Comment by dev_l1x_be
14 hours ago
There is a surprisingly large amount of bad science out there. And we know it. One of my favourite writeup on the subject: John P. A. Ioannidis: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/pdf/pmed.00...
This is a great paper but, in my experience, most people in tech love this paper because it allows them to say "To hell with pursuing reality. Here is MY reality".
John Ioannidis is a weird case. His work on the replication crisis across many domains was seminal and important. His contrarian, even conspiratorial take on COVID-19 not so much.
Ugh, wow, somehow I missed all this. I guess he joins the ranks of the scientists who made important contributions and then leveraged that recognition into a platform for unhinged diatribes.
Please don't lazily conclude that he's gone crazy because it doesn't align with your prior beliefs. His work on Covid was just as rigorous as anything else he's done, but it's been unfairly villainized by the political left in the USA. If you disagree with his conclusions on a topic, you'd do well to have better reasoning than "the experts said the opposite".
Ioannidis' work during Covid raised him in my esteem. It's rare to see someone in academics who is willing to set their own reputation on fire in search of truth.
1 reply →
What’s happening here?
“Most Published Research Findings Are False” —> “Most Published COVID-19 Research Findings Are False” -> “Uh oh, I did a wrongthink, let’s backtrack at bit”.
Is that it?
10 replies →
Yeah, and lucky you! You gain all this insight b/c you logged into Hacker News on the very day someone posted the truth! What a coincidence!
He made a famous career, to being a professor and a director in Stanford University, about meta-research on the quality of other people's research, and critiquing the methodology of other people's studies. Then during Covid he tried to do a bit of original empirical research of his own, and his own methods and statistical data analysis were even worse than what he has critiqued in other people's work.