Comment by tripletao
16 hours ago
Ioannidis corrected for false positives with a point estimate rather than the confidence interval. That's better than not correcting, but not defensible when that's the biggest source of statistical uncertainty in the whole calculation. Obviously true zero can be excluded by other information (people had already tested positive by PCR), but if we want p < 5% in any meaningful sense then his serosurvey provided no new information. I think it was still an interesting and publishable result, but the correct interpretation is something like Figure 1 from Gelman's
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714034
These test accuracies mattered a lot while trying to forecast the pandemic, but in retrospect one can simply look at the excess mortality, no tests required. So it's odd to still be arguing about that after all the overrun hospitals, morgues, etc.
By walked back, what I meant is his conclusion starts by demanding an apology, saying reading the paper was a waste of time and that Ioannidis "screwed up", that he didn't "look too carefully", that Stanford has "paid a price" for being associated with him, etc.
But then in the P.P.P.S sections he's saying things like "I’m not saying that the claims in the above-linked paper are wrong." (then he has to repeat that twice because in fact that's exactly what it sounds like he's saying), and "When I wrote that the authors of the article owe us all an apology, I didn’t mean they owed us an apology for doing the study" but given he wrote extensively about how he would not have published the study, I think he did mean that.