Comment by FabHK
14 hours ago
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.
14 hours ago
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.
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?
Yes, sort of. Ioannidis published a serosurvey during COVID that computed a lower fatality rate than the prior estimates. Serosurveys are a better way to compute this value because they capture a lot of cases which were so mild people didn't know they were infected, or thought it wasn't COVID. The public health establishment wanted to use an IFR as high as possible e.g. the ridiculous Verity et al estimates from Jan 2020 of a 1% IFR were still in use more than a year later despite there being almost no data in Jan 2020, because high IFR = COVID is more important = more power for public health.
If IFR is low then a lot of the assumptions that justified lockdowns are invalidated (the models and assumptions were wrong anyway for other reasons, but IFR is just another). So Ioannidis was a bit of a class traitor in that regard and got hammered a lot.
The claim he's a conspiracy theorist isn't supported, it's just the usual ad hominem nonsense (not that there's anything wrong with pointing out genuine conspiracies against the public! That's usually called journalism!). Wikipedia gives four citations for this claim and none of them show him proposing a conspiracy, just arguing that when used properly data showed COVID was less serious than others were claiming. One of the citations is actually of an article written by Ioannidis himself. So Wikipedia is corrupt as per usual. Grokipedia's article is significantly less biased and more accurate.
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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.