17 ms·

Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data: "I think the au

by jaaron 6y ago

Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data: "I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error." "I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don’t look too carefully at what you might have done wrong." source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

thepope 6y ago
Do you have any idea how stupid most people are? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/File:IQ_distribution.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/F... Think about where you fall on that graph and then realize how many people are dumber and a lot dumber than you. But it doesn't end there. Some people are sheltered their entire lives so there is a lot they don't understand. Some people are mostly one dimensional so they don understand a lot. Some people have huge egos so they don't understand a lot. Some people have unreasonable biases and agendas that warp their otherwise rational mind into being ridiculous. Some people are so overburdened they can't do anything but work and never have a second to think for themselves. The powers that be PUMP shit into our heads all day long. lol, how many people even passed Calculus let alone could do anything with it now. And you're asking these people to look at the data? Get real. Get real! These people are not influenced by data. Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? It's more selfish boomer behavior. I'm sorry but it's not worth the cost of another one or two Iraq wars to save the few people it does infect. It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. It's not like this thing kills 1/3 or even a 1/10th of the population. We are just pissing away money to protect a few boomers. They are pile driving our generation into poverty. End the quarantine. Very few people understand anything at all about statistics other than what can be gleaned from basic arithmetic. You're asking too much of people. You don't influence people with facts. Sorry this reply is all over the place.
- romwell 6y ago
  >Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? >It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. At 30% population infected, 1% is more than a million people. I'm sorry, our values seems radically different. >Do you have any idea how stupid most people are? I thought I did, but reading your comment did bring an enhanced understanding.
  - ggm 6y ago
    The implicit belief in the comment you respond to, is that the mitigation cost will "kill" more than a million people. I suspect it goes to non-lethal costs more, and then its the usual problem of milli-morts against economic cost/benefit.
  - streb-lo 6y ago
    Also, the fatality rate will rise if the virus gets out of control, which it very well could if people decide to forgo social distancing and self-isolating when possible.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    Grandparent post has been voted into oblivion, so commenting here: > Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? Actually, I don't. I've seen a lot of people make the argument that lockdowns and other restrictions are "too expensive", but: * I have not seen a single serious attempt to model quite how expensive they will be. * Nor have I seen any attempts to model how expensive alternate approaches would be, e.g. the Swedish model. Quite a few people who propagate it seem to be under the impression that this is implemented with zero economic disruption, but that's definitely not the case. * And to be truly realistic, the models should consider the capabilities of countries to mitigate economic consequences through fiscal or monetary means. Many countries can currently borrow at very low or even negative interest rates, so they may have considerable leverage there.
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      You cannot mitigate economic damage with fiscal or monetary means in any serious way. That statement of yours indicates that you do not understand the difference between money and wealth. Money is an abstraction we use to measure (relative) value. Wealth is the sum total of physical goods/services/resources that we rely on. When you neuter an economy, as we have done in the US, you destroy real wealth. There is no way to counteract that by injecting money. It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged. It is no surprise then that someone who holds that view would have trouble seeing the real damage that a shutdown like ours does. We have postponed elective surgeries, leading to furloughing tens of thousands of medical workers across the country because in many areas hospitals are practically empty. We’re halting meat packing plants because some portion of employees have tested positive. We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point). We treated a really bad but manageable papercut by chopping off our hand, and in doing so we have widened inequality in _every dimension_. What does a poor school-aged child who does not own a laptop do with remote schooling? What do millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and are now unemployed do? What about those postponing important preventative care that will prevent future deaths from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes? How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see? We took a bunch of otherwise healthy people, instilled them with disproportionate, all-consuming fear, and have had people in social isolation, which not only produces its own mortality but will also retard the natural exchange of micro-organisms that our health relies upon. And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it, while destroying the quality of life of the 99.4% of the population who never would have died from this thing anyway (there’s debate as to whether the IFR is .3% or 1% but I think .6% is a very conservative number) — In answer to your question about models, you are right that we need more of them, and in rereading your comment I see you were more raising questions than advocating a pro-lockdown stance. In any case I encourage you to check out http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=6976 http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=69.... I’m on mobile right now otherwise I’d quote from it but they look at it in terms of wellbeing-years
cameldrv 6y ago
I don't think that Ioannnidis needs to resign or something, but he should retract the paper and recuse himself from the ongoing debate about this issue. It was their group's decision to a) Run op-eds in the WSJ and get on Fox News with their theories b) Create a faulty study with biased data analysis (of all people, Ioannnidis should be very sensitive to this -- he's famous for his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." c) Publish the flawed paper as a preprint without peer review. d) Publish the results of the L.A. serological survey without even a preprint so that the methods could be looked over. If you publish a study that has huge societal implications before peer review, then Twitter is going to be your peer review. Deal with it.
- blueblimp 6y ago
  I don't blame them for posting a dodgy preprint (that's what preprints are for) but I do blame them for going on a press blitz for their dodgy preprint. It's not a responsible way to use their platform.
  - ravitation 6y ago
    Well, some may find posting said preprint particularly questionable simply because it had Ioannidis' name on it, and he's primarily known for his emphasis on standards of evidence.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      As somebody who was always annoyed by the weird amounts of odd attention that Ioannidis' "standards of evidence" papers got, I hope that this makes people reevaluate them. The "standard" he set up was a straw man, and not how any practicing scientist I know actually looks at papers. And when he allows his name to be used to push highly politci contrarian takes, all the weird attention his other papers received starts to make sense. It's not about the science, it's about being contrarian, at best, and at worst ways to subvert the public's view of science by deriving them on what it really means to publish a peer-reviewed paper.
- cma 6y ago
ravitation 6y ago
I want to add one other piece of information to this discussion, because Ioannidis is somewhat central to the point the original article is trying to make, and it is ignored by the article (because it significantly weakens some of their arguments). Had the study simply been released and criticized, then much of this current controversy would've been avoided, but that didn't happen. Instead, Ioannidis did the rounds at several conservative news outlets in the wake of the study's release, and promoted the study's findings as the new "best evidence." This aided in pushing certain social and political agendas. Many scientists (especially on Twitter) found this specific behavior to be unacceptable, especially from a scientist that they also felt should "know better."
- MengerSponge 6y ago
  Will Happer should "know better" too, but as Sinclair said: "It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
- thu2111 6y ago
  Did those people criticise other epidemiologists for doing the same? Immediately holding press conferences appears to be standard behaviour during this outbreak; for example, Imperial and Oxford both did the same. In fact in the Oxford case the press published stories about the paper before it was even available anywhere, let alone in a journal. I understand why at the moment peer review is being short circuited by everyone, regardless of political or epidemiological position. The world is hungry for news and journalists will interpret papers with or without the help of the authors. Might as well have their assistance, in these circumstances. Your remark about "conservative news outlets" shows what's really going on here, I suspect - just another day in politically biased academia-land. If you talk to anything other than CNN then you're bad and wrong. The same has been seen with Alex Berenson, a former NYT journalist turned novelist who has never really taken part in politics nor even really discussed it much in public. Once he started tweeting skeptically about the actions of governments and academics, all based on public data, he discovered only the conservative news outlets were willing to interview him. And then that mere fact alone was used by the left to attack him, although his points were all based on actual verifiable facts and had no pre-existing political bias. Ioannidis made a lot of enemies by kickstarting the replication crisis. Now it looks like some see a chance to get back at him.
golemiprague 6y ago
Is there any research with "solid data" and any meaningful conclusions? From what I see most of the research is about one parameter out of the 20 or 20 parameters that could affect any practical conclusion. So while the research might be scientifically correct it is not really useful in any way. Nobody can explain why this virus spread more in one place than another, why Sweden or Japan or Germany or Italy got such various results with very different policies. There is no correlation, there is no even an agreement whether wearing a mask is good or not. His "flawed data" is as good as any other research
statquontrarian 6y ago
You've quoted the conclusions, but in the spirit of the STAT article, can you also quote the relevant scientific debate in your article, and what specifically leads to such bold conclusions (e.g. "owe an apology", "wasted time and effort", "statistical error", "screwed up", etc.)? I skimmed through the article and, because I'm not a statistician, I could not follow what was so blatantly wrong, if we were to charitably assume that the two sets of authors may have different premises or interpretations. Edit: In the spirit of the STAT article (edit: removed extraneous text), I searched for "Ioannidis Gelman" (the latter being the author of your piece) and found: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-coronavirus-study-the-authors-owe-us-all-an-apology/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co... > In response, on Sunday, the Stanford study’s authors said they are planning to soon release a detailed appendix that addresses many of the “constructive comments and suggestions” the team has received. > “This is exactly the way peer-review should work in scientific work, and we are looking forward to engaging with other scholars as we proceed in this important work,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who along with colleague Dr. Eran Bendavid, also assisted with the USC study. Edit2: I'm not sure if this is the appendix referred to (probably not because the file has an older date in it), but there is a statistical appendix in the cited article: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/suppl/2020/04/17/2020.04.14.20062463.DC1/2020.04.14.20062463-1.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/suppl/2020/04/17/202...
- knzhou 6y ago
  > what specifically leads to such bold conclusions (e.g. "owe an apology", "wasted time and effort", "statistical error", "screwed up", etc.)? They used a test with a false positive rate of about 2%, and found a positive rate of about 2%. It is impossible to use this information to establish a lower bound on the number infected. However, by screwing up the computation of the confidence interval, they claimed a huge lower bound.
  - statquontrarian 6y ago
    Thanks. By the way, the STAT article links to https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-rate-critics/ https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-... in which Ioannidis is quoted: > “We have been working very hard to address all the comments raised by many colleagues and I am always grateful to receive constructive criticism,” he said. “While we received thousands of congratulations for this work, I cherish far more the comments of the scientists who criticized our work and I thank them deeply for their comments.”
ptero 6y ago
> Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data. That articles backed by solid data is certainly the desired state, but it is very far from the current state of affairs on COVID. There are many articles that tout opposing views that are pretty liberal with data. Requesting an official apology (which, in science is almost unheard of) is simply an attempt at harassment. Mistakes happen, you refute errors and move on. Scientists must be allowed to explore and advocate non-traditional views. Otherwise (and very quickly if you let hecklers in) you create static beliefs that live on for a long time, whether true or not, because the bar for challenge is very high and an error ruins a career.

by jaaron 6y ago

thepope 6y ago

Do you have any idea how stupid most people are? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/File:IQ_distribution.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/F... Think about where you fall on that graph and then realize how many people are dumber and a lot dumber than you. But it doesn't end there. Some people are sheltered their entire lives so there is a lot they don't understand. Some people are mostly one dimensional so they don understand a lot. Some people have huge egos so they don't understand a lot. Some people have unreasonable biases and agendas that warp their otherwise rational mind into being ridiculous. Some people are so overburdened they can't do anything but work and never have a second to think for themselves. The powers that be PUMP shit into our heads all day long. lol, how many people even passed Calculus let alone could do anything with it now. And you're asking these people to look at the data? Get real. Get real! These people are not influenced by data. Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? It's more selfish boomer behavior. I'm sorry but it's not worth the cost of another one or two Iraq wars to save the few people it does infect. It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. It's not like this thing kills 1/3 or even a 1/10th of the population. We are just pissing away money to protect a few boomers. They are pile driving our generation into poverty. End the quarantine. Very few people understand anything at all about statistics other than what can be gleaned from basic arithmetic. You're asking too much of people. You don't influence people with facts. Sorry this reply is all over the place.

romwell 6y ago
>Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? >It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. At 30% population infected, 1% is more than a million people. I'm sorry, our values seems radically different. >Do you have any idea how stupid most people are? I thought I did, but reading your comment did bring an enhanced understanding.
- ggm 6y ago
  The implicit belief in the comment you respond to, is that the mitigation cost will "kill" more than a million people. I suspect it goes to non-lethal costs more, and then its the usual problem of milli-morts against economic cost/benefit.
- streb-lo 6y ago
  Also, the fatality rate will rise if the virus gets out of control, which it very well could if people decide to forgo social distancing and self-isolating when possible.
- microtherion 6y ago
  Grandparent post has been voted into oblivion, so commenting here: > Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? Actually, I don't. I've seen a lot of people make the argument that lockdowns and other restrictions are "too expensive", but: * I have not seen a single serious attempt to model quite how expensive they will be. * Nor have I seen any attempts to model how expensive alternate approaches would be, e.g. the Swedish model. Quite a few people who propagate it seem to be under the impression that this is implemented with zero economic disruption, but that's definitely not the case. * And to be truly realistic, the models should consider the capabilities of countries to mitigate economic consequences through fiscal or monetary means. Many countries can currently borrow at very low or even negative interest rates, so they may have considerable leverage there.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    You cannot mitigate economic damage with fiscal or monetary means in any serious way. That statement of yours indicates that you do not understand the difference between money and wealth. Money is an abstraction we use to measure (relative) value. Wealth is the sum total of physical goods/services/resources that we rely on. When you neuter an economy, as we have done in the US, you destroy real wealth. There is no way to counteract that by injecting money. It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged. It is no surprise then that someone who holds that view would have trouble seeing the real damage that a shutdown like ours does. We have postponed elective surgeries, leading to furloughing tens of thousands of medical workers across the country because in many areas hospitals are practically empty. We’re halting meat packing plants because some portion of employees have tested positive. We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point). We treated a really bad but manageable papercut by chopping off our hand, and in doing so we have widened inequality in _every dimension_. What does a poor school-aged child who does not own a laptop do with remote schooling? What do millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and are now unemployed do? What about those postponing important preventative care that will prevent future deaths from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes? How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see? We took a bunch of otherwise healthy people, instilled them with disproportionate, all-consuming fear, and have had people in social isolation, which not only produces its own mortality but will also retard the natural exchange of micro-organisms that our health relies upon. And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it, while destroying the quality of life of the 99.4% of the population who never would have died from this thing anyway (there’s debate as to whether the IFR is .3% or 1% but I think .6% is a very conservative number) — In answer to your question about models, you are right that we need more of them, and in rereading your comment I see you were more raising questions than advocating a pro-lockdown stance. In any case I encourage you to check out http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=6976 http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=69.... I’m on mobile right now otherwise I’d quote from it but they look at it in terms of wellbeing-years

cameldrv 6y ago

I don't think that Ioannnidis needs to resign or something, but he should retract the paper and recuse himself from the ongoing debate about this issue. It was their group's decision to a) Run op-eds in the WSJ and get on Fox News with their theories b) Create a faulty study with biased data analysis (of all people, Ioannnidis should be very sensitive to this -- he's famous for his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." c) Publish the flawed paper as a preprint without peer review. d) Publish the results of the L.A. serological survey without even a preprint so that the methods could be looked over. If you publish a study that has huge societal implications before peer review, then Twitter is going to be your peer review. Deal with it.

blueblimp 6y ago
I don't blame them for posting a dodgy preprint (that's what preprints are for) but I do blame them for going on a press blitz for their dodgy preprint. It's not a responsible way to use their platform.
- ravitation 6y ago
  Well, some may find posting said preprint particularly questionable simply because it had Ioannidis' name on it, and he's primarily known for his emphasis on standards of evidence.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    As somebody who was always annoyed by the weird amounts of odd attention that Ioannidis' "standards of evidence" papers got, I hope that this makes people reevaluate them. The "standard" he set up was a straw man, and not how any practicing scientist I know actually looks at papers. And when he allows his name to be used to push highly politci contrarian takes, all the weird attention his other papers received starts to make sense. It's not about the science, it's about being contrarian, at best, and at worst ways to subvert the public's view of science by deriving them on what it really means to publish a peer-reviewed paper.
cma 6y ago

ravitation 6y ago

I want to add one other piece of information to this discussion, because Ioannidis is somewhat central to the point the original article is trying to make, and it is ignored by the article (because it significantly weakens some of their arguments). Had the study simply been released and criticized, then much of this current controversy would've been avoided, but that didn't happen. Instead, Ioannidis did the rounds at several conservative news outlets in the wake of the study's release, and promoted the study's findings as the new "best evidence." This aided in pushing certain social and political agendas. Many scientists (especially on Twitter) found this specific behavior to be unacceptable, especially from a scientist that they also felt should "know better."

MengerSponge 6y ago
Will Happer should "know better" too, but as Sinclair said: "It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
thu2111 6y ago
Did those people criticise other epidemiologists for doing the same? Immediately holding press conferences appears to be standard behaviour during this outbreak; for example, Imperial and Oxford both did the same. In fact in the Oxford case the press published stories about the paper before it was even available anywhere, let alone in a journal. I understand why at the moment peer review is being short circuited by everyone, regardless of political or epidemiological position. The world is hungry for news and journalists will interpret papers with or without the help of the authors. Might as well have their assistance, in these circumstances. Your remark about "conservative news outlets" shows what's really going on here, I suspect - just another day in politically biased academia-land. If you talk to anything other than CNN then you're bad and wrong. The same has been seen with Alex Berenson, a former NYT journalist turned novelist who has never really taken part in politics nor even really discussed it much in public. Once he started tweeting skeptically about the actions of governments and academics, all based on public data, he discovered only the conservative news outlets were willing to interview him. And then that mere fact alone was used by the left to attack him, although his points were all based on actual verifiable facts and had no pre-existing political bias. Ioannidis made a lot of enemies by kickstarting the replication crisis. Now it looks like some see a chance to get back at him.

golemiprague 6y ago

Is there any research with "solid data" and any meaningful conclusions? From what I see most of the research is about one parameter out of the 20 or 20 parameters that could affect any practical conclusion. So while the research might be scientifically correct it is not really useful in any way. Nobody can explain why this virus spread more in one place than another, why Sweden or Japan or Germany or Italy got such various results with very different policies. There is no correlation, there is no even an agreement whether wearing a mask is good or not. His "flawed data" is as good as any other research

statquontrarian 6y ago

You've quoted the conclusions, but in the spirit of the STAT article, can you also quote the relevant scientific debate in your article, and what specifically leads to such bold conclusions (e.g. "owe an apology", "wasted time and effort", "statistical error", "screwed up", etc.)? I skimmed through the article and, because I'm not a statistician, I could not follow what was so blatantly wrong, if we were to charitably assume that the two sets of authors may have different premises or interpretations. Edit: In the spirit of the STAT article (edit: removed extraneous text), I searched for "Ioannidis Gelman" (the latter being the author of your piece) and found: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-coronavirus-study-the-authors-owe-us-all-an-apology/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co... > In response, on Sunday, the Stanford study’s authors said they are planning to soon release a detailed appendix that addresses many of the “constructive comments and suggestions” the team has received. > “This is exactly the way peer-review should work in scientific work, and we are looking forward to engaging with other scholars as we proceed in this important work,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who along with colleague Dr. Eran Bendavid, also assisted with the USC study. Edit2: I'm not sure if this is the appendix referred to (probably not because the file has an older date in it), but there is a statistical appendix in the cited article: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/suppl/2020/04/17/2020.04.14.20062463.DC1/2020.04.14.20062463-1.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/suppl/2020/04/17/202...

knzhou 6y ago
> what specifically leads to such bold conclusions (e.g. "owe an apology", "wasted time and effort", "statistical error", "screwed up", etc.)? They used a test with a false positive rate of about 2%, and found a positive rate of about 2%. It is impossible to use this information to establish a lower bound on the number infected. However, by screwing up the computation of the confidence interval, they claimed a huge lower bound.
- statquontrarian 6y ago
  Thanks. By the way, the STAT article links to https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-rate-critics/ https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-... in which Ioannidis is quoted: > “We have been working very hard to address all the comments raised by many colleagues and I am always grateful to receive constructive criticism,” he said. “While we received thousands of congratulations for this work, I cherish far more the comments of the scientists who criticized our work and I thank them deeply for their comments.”

ptero 6y ago

> Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data. That articles backed by solid data is certainly the desired state, but it is very far from the current state of affairs on COVID. There are many articles that tout opposing views that are pretty liberal with data. Requesting an official apology (which, in science is almost unheard of) is simply an attempt at harassment. Mistakes happen, you refute errors and move on. Scientists must be allowed to explore and advocate non-traditional views. Otherwise (and very quickly if you let hecklers in) you create static beliefs that live on for a long time, whether true or not, because the bar for challenge is very high and an error ruins a career.