Lay People Must Ignore Certain Scientists

[jordansparks]

I've just enhanced this page with an explanation of why lay people must ignore any scientist who supports cryopreservation without fixation:
https://www.sparksbrain.org/scientificBasis.html
It's nothing personal. I like them as people. I also have no problem with what they publish because other scientists can easily filter out their inaccurate claims. But where we get into trouble is when lay people listen to their advice on brain preservation. The mainstream position on reversibility of brain cryopreservation is that it's so far in the future that there is no timeline, but instead only skepticism that it will even be possible at all. It is also well outside the mainstream scientific consensus to claim that cryopreservation without fixation is of adequate quality to preserve structure as compared with fixation. Any scientist who suggests using cryopreservation without fixation is biased. Lay people must completely ignore any scientist who holds this position and must completely disregard all of their statements as inaccurate. Yes, many of their statements might be accurate and other scientists can easily filter those out. But it becomes impossible for most lay people to discern which statements are accurate and which are biased, so they are the wrong experts to ask about brain preservation. It's important to only listen to mainstream scientists, and to not take advice about brain preservation from biased outliers. It is fairly straightforward to identify those scientists and simply ignore them as noise from now on.

[carrie_radomski]

Hi Jordan, Greg Fahy is not just “some scientist” with an outlier opinion. He is one of the most important cryobiologists alive, and one of the central figures in organ vitrification. When he started his career, many in the scientific community did not believe whole-organ vitrification was even possible.

If the question is cryopreservation, vitrification, cryoprotectant toxicity, ice formation, and the preservation of biological structure at low temperatures, Fahy is exactly the kind of expert whose opinion should carry serious weight.

That does not mean he is automatically right about every question in brain preservation. But I would not tell lay people to ignore him. I would tell them to understand why someone with Fahy’s background might evaluate the tradeoffs differently from someone coming from conventional fixation-based neuroscience.

[jordansparks]

Which is exactly why I made this post. The scientific process requires that lay people ignore outliers whose views do not match mainstream consensus. He cannot accurately relay the current mainstream consensus to lay people because he is an outlier. This is extremely important. Credentials alone are not enough to give full credence to all his statements. Appeal to authority is a well known logical fallacy. This is how we navigate around that fallacy. Lay people are simply not equipped to evaluate individual statements from a scientist. They should never be expected to.