Comment by petesergeant
15 hours ago
Is it possible that scientists employed at Stanford will have also had this insight, and worked around it?
15 hours ago
Is it possible that scientists employed at Stanford will have also had this insight, and worked around it?
possible, yes. did they? that's the question
Yes they did, and published it all.
Sometimes I can't believe how low discussions on HN can fall. Did really nobody in this thread bother to check this? Are we fine disparaging research solely based on the fact that they used a method that gives bad results with bad inputs (which doesn't?) and their incentives could be misaligned (whose aren't?)?
If there are well justified concerns about the method or data then by all means let's talk about it, but please let's all try to keep low effort anti intellectual conspiracy theories away from here.
I read the paper before I made my original comment. They fit a clustering algorithm and then hand waved at intepreting the clusters. 'Omics papers get away with a lot of hand waving. Yeah they did some peak detection and found peaks, but you are going to find peaks in a random walk.
They didn't test the theory that rapid aging occurs at those two specific time points in an independent hold out set.
Most importantly even if these peaks exist this paper does not prove they are biological. They could correspond to common socially driven changes in behavior
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It is also very possible that they have big incentives to ignore those just to get something published, don't you think?