26 Comments

Where was Duesberg disproven? And in which sense are ARV successful? Because they kill more slowly than the higher dosage AZT?

Just name any sources for both, please. No empty "he was proven wrong" when you cannot name any sources.

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Duesberg "cherry-picks" his evidence, not likely. His hypothesis is so obviously correct that the evidence may have to be condensed but not cherry-picked. It appears to me that his opponents may be cherry-picking to keep a $billion hoax afloat - but boys the ship is sinking ( convert you stocks in this one to something else - global warming is the current fad/can't think of a current biology-type fad -cancer is a good one usually). I love the repeated ascertion that Duesberg has been "scientifically" proven wrong - wow but I never see a citation ( just forgot them all i guess, maybe you can remember 1 someday).

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Above, aaron talked about the secondary consequences of some claims about reality. This is a common issue people raise in controversial scientific questions: calling AGW into question makes it less likely we'll do anything about it in time (assuming the basic idea of AGW is correct), discussing racial differences in IQ can be used to justify discrimination or worse political/social nastiness, pointing out data showing that seasonal flu vaccine may make you more susceptible to swine flu may convince people to skip their seasonal flu shots and maybe get sick as a result, etc.

The problem is, these consequences can tell us something about the best policies to pursue in the gambling sense (if AGW costs much less to head off than to adapt to, it's probably worth heading off even if you're not too certain it's real), it can't tell us *anything* about the truth of the underlying factual question. And this kind of consequences/implications are like a kind of poison for our minds, making it harder to think clearly about the factual question because we so dislike the consequences.

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Your hypothesis still posits that HIV is the main cause of AIDS. As far as I can tell, Duesberg does not claim this: he argues that HIV itself is mostly or entirely harmless.

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The success of the anti-retrovirals makes clear that HIV does cause AIDS. However, the fact that many people are HIV-positive, but do not come down with AIDS, suggests that HIV infection ALONE is not sufficient to cause AIDS in many cases. That there must be a factor IN ADDITION to HIV infection that causes one to come down with AIDS. This is Duesberg's argument and one I think is credible.

I think HIV is a lot like Chicken pox or Herpes. If you get it and you have a robust immune system, your immune system keeps it bottled up in the spinal column and you never get sick. However, if something affects your immune system such as traumatic injury, aging, or even a party life style where you do not take proper care of yourself, then the virus gets out and you get sick and die.

Such a two-step mechanism strikes me as being a very plausible explanation of AIDS and one that fits with what I have seen over the past 30 years. I fail to see why it should be so controversial.

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Presumably the resulting controversy will ensure Duesberg's paper gets the maximum possible circulation.

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My comment wasn't particularly well written but in my final paragraph I note that the fact this paper took a non-standard position meant that it was judged more harshly, a double standard that I believe is justified.

For instance if you only wanted to publish papers with a minimum value, p, of being correct. A mainstream paper is to an extent backed up by the conclusions of the rest of the field, thus giving it a p advantage to start with. If you are coming to a different conclusion than everyone else than you need a much higher quality paper to achieve the same p value.

On top of that consider the secondary consequences of the publication. In this case the hypothesis, widely thought to be wrong, could (and probably did) lead to a large number of deaths. When the consequences of publication are that severe I believe a higher p-value is justified.

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Give them the Nobel Prize in Economics - that's what they did for Sviet booster Paul Samuelson. http://freedomkeys.com/samu...

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If there are many previous studies it will be infeasible for any one ordinary new paper to critique all their methods, just in order to present one new piece of evidence. Are you saying that no new evidence should be presented on the subject in any paper that does not fully review all previous evidence in enough detail to critique their methods?

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Aaron, are you saying this particular paper, about South African death stats, has such sloppy analysis that the paper should be retracted and the journal editor sacked no matter what hypothesis that paper had been said to support? Do you really think that would have happened for most other hypotheses it might have been said to support?

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No, because setting up that bet would incur transaction costs way beyond my potential winnings.

Besides, it's *not* about HIV being the only cause of AIDS overall (hard to claim that, since it basically amounts to a host of opportunistic infections due to a weakened immune system, and we know there are other things that weaken the immune system) - Duesberg is claiming that HIV is not causing AIDS, period.

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I'd place a bet for $10 against $10,000 in nominal 2010 USD that HIV will continue to be confirmed as the leading cause of AIDS. Other variables may influence the development of AIDS, but I will bet that in any year you care to name -- 2020, 2025, 2030, etc -- that any leading journal you care to name -- Science, Nature, PubMed's greatest hits, etc. -- will still think that HIV explains 51% or more of the variability in AIDS vs. not-AIDS.

If anyone actually wants to take that bet, private message me on Less Wrong and I'll draft a contract for us.

Dr. Hanson, I do think that if a journal is publishing studies that conflict with previous results that had p < .001 without critiquing the methods used in those previous studies, it should probably be shut down. Obviously not by the government or anything like that, but if academics shut it down in that situation, they made the right decision.

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Notice the qualifier "worth my while bothering to place a bet." If decision markets were widely used and I were a habitual player of decision markets and it wasn't much trouble to place bets on all kinds of different outcomes to spread around my risk, I'd consider taking far worse odds. How much I'm not sure, really small probabilities are hard to think about. But basically, I think the chance of the consensus on HIV being overturned is negligible.

Also, what Aaron says below. Most scientists who've looked at his work think Duesberg is guilty of cherry-picking data. The real issue is the quality of a given piece of research, not the probability of the hypothesis it supports being accepted in the long run.

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Medical Hypothesis doesn't use peer review, the editor decides which papers get published by themselves.

I think the issue is simpler than Robin makes it out to be. The issue isn't just the AIDS denialism (which is responsible for a lot of deaths), but deliberately publishing bad research. It's possible to do proper research that tries to throw doubt on the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS. But when you start writing papers that take information out of context and misrepresent facts you're going to be in trouble whether you're with the majority or are out in the woods.

The standard is higher for the researchers out in the woods (as it should be, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence). But if a mainstream researcher started trying to publish papers with false information and undisclosed conflicts of interest they'd eventually get in trouble too.

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That would imply that any hypothesis that was rightly discussed in a publication and which subsequently validated by a second study at p<.05 could be said to be more likely than not (given many assumptions).

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Arguably, the economic policy of farm collectivization has killed millions of people all around the world. What should we think about the people who advocate such economic policies?

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