3 ms·

From what I have read in the past this is just how the funding tends to work. You write a grant proposal for a study with 20 people, get funding, get results, u

From what I have read in the past this is just how the funding tends to work. You write a grant proposal for a study with 20 people, get funding, get results, use that to get funding for another study with 200, then 2000, etc. Frequently they don’t manage to make it past the first couple levels because the results aren’t interesting.

3pt14159 4y ago
Any study less than 200 people is essentially false advertising unless the population size is incredibly small (e.g., rare diseases) or the intervention has a crazy high prior (e.g., does getting shot in the chest lead to blood loss leading to passing out) so I consider these grants completely counter productive. There is a real benefit in having fewer pieces of junk to sort out and so many of these medical research studies are just noise that well meaning members of the public cite and adopt into practice because they don't know any better. It's the modern day version of leeches, essentially.
- subharmonicon 4y ago
  Rather than “well meaning members of the public”, I think the larger problem is with health and science reporting which frequently reports findings of very small studies as if they are definitive fact, with very prominent and provocative headlines.
  - 3pt14159 4y ago
    > health and science reporting Is part of "well meaning members of the public" just as "YouTube commentary" is and "random celebrity that Googles something and repeats it on Twitter." And quite frankly, so are scientists themselves. I have met far, FAR too many scientists that do not know the very first thing about statistics and yet feel competent to reference other people's research. This is why I say it's a big pile of leeches for more than half this stuff. Sure the incentives are misaligned, sure its reporting, sure this and that. But what we really need here are people to say "no you idiot leeches don't do dittly squat to fix this problem."

3pt14159 4y ago

Any study less than 200 people is essentially false advertising unless the population size is incredibly small (e.g., rare diseases) or the intervention has a crazy high prior (e.g., does getting shot in the chest lead to blood loss leading to passing out) so I consider these grants completely counter productive. There is a real benefit in having fewer pieces of junk to sort out and so many of these medical research studies are just noise that well meaning members of the public cite and adopt into practice because they don't know any better. It's the modern day version of leeches, essentially.

subharmonicon 4y ago
Rather than “well meaning members of the public”, I think the larger problem is with health and science reporting which frequently reports findings of very small studies as if they are definitive fact, with very prominent and provocative headlines.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  > health and science reporting Is part of "well meaning members of the public" just as "YouTube commentary" is and "random celebrity that Googles something and repeats it on Twitter." And quite frankly, so are scientists themselves. I have met far, FAR too many scientists that do not know the very first thing about statistics and yet feel competent to reference other people's research. This is why I say it's a big pile of leeches for more than half this stuff. Sure the incentives are misaligned, sure its reporting, sure this and that. But what we really need here are people to say "no you idiot leeches don't do dittly squat to fix this problem."