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This headline is quite misleading (and arguably very biased toward white readers). It describes a marked improvement in outcomes for African American study part

This headline is quite misleading (and arguably very biased toward white readers). It describes a marked improvement in outcomes for African American study participants. So perhaps NPR views this as "disappointing" but the headline suggests broadly that everyone should stop taking those supplements, when in fact the results are far more nuanced. HN's absurd title policy is using a clickbait (and misleading) title chosen by NPR and amplifying it.

hammock 8y ago
>This headline is quite misleading (and arguably very biased toward white readers). It describes a marked improvement in outcomes for African American study participants. Maybe NPR is just playing to their audience?
BurningFrog 8y ago
Without reading the article, if you're dark skinned you need to be really aware of your vitamin D levels when living away from a tropical sun. Just like super white people need to be careful about sun screen when away from northern European climates.
- dmix 8y ago
  The article only mentioned benefits for African Americans for fish oil not vitamin d, and related to heart health not (skin) cancer... and as the other commenter pointed out even the data on that was flimsy and not the main focus of the study.
ekianjo 8y ago
Does not matter. The effects on African American populations were probably not part of the pre defined endpoints, so yes, it is perfectly acceptable to say the study is negative. Looking at subgroups a posteriori is essentially what leads to p hacking and this is the behavior that we want to discourage in sciences.
- Leary 8y ago
  Shouldn't one consider what the p-value is in weighing whether it is a fluke or not?
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    In theory, you can do some more statistical tests to study if the subgroup analysis has statistically significant results. In practice, those tests are probably going to be skipped or done improperly, and it's difficult to tease out if the subgroup analysis suffers from the statistical fraud of reanalyzing until you get a positive result. Redoing the test from the start with the subgroup as the primary endpoint would always get you more accurate data, and history has pretty clearly shown that most instances of "we looked at the subgroups and found something where it works!" tend to not actually work when done properly anyways.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    The study is designed to evaluate precise and well-defined endpoints. Any additional observation not planned from the start does not have the same rigor (since the study does not control for all thousands of variables at once, obviously), so in practice you should never draw conclusions from what was not agreed to evaluate from the start.
tarr11 8y ago
I don’t know, the findings about African Americans seem to be a case of “outcome switching” [0] since it does not appear that this trial was specifically designed to test against that group. [0] https://www.vox.com/2015/12/29/10654056/ben-goldacre-compare-trials https://www.vox.com/2015/12/29/10654056/ben-goldacre-compare...
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  A more approachable description of why this is bad: "Green Jellybeans cause acne, p=0.05" https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ No, outcome switching is not exactly the same as P-hacking, but either could be blamed here.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    But on the other hand if you do the equivalent of 20 parallel trials and one of them has a naive p value of .001 then you still have a good result. I don't know how what heart attack values normally look like, but those percentages are pretty huge. They sound like numbers that might stand even after you compensate for the subsetting.
codetrotter 8y ago
> HN's absurd title policy is using a clickbait (and misleading) title chosen by NPR and amplifying it. In general I think the HN title policy works great, and I don’t think it’s fair to call it “absurd”. I think HN at its core always was a sort of social experiment revolving around online discussions. The title policy, along with the guidelines, is what makes HN be HN.
- loeg 8y ago
  The absurd part isn't the convention of being true to the source's headline — which is good, generally — but the dogged persistence in keeping bad and misleading headlines, with extremely rare exception.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    This is not a case of misleading headline. The study endpoints were not met. It is negative.
    - dmix 8y ago
      Agreed. This is turning out to bettet represent commenters preference for controversy and superiority over other comments/submissions than any expose of social media sites or HN's preference for negativity.
    - loeg 8y ago
      In the article, there are 6 paragraphs on the recent negative study results, followed by 15 paragraphs suggesting possible benefits either out of scope of the two recent studies, or potential future avenues of research. NPR's title is certainly accurate for the portion on the two studies, but ~3/4 of the text is not about the negative study results. So, while it's not the most misleading headline ever to grace the orange site, it's not exactly representative of the text either. Since the comment yesterday, the HN headline has changed to "Long-Awaited Study Results on Vitamin D and Fish Oil Supplements," dropping "disappointing."
      - 8y ago
a_bonobo 8y ago
I don't know, the linked editorial in NEJM summarises it pretty well: >However, these “positive” results need to be interpreted with caution. First, there was no correction for multiple comparisons, as would be required to attenuate the chance that these are spurious results, owing, in part, to the number of secondary end points. Second, these putative effects have not been consistently observed across other large, randomized trials of n−3 fatty acids.5,6 However, in one of the trials of vitamin D supplementation, post hoc analysis showed a lower incidence of cancer among women who received active supplements than among those who received placebo, excluding women who had withdrawn or in whom cancer had developed in the first year of the trial.13 Finally, the medical literature is replete with exciting secondary end points that have failed when they were subsequently formally tested as primary end points in adequately powered randomized trials. Thus, in the absence of additional compelling data, it is prudent to conclude that the strategy of dietary supplementation with either n−3 fatty acids or vitamin D as protection against cardiovascular events or cancer suffers from deteriorating VITAL signs. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1814933 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1814933
- dmix 8y ago
  So HNs "click bait" is not the issue at all then... The article merely misrepresented the positives for cardiovascular health but was largely correct about cancer (which was the entire point of the study as well as the topic of the headline).
erwan 8y ago
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
dang 8y ago
HN's policy is just the opposite. It would be good to know what the guidelines are before calling them absurd! "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- koboll 8y ago
  This is absolutely a clickbait title. A better one would be something like "Landmark Study On Fish Oil and Vitamin D Shows Fish Oil Reduces Heart Attacks, But Few Other Benefits"
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    Orig title was: "Vitamin D And Fish Oil Supplements Disappoint In Long-Awaited Study Results" Current title is: "Long-Awaited Study Results on Vitamin D and Fish Oil Supplements" The current title doesn't contain the conclusion which is much more neutral and invites for more reading. The current title is not clickbait.
    - resters 8y ago
      It was fixed after my comment.

hammock 8y ago

>This headline is quite misleading (and arguably very biased toward white readers). It describes a marked improvement in outcomes for African American study participants. Maybe NPR is just playing to their audience?

BurningFrog 8y ago

Without reading the article, if you're dark skinned you need to be really aware of your vitamin D levels when living away from a tropical sun. Just like super white people need to be careful about sun screen when away from northern European climates.

dmix 8y ago
The article only mentioned benefits for African Americans for fish oil not vitamin d, and related to heart health not (skin) cancer... and as the other commenter pointed out even the data on that was flimsy and not the main focus of the study.

ekianjo 8y ago

Does not matter. The effects on African American populations were probably not part of the pre defined endpoints, so yes, it is perfectly acceptable to say the study is negative. Looking at subgroups a posteriori is essentially what leads to p hacking and this is the behavior that we want to discourage in sciences.

Leary 8y ago
Shouldn't one consider what the p-value is in weighing whether it is a fluke or not?
- jcranmer 8y ago
  In theory, you can do some more statistical tests to study if the subgroup analysis has statistically significant results. In practice, those tests are probably going to be skipped or done improperly, and it's difficult to tease out if the subgroup analysis suffers from the statistical fraud of reanalyzing until you get a positive result. Redoing the test from the start with the subgroup as the primary endpoint would always get you more accurate data, and history has pretty clearly shown that most instances of "we looked at the subgroups and found something where it works!" tend to not actually work when done properly anyways.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  The study is designed to evaluate precise and well-defined endpoints. Any additional observation not planned from the start does not have the same rigor (since the study does not control for all thousands of variables at once, obviously), so in practice you should never draw conclusions from what was not agreed to evaluate from the start.

tarr11 8y ago

I don’t know, the findings about African Americans seem to be a case of “outcome switching” [0] since it does not appear that this trial was specifically designed to test against that group. [0] https://www.vox.com/2015/12/29/10654056/ben-goldacre-compare-trials https://www.vox.com/2015/12/29/10654056/ben-goldacre-compare...

LeifCarrotson 8y ago
A more approachable description of why this is bad: "Green Jellybeans cause acne, p=0.05" https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ No, outcome switching is not exactly the same as P-hacking, but either could be blamed here.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  But on the other hand if you do the equivalent of 20 parallel trials and one of them has a naive p value of .001 then you still have a good result. I don't know how what heart attack values normally look like, but those percentages are pretty huge. They sound like numbers that might stand even after you compensate for the subsetting.

codetrotter 8y ago

> HN's absurd title policy is using a clickbait (and misleading) title chosen by NPR and amplifying it. In general I think the HN title policy works great, and I don’t think it’s fair to call it “absurd”. I think HN at its core always was a sort of social experiment revolving around online discussions. The title policy, along with the guidelines, is what makes HN be HN.

loeg 8y ago
The absurd part isn't the convention of being true to the source's headline — which is good, generally — but the dogged persistence in keeping bad and misleading headlines, with extremely rare exception.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  This is not a case of misleading headline. The study endpoints were not met. It is negative.
  - dmix 8y ago
    Agreed. This is turning out to bettet represent commenters preference for controversy and superiority over other comments/submissions than any expose of social media sites or HN's preference for negativity.
  - loeg 8y ago
    In the article, there are 6 paragraphs on the recent negative study results, followed by 15 paragraphs suggesting possible benefits either out of scope of the two recent studies, or potential future avenues of research. NPR's title is certainly accurate for the portion on the two studies, but ~3/4 of the text is not about the negative study results. So, while it's not the most misleading headline ever to grace the orange site, it's not exactly representative of the text either. Since the comment yesterday, the HN headline has changed to "Long-Awaited Study Results on Vitamin D and Fish Oil Supplements," dropping "disappointing."
    - 8y ago

a_bonobo 8y ago

I don't know, the linked editorial in NEJM summarises it pretty well: >However, these “positive” results need to be interpreted with caution. First, there was no correction for multiple comparisons, as would be required to attenuate the chance that these are spurious results, owing, in part, to the number of secondary end points. Second, these putative effects have not been consistently observed across other large, randomized trials of n−3 fatty acids.5,6 However, in one of the trials of vitamin D supplementation, post hoc analysis showed a lower incidence of cancer among women who received active supplements than among those who received placebo, excluding women who had withdrawn or in whom cancer had developed in the first year of the trial.13 Finally, the medical literature is replete with exciting secondary end points that have failed when they were subsequently formally tested as primary end points in adequately powered randomized trials. Thus, in the absence of additional compelling data, it is prudent to conclude that the strategy of dietary supplementation with either n−3 fatty acids or vitamin D as protection against cardiovascular events or cancer suffers from deteriorating VITAL signs. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1814933 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1814933

dmix 8y ago
So HNs "click bait" is not the issue at all then... The article merely misrepresented the positives for cardiovascular health but was largely correct about cancer (which was the entire point of the study as well as the topic of the headline).

erwan 8y ago

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

dang 8y ago

HN's policy is just the opposite. It would be good to know what the guidelines are before calling them absurd! "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

koboll 8y ago
This is absolutely a clickbait title. A better one would be something like "Landmark Study On Fish Oil and Vitamin D Shows Fish Oil Reduces Heart Attacks, But Few Other Benefits"
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Orig title was: "Vitamin D And Fish Oil Supplements Disappoint In Long-Awaited Study Results" Current title is: "Long-Awaited Study Results on Vitamin D and Fish Oil Supplements" The current title doesn't contain the conclusion which is much more neutral and invites for more reading. The current title is not clickbait.
  - resters 8y ago
    It was fixed after my comment.