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Exactly. I have reviewed a few articles for Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, and twice for Nature. In many cases, I found really absurd causal claims, p
by nextos 3y ago
Exactly. I have reviewed a few articles for Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, and twice for Nature.
In many cases, I found really absurd causal claims, plus a total ignorance of confounding and causal inference techniques.
It is shocking that many researchers in biology and medicine have never heard about many of the topics surveyed in e.g. Chapter 36 of Kevin Murphy's second book [1].
[1] https://probml.github.io/pml-book/book2.html https://probml.github.io/pml-book/book2.html
- liquidpele 3y ago“Meta analysis” is the new snake oil.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 4death4 3y agoEven with confounding and causal inference techniques, I will never be convinced by studies that aren't double-blind RCTs or studies that show a direct causal relationship. The reason is that the set of human behavior is so fast and unfathomably complicated. Any two aspects of life are surely correlated by many factors that are influenced by lifestyle.
- nextos 3y agoFor ethical reasons, it is not possible to perform some kinds of research with double-blind RCTs. Besides, large biobanks provide a wealth of observational data which can be explored using causal inference. One can always use a RCT on promising hypotheses.