Comment by Barrin92
17 hours ago
As the paper points out that's accounted for in the analysis, because shockingly enough to most internet commentators researchers know that they need to control for confounding variables
17 hours ago
As the paper points out that's accounted for in the analysis, because shockingly enough to most internet commentators researchers know that they need to control for confounding variables
Always insane to me how people will just read the headline of an article and point out "flaws" based on what they assume the article says
People jump the gun to show their perceived intellectual superiority. Typically same kind of people are last to admit of a mistake.
It's not necessarily about intellectualism. Science in modern times is plagued by publish or perish. Researchers just need to get things published to keep working, and negative results don't get published. So I think people often publish stuff without proper controls/missing confounding variables/inversion of causality/etc not out of ignorance, but because they know the conclusion is dubious - but if they don't publish, they're going to be out of a job.
I don't think many realize how huge the replication crisis is. You have 75% of studies in a leading social psychology journal failing to replicate. [1] Another replication effort on preclinical medical studies found only 11% were able to be replicated, a replication effort on cancer studies found the average effect size to be 85% lower than published, and much more. If you assume most science headlines, at least outside of the traditional hard sciences, are false - you're substantially more likely to be right than wrong.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...
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And then their comment also reliably becomes the top-voted comment in the post
You actually read the link ?
They got trained to said assumptions by bad sensationalist 'science journalism'. Remember how power lines caused brain damage in children? Not through the magnetic fields or anything like that, but the lowered property values.
> "researchers know that they need to control for confounding variables"
'Why ‟controlling for a variable” doesn't (usually) work' - https://dynomight.net/control/
Other things that don't work, including four other 'controlling for a variable' entries at items 39 through 43: https://dynomight.net/things/
Also https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/26/stop-confounding-yours...
About that old Slate Star Codex article, I find it amazing that no one in that 70+ comment section of presumably smart and Rational people, bothered to look up to see if there were interventional studies on bullying.
Dan Olweus did several of them in the 70s and 80s, and fought to his dying day against programs which didn't have casual intervention studies backing them.
The 1/60 to 1/100 difference could be explained by just one small confounder that is impossible to cover for. Therefore in my opinion making any conclusions based on this study wouldn't be fruitful at all.