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This must be a satire piece. It talks on things like power, reproducibility, etc. Which is fine. There are minority of papers with mathematical errors. What it

This must be a satire piece. It talks on things like power, reproducibility, etc. Which is fine. There are minority of papers with mathematical errors. What it fails to examine is what is "false". Their results may be valid for what they studied. Future studies may have new and different findings. You may have studies that seem to conflict with each other due to differences in definitions (eg what constitutes a "child", 12yo or 24yo?) or the nuance in perspective apllied to the policies they are investigating (eg aggregate vs adjusted gender wage gap). It's about how you use them - "Research suggests..." or "We recommend further studies of larger size", etc. It's a tautology that if you misapply them they will be false a majority of the time.

austinjp 2y ago
It's not satire. Ioannidis has a long history of pointing out flaws in scientific processes. (Edit: spelling.)
dcl 2y ago
What part about the genuine statistical arguments made in the article would make you believe it is satire? I've found the reaction to this article can be pretty intense. We read this in a journal club many years ago and one of the mathematicians who was kind of new to the idea that research papers (in other fields) didn't more or less represent 'truth' said this article was _dangerous_.
- giantg2 2y ago
  It's ironic that the paper has a correction. The title and abstract sound highly editorial, especially given that "false" is never defined. They talk about pre study odds being an enhancement but I didn't see them include those in their own paper. The fact that a study is small or the impact is minor doesn't make the results false, especially when these limitations are called out and further research is requested. You could even have a case study n=1 be valid if the conclusion is properly defined. The main problem is people generalizing from things that don't have that level of support.

austinjp 2y ago

It's not satire. Ioannidis has a long history of pointing out flaws in scientific processes. (Edit: spelling.)

dcl 2y ago

What part about the genuine statistical arguments made in the article would make you believe it is satire? I've found the reaction to this article can be pretty intense. We read this in a journal club many years ago and one of the mathematicians who was kind of new to the idea that research papers (in other fields) didn't more or less represent 'truth' said this article was _dangerous_.

giantg2 2y ago
It's ironic that the paper has a correction. The title and abstract sound highly editorial, especially given that "false" is never defined. They talk about pre study odds being an enhancement but I didn't see them include those in their own paper. The fact that a study is small or the impact is minor doesn't make the results false, especially when these limitations are called out and further research is requested. You could even have a case study n=1 be valid if the conclusion is properly defined. The main problem is people generalizing from things that don't have that level of support.