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The author, John Ioannidis, is a discredited researcher on Covid-19. He and his Stanford colleages are responsible for a terribly written antibody study done ba

The author, John Ioannidis, is a discredited researcher on Covid-19. He and his Stanford colleages are responsible for a terribly written antibody study done back in March on residents of Santa Clara County. The statistics in that paper were egregiously bad and seem cooked to meet foregone political conclusions. Some reporting: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis... https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/24/coronavirus-research-stanford-scientists-accused-of-hyping-covid-19-antibody-study/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/24/coronavirus-research-...

ColanR 6y ago
I'm interested, but it seems like you'll need more than buzzfeed news as a source if you're claiming that Stanford scientists are unreliable.
- in_cahoots 6y ago
  Here’s a rebuttal from a statistician at Columbia University: 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...
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  Buzzfeed is a solid journalism source. Yes, they also are famous for stupid clickbait articles, but if you read the article you will find it's quite solid. I already posted a second link for you, from the SJ Mercury News, which you chose to ignore. Perhaps you didn't see it. Here are some more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-coronavirus-neeleman-ioannidis-whistleblower https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-... https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-coronavirus-study-the-authors-owe-us-all-an-apology/amp/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co... https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/1251176233594949632 https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/1251176233594949632 These are all popular articles (and one tweetstorm) because that's what I have collected. If you spend just moments looking in scientific community discussions you will also find many, many critiques. But really it's that first Buzzfeed article you have to go back to because it establishes the motive for the badly conducted and analyzed study, a political agenda and a foregone conclusion. It's the worst form of scientific corruption.
  - ahartmetz 6y ago
    AFAIU Buzzfeed News is their serious branch. Think 90s Microsoft (Buzzfeed) and 90s Microsoft Research (Buzzfeed News).
    - cafed00d 6y ago
      That’s such a creative way to make journalism relatable to the nerds on hn lol XD XD
- StavrosK 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I saw him on a TV interview saying that COVID was less bad than the flu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF4lKVFpREU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF4lKVFpREU
- woofie11 6y ago
  Curiously, Stanford excels at poor research methodology these days, with MIT a close second. It turns out that faculty positions are competitive enough at the elites that few make it in without cheating. There has been a steady decline in research integrity (with a parallel incline in research impact) as competition went up. I'm not sure what to do about it. I know MIT better than Stanford, and fixing the culture would involve firing a big chunk of the faculty. You can't fire tenured faculty, even if you could get people to acknowledge the problem. Integrity at 2nd and 3rd tier schools is still a lot higher, but we do need to fix incentive structures, or the rot will take over academia. Softer disciplines (like social sciences) are way ahead of harder disciplines like CS on the rot curve. In CS, it's a lot harder to bake data.
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    > In CS, it's a lot harder to bake data. You've never read a machine learning paper, I take it. Those results are by far the easiest to bake.
butthewho 6y ago
This is a peer-reviewed article published by the World Health Organization, not a press release from an individual Stanford lab. Could you please enumerate your specific concerns with this study?
- wonnage 6y ago
  He references his own terrible seroprevalence study in this paper.
  - irq11 6y ago
    The paper you’re criticizing was upheld by many other subsequent papers, around the world, which have found similar IFR estimates. The methodological criticisms of the paper that you’re making, while relevant, in no way invalidate the work. While the estimate may have been off by a factor of 2-3, overall, that’s well within the margin of error for a study of IFR on a small sample. This comment, downthread, cites a paper which finds similar estimates to Ionnadis’ original paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24810409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24810409
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  Plenty of other folks in this thread have done a great job linking to critiques or pointing out flaws. The part I'm contributing is the corrupting influence, the political agenda.
- mkolodny 6y ago
  My main concern with this study is that it uses reported Covid-19 deaths to infer the fatality rate. According to the paper, the fatality rates in the US are far higher than the rates in China and India. While the inferred fatality rate in the US is as high as ~1.3% (Louisiana), in many other places like China outside Wuhan and in India, the inferred death rate is close to 0.0%. I highly doubt that's actually the case. It seems much more likely that Covid-19 deaths have been under-reported in China and India. Anecdotally, my Pakistani friend called Covid-19 a "rich-person" disease because only rich people in Pakistan can afford a Covid-19 test. That may account for the lower number of reported Covid-19 deaths in poorer places.
electrondood 6y ago
Media reaction was to an advance, not-yet-reviewed draft of that study. Your comments are a textbook ad hominem attack.
- onecommentman 6y ago
  Please invite all your friends who are sophisticated enough to actually know the names for rhetorical strategies to post more on HN and Reddit. If you can, post a definition of the terms you use to get more people familiar with the terms and concepts, even if it just boilerplate copypasta. It warms the cockles of my heart to think we can actually tighten up discussions and get the heart of matters by avoiding rhetorical sillinesses that have been well-known in some circles for over 2000 years. Maybe a good use for GPT-4+ will be a bot that will identify these rhetorical devices in forum threads. And yes, it is an ad hominem attack. The basic point may or may not be correct, but the post immediately loses cred for using such a device. OK, now let’s try post hoc ergo propter hoc...
VMG 6y ago
"discredited" means stripped of his credentials?
- nwah1 6y ago
  It means some people didn't like what he said, so now this eminent researcher is not to be trusted again until he says something they like.
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
As with all statistical bullshitters, Taleb has smelled it back it April. Think of the man what you want, but whenever he is putting his reputation on the line and publicly accuses someone else of statistical ignorance, he turns out to be correct.
- nwah1 6y ago
  He embarrassed himself with Nate Silver, Stephen Pinker, and most other disputes I've ever seem him wage. Not to mention being notoriously moody on twitter, and cozying up to alt-right trolls. If you are just relying on the supposed credibility of Taleb, you are relying on nothing.
  - bart_spoon 6y ago
    He didn’t really embarrass himself with Nate Silver. I’m not a big fan of Taleb personally, but his criticisms of Silver were sound.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    I haven't yet seen any serious attempt to dispel his attacks on Pinker, specifically the lack of statistical evidence concerning the "the world is getting more peaceful" thesis - can you point me towards anything substantive?
ajb 6y ago
Wait, is that the same John Ioannidis who wrote "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", pretty much the most influential paper on statistical error for the last 50 years?
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  Yes it is and that doesn't make his current fraudulent shenanigans any better. It makes them more disheartening, however. I'm not an expert in the replication crisis but I have to say that as a conceptual framework, it has the problem of pointing a finger at all research - saying "Most Published Research" etc, when the replication crisis is quite concentrated in experimental psychology, complex biomedical causation research and fields with pretty specific difficulties (humans taking simple psychology tests seem to be easily influenced by outside factors, the biochemistry of mammals seems to incredible variations in it's operations). The germ theory of disease doesn't by itself fall into this paradigm (even if humans are complex, the transmission mechanism of a germ is simple). And there's the problem, it's as if Ioannidis decided, "nothing is true, I'll claim what I want".
  - nwah1 6y ago
    How is reporting an IFR you disagree with the same as denying germ theory?
    - joe_the_user 6y ago
      I didn't say Ioannidis denied germ theory. What I implied was that he seems to put findings based on germ theory in the same category as the often/generally false/debatable findings of experimental psychology. Then he publishes findings based on completely selective uses of data, apparently with the attitude "nothing is true, I'll take the truth I like".
      - nwah1 6y ago
        Did you read his California study? He sampled blood, and came up with a number. You are inferring a whole lot from that.
just-juan-post 6y ago
Let's take John out of the discussion. On Oct 05 the WHO officially announced there were 750m cases worldwide. On that day their official fatality count was ~1m. This comes out to an IFR of 0.13% Do you have an issues with this statistic as well?
- JungleGymSam 6y ago
  No rebuttals. Just downvotes. That'll teach you a lesson, right?? edit: Oh no! Someone downvoted this comment? Whatever will I do?!
  - dang 6y ago
    Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? We're trying for something different here. We've had to ask you about this before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
- SummerlyMars 6y ago
  Where are you getting 750m cases from? Their own dashboard only shows 35m. https://covid19.who.int/ https://covid19.who.int/
  - bhk 6y ago
    Probably referring to this: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-archive-united-nations-54a3a5869c9ae4ee623497691e796083 https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-archive-united-nat...
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Those numbers are entirely different. The 750mn cases is an estimate based on seroprevalence studies. The 1mn deaths are based on deaths following a positive PCR test. A more appropriate comparison is 1mn deaths over 35mn cases, leading to a CFR of over 2%. Odd how no one ever quotes that number.
ImaCake 6y ago
Ah that explains why this is not a properly conducted meta-analysis. This guy seems to think he is somehow better than all the checks and safeguards put in place to ensure people do meta-analysis properly. I personally found this meta-analysis was done okay, considering it was not properly anyway, and defends itself well. But it is clear this man is pushing an agenda and that the meta-analysis itself is standing on some very shaky foundations.
marcell 6y ago
Can you summarize the objections? I skimmed the BuzzFeed article and it is very long, filled with vague innuendo. I couldn’t find any argument on the merits. Similarly your post is an ad hominem, but you didn’t make any arguments based on merits.
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  No.
  - marcell 6y ago
    ...? So it’s just an ad hominem?
andbberger 6y ago
The seroprevalence study was indeed awful, but this isn't so remarkable on its own. Bad science gets published all the time. The emails suggesting a foregone conclusion make Ioannidis look even worse. Nonetheless, the work stands on its own and should be evaluated as such. You would be forgiven for going in with the prior that Ioannidis has a poor track record in this area - but your prior alone is not enough to dismiss the work.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  Science isn't a matter of simple data. Science is a matter of trust. A scientific cannot "stand on it's own" without the assurance that it was produced by someone with a minimal amount of integrity. There are too many elements in the process of research that can be "fudged" to allow this.
  - andbberger 6y ago
    > Science is a matter of trust Well that's simply not true, by definition. That's like the whole point of science. You can do something and write a report on it, and if I don't believe you I am free to try and reproduce it and publish my own account. Track record is an excellent reason to be skeptical. Skepticism alone is not enough to invalidate a study.
    - joe_the_user 6y ago
      I should clarify science does require data, does descriptions and so-forth. But if scientists are free to fake data until caught and to essentially be untrustworthy, it becomes impossible to make progress. That someone has engaged in bad faith and bad methology previously doesn't invalidate their findings. It doesn't prove they're wrong. But it makes people justified in ignoring them. The world is full of, uh, bullshit, full of unjustified claims on this and that. These have to be ignored because otherwise you waste all your time. Being a credible scientists engaging credible research is a reason to take someone out of the this category and pay attention to them. But once someone has discredited themselves as a scientist, they're back in the bullshit category and no one has an obligation to look at their stuff. Sure, maybe their stuff is true, who knows.

ColanR 6y ago

I'm interested, but it seems like you'll need more than buzzfeed news as a source if you're claiming that Stanford scientists are unreliable.

in_cahoots 6y ago
Here’s a rebuttal from a statistician at Columbia University: 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...
NelsonMinar 6y ago
Buzzfeed is a solid journalism source. Yes, they also are famous for stupid clickbait articles, but if you read the article you will find it's quite solid. I already posted a second link for you, from the SJ Mercury News, which you chose to ignore. Perhaps you didn't see it. Here are some more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-coronavirus-neeleman-ioannidis-whistleblower https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-... https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-coronavirus-study-the-authors-owe-us-all-an-apology/amp/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co... https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/1251176233594949632 https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/1251176233594949632 These are all popular articles (and one tweetstorm) because that's what I have collected. If you spend just moments looking in scientific community discussions you will also find many, many critiques. But really it's that first Buzzfeed article you have to go back to because it establishes the motive for the badly conducted and analyzed study, a political agenda and a foregone conclusion. It's the worst form of scientific corruption.
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  AFAIU Buzzfeed News is their serious branch. Think 90s Microsoft (Buzzfeed) and 90s Microsoft Research (Buzzfeed News).
  - cafed00d 6y ago
    That’s such a creative way to make journalism relatable to the nerds on hn lol XD XD
StavrosK 6y ago
For what it's worth, I saw him on a TV interview saying that COVID was less bad than the flu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF4lKVFpREU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF4lKVFpREU
woofie11 6y ago
Curiously, Stanford excels at poor research methodology these days, with MIT a close second. It turns out that faculty positions are competitive enough at the elites that few make it in without cheating. There has been a steady decline in research integrity (with a parallel incline in research impact) as competition went up. I'm not sure what to do about it. I know MIT better than Stanford, and fixing the culture would involve firing a big chunk of the faculty. You can't fire tenured faculty, even if you could get people to acknowledge the problem. Integrity at 2nd and 3rd tier schools is still a lot higher, but we do need to fix incentive structures, or the rot will take over academia. Softer disciplines (like social sciences) are way ahead of harder disciplines like CS on the rot curve. In CS, it's a lot harder to bake data.
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  > In CS, it's a lot harder to bake data. You've never read a machine learning paper, I take it. Those results are by far the easiest to bake.

butthewho 6y ago

This is a peer-reviewed article published by the World Health Organization, not a press release from an individual Stanford lab. Could you please enumerate your specific concerns with this study?

wonnage 6y ago
He references his own terrible seroprevalence study in this paper.
- irq11 6y ago
  The paper you’re criticizing was upheld by many other subsequent papers, around the world, which have found similar IFR estimates. The methodological criticisms of the paper that you’re making, while relevant, in no way invalidate the work. While the estimate may have been off by a factor of 2-3, overall, that’s well within the margin of error for a study of IFR on a small sample. This comment, downthread, cites a paper which finds similar estimates to Ionnadis’ original paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24810409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24810409
NelsonMinar 6y ago
Plenty of other folks in this thread have done a great job linking to critiques or pointing out flaws. The part I'm contributing is the corrupting influence, the political agenda.
mkolodny 6y ago
My main concern with this study is that it uses reported Covid-19 deaths to infer the fatality rate. According to the paper, the fatality rates in the US are far higher than the rates in China and India. While the inferred fatality rate in the US is as high as ~1.3% (Louisiana), in many other places like China outside Wuhan and in India, the inferred death rate is close to 0.0%. I highly doubt that's actually the case. It seems much more likely that Covid-19 deaths have been under-reported in China and India. Anecdotally, my Pakistani friend called Covid-19 a "rich-person" disease because only rich people in Pakistan can afford a Covid-19 test. That may account for the lower number of reported Covid-19 deaths in poorer places.

electrondood 6y ago

Media reaction was to an advance, not-yet-reviewed draft of that study. Your comments are a textbook ad hominem attack.

onecommentman 6y ago
Please invite all your friends who are sophisticated enough to actually know the names for rhetorical strategies to post more on HN and Reddit. If you can, post a definition of the terms you use to get more people familiar with the terms and concepts, even if it just boilerplate copypasta. It warms the cockles of my heart to think we can actually tighten up discussions and get the heart of matters by avoiding rhetorical sillinesses that have been well-known in some circles for over 2000 years. Maybe a good use for GPT-4+ will be a bot that will identify these rhetorical devices in forum threads. And yes, it is an ad hominem attack. The basic point may or may not be correct, but the post immediately loses cred for using such a device. OK, now let’s try post hoc ergo propter hoc...

VMG 6y ago

"discredited" means stripped of his credentials?

nwah1 6y ago
It means some people didn't like what he said, so now this eminent researcher is not to be trusted again until he says something they like.

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

As with all statistical bullshitters, Taleb has smelled it back it April. Think of the man what you want, but whenever he is putting his reputation on the line and publicly accuses someone else of statistical ignorance, he turns out to be correct.

nwah1 6y ago
He embarrassed himself with Nate Silver, Stephen Pinker, and most other disputes I've ever seem him wage. Not to mention being notoriously moody on twitter, and cozying up to alt-right trolls. If you are just relying on the supposed credibility of Taleb, you are relying on nothing.
- bart_spoon 6y ago
  He didn’t really embarrass himself with Nate Silver. I’m not a big fan of Taleb personally, but his criticisms of Silver were sound.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  I haven't yet seen any serious attempt to dispel his attacks on Pinker, specifically the lack of statistical evidence concerning the "the world is getting more peaceful" thesis - can you point me towards anything substantive?

ajb 6y ago

Wait, is that the same John Ioannidis who wrote "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", pretty much the most influential paper on statistical error for the last 50 years?

joe_the_user 6y ago
Yes it is and that doesn't make his current fraudulent shenanigans any better. It makes them more disheartening, however. I'm not an expert in the replication crisis but I have to say that as a conceptual framework, it has the problem of pointing a finger at all research - saying "Most Published Research" etc, when the replication crisis is quite concentrated in experimental psychology, complex biomedical causation research and fields with pretty specific difficulties (humans taking simple psychology tests seem to be easily influenced by outside factors, the biochemistry of mammals seems to incredible variations in it's operations). The germ theory of disease doesn't by itself fall into this paradigm (even if humans are complex, the transmission mechanism of a germ is simple). And there's the problem, it's as if Ioannidis decided, "nothing is true, I'll claim what I want".
- nwah1 6y ago
  How is reporting an IFR you disagree with the same as denying germ theory?
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    I didn't say Ioannidis denied germ theory. What I implied was that he seems to put findings based on germ theory in the same category as the often/generally false/debatable findings of experimental psychology. Then he publishes findings based on completely selective uses of data, apparently with the attitude "nothing is true, I'll take the truth I like".
    - nwah1 6y ago
      Did you read his California study? He sampled blood, and came up with a number. You are inferring a whole lot from that.

just-juan-post 6y ago

Let's take John out of the discussion. On Oct 05 the WHO officially announced there were 750m cases worldwide. On that day their official fatality count was ~1m. This comes out to an IFR of 0.13% Do you have an issues with this statistic as well?

JungleGymSam 6y ago
No rebuttals. Just downvotes. That'll teach you a lesson, right?? edit: Oh no! Someone downvoted this comment? Whatever will I do?!
- dang 6y ago
  Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? We're trying for something different here. We've had to ask you about this before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
SummerlyMars 6y ago
Where are you getting 750m cases from? Their own dashboard only shows 35m. https://covid19.who.int/ https://covid19.who.int/
- bhk 6y ago
  Probably referring to this: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-archive-united-nations-54a3a5869c9ae4ee623497691e796083 https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-archive-united-nat...
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Those numbers are entirely different. The 750mn cases is an estimate based on seroprevalence studies. The 1mn deaths are based on deaths following a positive PCR test. A more appropriate comparison is 1mn deaths over 35mn cases, leading to a CFR of over 2%. Odd how no one ever quotes that number.

ImaCake 6y ago

Ah that explains why this is not a properly conducted meta-analysis. This guy seems to think he is somehow better than all the checks and safeguards put in place to ensure people do meta-analysis properly. I personally found this meta-analysis was done okay, considering it was not properly anyway, and defends itself well. But it is clear this man is pushing an agenda and that the meta-analysis itself is standing on some very shaky foundations.

marcell 6y ago

Can you summarize the objections? I skimmed the BuzzFeed article and it is very long, filled with vague innuendo. I couldn’t find any argument on the merits. Similarly your post is an ad hominem, but you didn’t make any arguments based on merits.

NelsonMinar 6y ago
No.
- marcell 6y ago
  ...? So it’s just an ad hominem?

andbberger 6y ago

The seroprevalence study was indeed awful, but this isn't so remarkable on its own. Bad science gets published all the time. The emails suggesting a foregone conclusion make Ioannidis look even worse. Nonetheless, the work stands on its own and should be evaluated as such. You would be forgiven for going in with the prior that Ioannidis has a poor track record in this area - but your prior alone is not enough to dismiss the work.

joe_the_user 6y ago
Science isn't a matter of simple data. Science is a matter of trust. A scientific cannot "stand on it's own" without the assurance that it was produced by someone with a minimal amount of integrity. There are too many elements in the process of research that can be "fudged" to allow this.
- andbberger 6y ago
  > Science is a matter of trust Well that's simply not true, by definition. That's like the whole point of science. You can do something and write a report on it, and if I don't believe you I am free to try and reproduce it and publish my own account. Track record is an excellent reason to be skeptical. Skepticism alone is not enough to invalidate a study.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    I should clarify science does require data, does descriptions and so-forth. But if scientists are free to fake data until caught and to essentially be untrustworthy, it becomes impossible to make progress. That someone has engaged in bad faith and bad methology previously doesn't invalidate their findings. It doesn't prove they're wrong. But it makes people justified in ignoring them. The world is full of, uh, bullshit, full of unjustified claims on this and that. These have to be ignored because otherwise you waste all your time. Being a credible scientists engaging credible research is a reason to take someone out of the this category and pay attention to them. But once someone has discredited themselves as a scientist, they're back in the bullshit category and no one has an obligation to look at their stuff. Sure, maybe their stuff is true, who knows.