Comment by martin-t
1 day ago
I understand but incompetence is so common everywhere in society that mistakes like this genuinely are the first thought people should have.
I have the opposite opinion - if criticism like this is so obvious (and it is), then it's up to the article to refute it immediately - this saves time of everyone reading it and gives it more credibility.
So any mention of a study in an online comment or blog post has to couch it in a bunch of pre-responses to potential kneejerk dismissals from people who won't even look at the study?
You can tell who never looks studies up on scihub because they have no idea that multivariate modeling for confounders (especially income and education) is something pretty much every study does, so it makes no sense to assume you just blindly outsmarted the study when you thought of the first confounder that came to your mind.
Yet it everyone else's responsibility to defend casual mention of every study from a critique you came up in 5 seconds.
So I get to hip-fire studies at you with 0 effort on my part and you'll spend hours verifying them?
No, you do it in good faith, and if I see value in engaging with you but I imagine a potential issue with the study just from its title, I can skim it instead of posting it and never looking.
Nobody has an obligation to assume competence. Incompetence is very common on both sides. It is reasonable to assume incompetence. Given it's such common criticism and refuting it is simple, yes, the author should pre-respond. Otherwise everyone else has to look at the study which costs more time in total and also allows incompetent scientists to get away with it because unless people investigate further, both look the same on the surface.
You could ask dozens and maybe hundreds of entry level questions about the study that the study answers in its text.
How many of those questions do you feel is adequate to pre-respond to any time you link a study? Especially when assuming incompetence on the person asking the question thus you can't possibly know the questions they are most likely to ask (since they're incompetent)?
And if I'm incompetent, why would anyone trust my summary and pre-responses to the study?
None of this makes sense. And we're getting awfully close of just pasting/linking the study so the person with the questions can just read the dang thing.