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Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

blogs.bmj.com

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Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#211

Post by bluGill »

WalterBright wrote: post #116
LadyCailin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least with privately funded research, the people providing the money aren't going to fund bullshit fake research. Citation needed, first of all, but governments are at minimum accountable to voters. Private money is in no way accountable.

> governments are at minimum accountable to voters Voting on how government spends money is in no conceivable way like you deciding how to spend your money. > Private money is in no way accountable It's accountable to the people who are providing the funds out of their own pockets. People do not like wasting their own money. I bet you look at your own budget. You have to, otherwise you'll be in jail for bouncing chec…

> I also bet you've never looked at your city, county, state or federal budget.

I have. Not in great detail though. The problem is I can't really do anything about it. Even if I find something bad and by lucky chance get people to care (there are plenty of slow news nights) - there is far more bad things in the budget than I can expose before people get tired of the corruption and give up listening. I try to elect politicians who will do something about it - I have low success: people who benefit from any specific spending are more powerful than people who are just against waste in general. That is assuming I can get my person on the ballot in the first place (low odds), and they don't realize once elected that reelection (read power) comes from handing out pork to those who want some specific waste. There are more things that make it hard - I just scratched the surface.

Pork is hard to figure out. Is spending money not to repair something that isn't broken good money or bad? I've seen perfectly good buildings get needless remodels and I've seen perfectly good buildings suffer because they never got maintained. I've seen towns put in sewer systems they don't need, and other towns fail to put in a sewer system until it was an expensive emergency. Flint had 40 years to replace the lead pipes in their water system - or they could have investing in water treatment chemicals that makes lead not leach from the pipes for much less money even over 40 years (you can pick anything from 60 to 30 years ago as the date when lead is bad became known - 40 was my somewhat arbitrary pick).

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#212

Post by goatlover »

naasking wrote: post #194
robomartin wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the problems I have with the absolute freak show that climate science/global-warming/saving-the-planet has become. It is, at a minimum, a triangle of bad actors with one corner being politicians --fear-based vote harvesting--, the second being business --jump on the bandwagon and print money...facilitated by politicians who want votes in exchange for fear mongering-- and, finally, religious-based detra…

Not sure I'm following your point. If you weigh the bad actors and financial incentives of climate change proponents against the bad actors and financial incentives on the fossil fuel side, do you think the scale tips in favour of more honesty for the fossil fuel side or climate change side? There's no doubt groupthink happens in academia on many issues, but the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important.…

Too bad everyone has been convinced nuclear is way worse because of a couple of accidents. That was a legitimate alternative that didn't need to wait for the 2010s to become an economically viable 15-20% of energy production.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#213

Post by SubiculumCode »

robomartin wrote: post #196
SubiculumCode wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a scientist?

> Are you a scientist? How is that relevant to my comment?

You suggest how scientists can act, their motivations, their freedom to disagree with the status quo, or those higher up the ladder in their field etc. You suggest how scientists will lose grants if they produce inconvenient science, etc etc. So I ask again. Are you a scientist? Have you written a grant application? Have you been punished? I AM a scientist, and I have never seen this hypothetical world.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#214

Post by adolph »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #133
adolph wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affirming the consequent, sometimes called converse error, fallacy of the converse, or confusion of necessity and sufficiency, is a formal fallacy of taking a true conditional statement (e.g., "If the lamp were broken, then the room would be dark,") and invalidly inferring its converse ("The room is dark, so the lamp is broken,") even though the converse may not be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_co…

You are trying to take a very general statement and make it a statement only about one very specific subset. That does not mean that someone pointing out your logical flaws is falling into the converse fallacy. It's like someone writes an article about drought in the west, and you're saying that they must really be talking about El Centro, California. Yes, it probably includes El Centro, but it's also talking about P…

The article is about all of medical research. Vaccine development is part of medical research and is therefore included. I did not attempt to "make it a statement about one very specific subset." I pointed out that the article is similar to the kind of article seized upon by people who have vaccine hesitancy ideations.

Take your straw elsewhere.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#215

Post by joshspankit »

dpifke wrote: post #106
dqpb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be sued for asking questions?

You can be sued by anyone, for anything, at any time. Whether or not that lawsuit has any merit is irrelevant. With certain exceptions based on subject matter (e.g. SLAPP) or jurisdiction, it still costs money to hire a lawyer to defend against the suit.

American law does not apply in Canada either

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#216

Post by 1MachineElf »

injidup wrote: post #112
dqpb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be sued for asking questions?

I have an amusing letter from the lawyers working for powerinsole threatening legal action for asking questions and that I should remove all my comments from social media. It was also demanded that I pay approx 350 euro that the letter cost to write. My response was to invest in the cost of the device, tear it down on video and post the analysis to facebook. That was more than 6 months ago. I have not heard from the…

Is that a public post? Would love to read it.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#217

Post by bluGill »

ModernMech wrote: post #207
native_samples wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is not profit but the reverse, the corruption comes from the absence of profit. Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. The government effectively "loses" all of it in accounting terms, but because it's tax it doesn't matter. The buyer is blind and doesn't even bother looking at the papers they'…

> Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. Do research projects sometimes fail to del…

> This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist.

That is pure corruption: the grant is funneling money from you to a domestic ariline. If it was about accountability you would have to prove the flight was really needed in the first place, and then that you found the best price. (though the grant should allow you to ignore the "skip maintenance and pilot training to give you a lower price" airline, but if that best happens to be foreign it shouldn't matter to the grant unless there is corruption involved)

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#218

Post by read_if_gay_ »

OriginalNebula wrote: post #134
injidup wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankyou for the tip. I'Ll look into it tomorrow.

No, thank you! Austria has a weird thing with pseudoscience scams [0][1][2] and it needs to be dealt with. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belebtes_Wasser [1] The current Minister of Economy was working as an "energizer" https://www.diepresse.com/5395317/wirtschaftsministerin-schr... [2] During the construction of a hospital in Vienna, an "energetic" ring was built around the construction site for 95000 Euro. https…

Meanwhile I'm trying to launch a simple health related mobile app and it's an absolutely insurmountable amount of paperwork for a solo dev.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#219

Post by jahnu »

OriginalNebula wrote: post #134
injidup wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankyou for the tip. I'Ll look into it tomorrow.

No, thank you! Austria has a weird thing with pseudoscience scams [0][1][2] and it needs to be dealt with. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belebtes_Wasser [1] The current Minister of Economy was working as an "energizer" https://www.diepresse.com/5395317/wirtschaftsministerin-schr... [2] During the construction of a hospital in Vienna, an "energetic" ring was built around the construction site for 95000 Euro. https…

Not to mention almost all pharmacies selling homeopathic rubbish. I find this particularly irritating given the ridiculously regulations and control around things like buying paracetamol or ibuprofen.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#220

Post by bluGill »

aabaker99 wrote: post #209
sjwalter wrote: post #203

What I want to know is how does this issue impact the notion that we all seem to buy into that we should "follow the science". Scientists themselves have a hard time "following the science". Add to it the observation that when an issue is getting lots of attention outside of academia, then there are usually some really strong incentives (profit, prestige) associated with doing the science and applying it (e.g., epide…

I think this is a very important question. This is something that I struggle with. I have read a lot of papers. I generally think science can be a force for good. I understand analytic methods developed by or used in papers from my field of interest. I generally believe that those methods are capable of answering important and interesting questions. In my view, the problem is that you can't know if an article is good…

> But upon further reflection, it seems that society hasn't figured out how to deal with much simpler lies, either.

outside of your field how much of the BS papers can you catch? I know enough about computers that I could probably figure out at least some of it in that field (after spending 10x longer than someone who actually reads papers regularly), but give me a paper in something else and I'm not so sure.

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