcce5d8)

\- The pressure to publish/obtain grants drives people to either make up data
to obtain fancy publications, or even to kill themselves:
[http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-
im...](http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-
college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/)

\- We reward researchers for brilliant clean discoveries, not brilliant
methodologies. However, the outcome of a serious research project is the one
thing that a scientist cannot control: science investigates the unknown, if
someone explores a plausible hypothesis in a clever way, and the hypothesis
turns out to be wrong, the scientist didn't do anything wrong.

\- PhDs are often used as cheap labour. A very famous PI once bragged that
before they got their new fancy robot, they just had 10 chinese postdocs
handle all the plating.

\- Private companies make an insane amount of money from publishing scientific
research that's carried out with public money, and that's reviewed by
scientists (largely) paid with public money who donate their money for free.

I could go on for ages - and so could almost every researcher/ex-researcher on
HN. There's a few no brainer changes - but the problem is that almost everyone
in power who could affect change stands to benefit from the current system.

~~~
Strilanc
A more relevant post by Scott is The Control Group is Out of Control [1]. The
starting off point is that parapsychology has high-quality studies with
positive results, but we're pretty sure parapsychology is wrong, and this
bodes poorly for "high-quality" studies in other fields. But then it just
keeps going and going... by the end I always feel like lowering the acceptable
p-value ceiling by a factor of 1000, and also like that would be a joke
laughed off by the nature of the problem.

1: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-
ou...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-
control/)

------
nonbel
Great article. I would say this is inaccurate though:

>"What it really means is that for each of the countless false hypo­theses
that are contemplated by researchers, we accept a 5 percent chance that it
will be falsely counted as true—a decision with a considerably more
deleterious effect on the proportion of correct studies."

The hypotheses that the statistical "hypothesis testing" framework is usually
applied to often amount to "two groups of cells/animals/people are samples
from exactly the same population". Then there will be assumptions about the
distribution of this population, etc. As has been noted by many (see eg Meehl
1967), such a hypothesis is pretty much always false and nothing but a
strawman.

[http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/meehlp/WebNEW/PUBLICATIONS/0...](http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/meehlp/WebNEW/PUBLICATIONS/074TheoryTestingParadox.pdf)

------
onetimePete
The problem is that fields don't advance in a continuous process, but its in
bursts of stop and go. This state with a lack of progress and entrenched
thought schools is prelude to another fracking of the unknown. Somebody in all
this science looks on the "outliers" and will connect the dots. And the truth
is, that not the science community grants the ultimate reward- but society and
economics, via application.

You can assemble a thousand followers, claiming that electrons are little
golden dwarfs, running through the metal if fed with potatoes, but the world
wants chips without chips, so what hinders science? Globalization, border-
lessness, in a ironic twist, cause where can that industrial revolution
flourish and reward overcome all prejudices? When the potato religion/ideology
is the same everywhere, there is noway to run too for the first battery maker.

One of the charlatans is not one. Better to feed a hundred of them, for the
one to prevail.

------
nitwit005
This article makes some good points, although ones that have been made a lot
recently, but it hugely oversells the regress argument.

If that was happening, it should be quite easy to measure in some areas: 5
year cancer survival rates should fall, corn yields should drop, and so on.
For the most part, we don't seem to see that.

If it was all some sort of faith, and the bad findings were accepted, we
should see more-or-less random changes instead of steady improvement

------
conjectures
TLDR: some scientists are doing science by critiquing what some other
scientists did, using statistics. The authors are a wee bit confused about the
fact that science is needed to weed out the 'bad' science from the 'good'
science.

~~~
DenisM
Please, this is not even close to the content of the article.

~~~
conjectures
Actually, it is.

------
paviva
This is an obviously biaised text by an author with a fundamentalist religious
agenda.

He cites all well-known and not at all surprising problems with peer review,
which means that a sizeable proportion of published science is wrong --
_wrong_ as in _somewhat innaccurate_ and likely _perfectible_ , and in now way
as wrong as only religious ideas can be, i.e. completely false and unfounded.
Asimov wrote a great essay about this _Relativity of Wrong_ [1].

Indeed, that fact that science isn't regressive, and our knowledge _is_
getting more accurate with each passing day, is self-evident. Suffice to
compare what we have now with what we had 20 years ago, and its clear that we
are not regressing.

Now, as to the specific examples that are falsely used to proove how wrong
this wicked science can get:

1\. "one hundred published psychology experiments".

Seriously, anyone in the field knows that these studies are rubbish, and all
correlations are obtained after running so many statstical tests that they are
clearly due to chance.

2\. "half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false".

Again, this is obvious. Many initially positive findings will be due to
chance, especially when we are talking of small, exploration studies. Yes,
many initially promising molecules did not live out to the hype, but others
did, and spectacularly so. For instance, progress in oncology has been amazing
lately. People who had life expectancies of mere weeks in early 2000s now
routinely survive for years with their metastatic cancers.

3\. "but are unlikely to mention a similar experiment conducted on reviewers
of the prestigious British Medical Journal." [as opposed to Sokal's Social
Text hoax].

Apples and oranges. Sokal's article is plain old gibberish, whereas the
experiments in medical litterature were to assess the reviewers capacity to
assess for methodology failures of otherwise plausible studies. Most of these
methodology failures are weeded out by dedicated statistical and clerical
staff.

Indeed, I would argue that some of those methodological problems were pretty
minor, e.g. :

"Poor justification for conducting the study; No ethics committee approval;
Failure to spot word reversal in text leading to wrong interpretation of
results; No explanations for ineligible or non-randomized cases; Safety. No
mention was made of monitoring patients for untoward effects; Format. The
abstract was not written in the structured form requested by Annals;
References. No reference cited was more current than 1989 despite the fact
that there were numerous more recent studies; 5.Presentation. There were
multiple grammatical and spelling mistakes, including the misspelling of
propranolol as “propanalol." [2,3]

[1] [http://hermiene.net/essays-
trans/relativity_of_wrong.html](http://hermiene.net/essays-
trans/relativity_of_wrong.html)

[2]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/)

[3]
[http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(98)70006-X/ful...](http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644\(98\)70006-X/fulltext)

~~~
conjectures
I notice your comment also got downvoted. Seems there are a bunch of people on
HN promoting this religious-fluff-critique.

------
rbrcurtis
disturbing.

