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> Really? You don't think that living in a pandemic and also getting the disease associated with that pandemic wouldn't be an inherently more stressful situatio
by Jedd 4y ago
> Really? You don't think that living in a pandemic and also getting the disease associated with that pandemic wouldn't be an inherently more stressful situation than not getting the disease?
Well, two things. First, I think I addressed that in the first point of my second paragraph. Second, I don't believe it matters what I think, as I'm not an expert, or even terribly well informed, on this subject.
Refer to the list of authors at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01909-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01909-w
It's possible that those 37 qualified & experienced professionals have missed some basic aspects of epidemiology, statistics, etc that are obvious to an untrained amateur who hasn't looked at the source data -- but that supposition shouldn't be the starting position of a casual reader, and it's that exhausting phenomenon I rail against.
HN readership includes some breathtakingly smart people - but the rest of us don't acquire that via forum-osmosis.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago> 37 qualified & experienced professionals On am aside based on my understanding of academia I could believe that many of them are qualified. I find it less likely that all 37 reviewed the paper, data and methodologies with throughness.
- spookthesunset 4y ago> I find it less likely that all 37 reviewed the paper, data and methodologies with throughness. Don't forget we live in a highly politicized environment where going against the narrative gets you banned, censored, mocked, and dethroned. There is very strong incentives to publish things that support the narrative. Doesn't even matter if the methods used to arrive at the conclusions make any sense. As long as it supports the narrative, it's good stuff. To do otherwise can cost your career.
- mquander 4y agoIt's annoying to come into a discussion where people are trying to figure out object-level stuff and appeal to authority. You're also overstating the case for doing so. The actual results in this paper are easy to understand and don't involve any complicated epidemiology or statistics, so being an "untrained amateur" isn't much of a barrier to thinking about them. I agree that the thing you were originally replying to was not a very well-thought-out criticism, and your original comment was useful and didn't require a followup sermon about humility.
- Jedd 4y agoThanks for the corrections. Some examples of the processes followed by the authors - there's some terms in there I don't understand, but perhaps they aren't complicated to everyone else. "Structured data on diagnoses, symptoms and referrals are recorded using SNOMED CT coding terminology. Selection of SNOMED CT codes for data extraction was conducted by a team of clinical researchers using an inhouse developed software platform called Code Builder, with systematic searching of existing code lists, reference to the SNOMED CT terminology browser and through clinical knowledge and discussion. Data extraction was performed using the data extraction for epidemiological research (DExTER) tool for automated clinical epidemiological studies. "To control for confounding, each patient infected with SARS-CoV-2 was propensity score-matched with up to four patients with no recorded evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection using a logistic regression model including the covariates listed in the covariates section below and a caliper width of 0.2. The SMD between patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 and patients with no recorded evidence of infection was reported for each variable before and after matching, and a variable with SMD > 0.1 after matching was considered to indicate imbalance in baseline characteristics. Kernel density plots were drawn for the two groups before and after matching to check the distribution of propensity scores." Compare against dismissive comments proposing this is all coincidental, or the data set / study is is useless because the 2-page summary article mentions 'self-reporting' (it feels this phrase has been grossly misunderstood in this thread), and some casual claims that all long COVID is psychosomatic, etc. EDIT: I don't think it's an 'appeal to authority' when you defer to expertise of the authors who've detailed their data & processes -- that's more a logical fallacy when you claim an opinion is valid because of who the author(s) is/are.