Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

acsh.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 85 posts

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#71

Post by chx »

feanaro wrote: post #60
jdminhbg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is claiming "purity" at all. Purity, if anything, would make things simpler.

The operating principle is homogeneity. Purity is a bit of a misnomer because a "perfectly" homogeneous species with no distinctive heterogeneous groups would have to be called pure, but that's not usually how people use the word. The implication is usually that there are several distinct, homogeneous groups within which there is homogeneity among its members. Having homogeneity at some level, even if it ends up bein…

> homogeneous groups, allows one to make useful scientific findings and generalizations. On the other hand, if everything was very heterogeneous, down to each individual, it would be very hard to find a general statement applicable to any appreciable number of individuals.

and yet it is possible we will need to end up where individual advice is the only one working

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#72

Post by aaavl2821 »

hannob wrote: post #51
User23 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A competent medicinal chemist can spend a lifetime in drug discovery and never get a candidate molecule out of clinical trials. I learned this from the excellent Derek Lowe, whose blog at http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ is on my daily list. Quote from an interview[1]: "I’ve been doing this for 27 years, and I have never once put a drug into a pharmacy. I tell people: “If you want to know why your prescriptions…

> “If you want to know why your prescriptions cost so much, it’s me.” I’ve done nothing but spend money the entire time." Sounds nice, the best evidence we have disagrees: https://news.ohsu.edu/2017/09/11/how-much-does-it-cost-to-br...

That's a widely criticized study because it ignores the cost of failure. It only looks at the r&d investments of companies that received FDA approval for a drug. It's like doing a study of the odds of winning the lottery, and only analyzing people who won the lottery

Considering the fact that 90% of phase 1 drugs never get approved and that study seems quite biased. That study conveniently assumes that all those medicinal chemists, who've worked decades and never seen a drug approved, simply don't exist

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#73

Post by selimthegrim »

dekhn wrote: post #69
api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a shortcut? I'm sure some improvements can be made but I am skeptical of the idea that science is just doing it wrong.

I don't think there's a shortcut. There would have to be a massive change in approach. In my field of expertise, molecular biology, it;'s common to just run experiments over and over until you get a positive result- throwing away thousands of dollars in gels and other things along the way. This isn't even intellectually honest (it's fishing for significance) but it's what nearly everybody does to get publishable resu…

How can we find out more about your company?

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#74

Post by selimthegrim »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #34
kansface wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a shortcut? A much, much deeper understanding of how humans work.

Facepalm! How could we have forgotten to pick that up before heading down this road of frustratingly hit-or-miss basic research?!

Maybe the real research was the friends...

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#75

Post by dekhn »

selimthegrim wrote: post #73
dekhn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a shortcut. There would have to be a massive change in approach. In my field of expertise, molecular biology, it;'s common to just run experiments over and over until you get a positive result- throwing away thousands of dollars in gels and other things along the way. This isn't even intellectually honest (it's fishing for significance) but it's what nearly everybody does to get publishable resu…

How can we find out more about your company?

insitro.com and https://medium.com/@daphne_38275/insitro-rethinking-drug-dis...

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#76

Post by User23 »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #72
hannob wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “If you want to know why your prescriptions cost so much, it’s me.” I’ve done nothing but spend money the entire time." Sounds nice, the best evidence we have disagrees: https://news.ohsu.edu/2017/09/11/how-much-does-it-cost-to-br...

That's a widely criticized study because it ignores the cost of failure. It only looks at the r&d investments of companies that received FDA approval for a drug. It's like doing a study of the odds of winning the lottery, and only analyzing people who won the lottery Considering the fact that 90% of phase 1 drugs never get approved and that study seems quite biased. That study conveniently assumes that all those medi…

Interestingly this contributes to why drug companies spend so much money on advertising: it has a predictable measurable return, whereas R&D is virtually a lottery.

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#77

Post by nordsieck »

chicob wrote: post #66
nordsieck wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's another bazooka in the room: the contemporary erosion of trust in authority, in this case scientific authority. Ionannidis' remarks are for the best, I think, but will add to the confusion of not only what knowledge can the public trust but who is more apt to produce that knowledge. The erosion of trust is _because_ of the poor quality of scientific findings produced by Science the institution (particul…

> The erosion of trust is _because_ of the poor quality of scientific findings produced by Science the institution (particularly in select fields). So it would seem, if we considered Nutrition Science alone. But that does not explain the process of increasing distrust in vaccination, global warming and climate change, or even evolution, where the scientific practice has a quite solid record and community consensus. T…

> The erosion of authority reaches outside of Science, which to me suggests that there might be a broader explanation beyond the specificities of each field.

In my opinion, the difference is the low cost of broadcasting ideas. Before, if you didn't believe in a main stream idea, you could share your theories with people near you. Now, it's easy for people who don't believe in the main stream to form communities and reinforce each other's beliefs.

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#78

Post by pas »

pixl97 wrote: post #65
jdietrich wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is there a shortcut? Controversially, I think we need to do less research. The publish-or-perish culture has created a perverse incentive to crank out junk papers. Most working scientists will privately admit that most research isn't actually advancing our understanding of nature, it's just a desperate effort to dredge up something sufficiently novel to publish. Conversely, there's a substantial amount of research t…

>but almost nothing on behavioural research to figure out how to stop people from gorging themselves to death on food they know to be terrible for them. I'd also say the converse is true. Corporations spend lot on how to get you to eat their low cost high profit food that is not good for you. Think if we treated junk food like cigarettes in many countries where they had to be in a generic white box and no advertising…

Junk or not, if someone's daily caloric intake is in the sky, they can overeat themselves on the most non-junkiest of foods. Let's say a lot of vegtable seeds, superhealthy all organic bread, some premium right out of the cow diary stuff, and some fruits, just to get more sugar.

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#79

Post by chicob »

nordsieck wrote: post #77
chicob wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The erosion of trust is _because_ of the poor quality of scientific findings produced by Science the institution (particularly in select fields). So it would seem, if we considered Nutrition Science alone. But that does not explain the process of increasing distrust in vaccination, global warming and climate change, or even evolution, where the scientific practice has a quite solid record and community consensus. T…

> The erosion of authority reaches outside of Science, which to me suggests that there might be a broader explanation beyond the specificities of each field. In my opinion, the difference is the low cost of broadcasting ideas. Before, if you didn't believe in a main stream idea, you could share your theories with people near you. Now, it's easy for people who don't believe in the main stream to form communities and r…

That is certainly a part of the problem. It amplifies the apparent relevance of erroneous perspectives and furthers the idea that expertise is at hand's reach for laypeople.

Re: John Ioannidis Aims His Bazooka at Nutrition Science (2018)

#80

Post by sykhotic »

toasterlovin wrote: post #45
sykhotic wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without further evidence/study one can’t conclude much. We have two facts: 1. There was a campaign against eating fats. 2. There was an obesity epidemic that started shortly after the campaign against eating fats. Fact 2 is seductive because it’s natural to assume that 1) is the cause. But without further analysis and study one can’t conclude this. In a post decrying causal links without proper statistical evidence i…

There was an intervention (telling people not to eat fat) based on the "eating fats = bad" hypothesis and that intervention failed to have the effect that the hypothesis would predict. That is disconfirming evidence. You are correct that it's not conclusive, but it is disconfirming nonetheless. That's all I am saying.

It’s not disconfirming since it’s possible that eating fats is bad but also that replacing fats with sugar is bad too or possibly even worse than eating fats. There are also other possibilities to explain why eating too many fats is bad even though when they were targeted for reduction health outcomes did not improve.
Post reply on HN