3 ms·

> There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journal

> There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journalists who printed the article hyping it. That is seen on here constantly. The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies based on some past anecdotes. It's the exact same trick used by climate science deniers who go back and cherry pick some old studies where the conclusion changed: Pick some old studies where the conclusion changed, announce that science is fallible, then dismiss the entire field. It's ridiculous logic to anyone who understands how science works, but it's very appealing to people who like to be contrarian.

llm_nerd 3y ago
"The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies" If they're observational or survey based studies, they should be dismissed generally, or at least given incredibly little attention. Even worse they're usually 2nd order "I took some terrible observational studies, put them in a pile, and now I have a study of studies" bit of bunk that is a bit like CDOs: Just layer the junk and pretend it has value all together. We have decades of doing this now to have learned that it is extremely low value, and simply repeating the same pattern again with new biases and assumptions is not going to improve the situation. Nutritional studies are really, really hard, short of creating concentration camps and assigning diets to sections for decades. If you were studying physics by doing a survey on what people's opinion of gravity is or what their recollection of their acceleration rates for the past year, you'd probably not have great results.