'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#11

Post by xhkkffbf » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:15 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #4

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

As the replication crisis grows, or we're simply becoming more aware of it, I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy. Much discussion has been had on what to do if it is the former but if it is the latter, what needs to change in the education process so studies are be…

> what needs to change in the education process so studies are better designed Remove politics, free kidnapped and gagged science.

That's just hard to do with a topic like this. There are committed people on both sides of the issue who know what they want to hear. That's not a good environment for science to find a neutral answer.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#12

Post by colechristensen » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:15 PM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

As the replication crisis grows, or we're simply becoming more aware of it, I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy. Much discussion has been had on what to do if it is the former but if it is the latter, what needs to change in the education process so studies are be…

I think it is not enough of a sense of quality and too much pressure or gamification of getting things published. And fundamentally lots of researchers need to be more interested in finding the truth and considerably better at statistics.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#13

Post by dale_glass » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

As the replication crisis grows, or we're simply becoming more aware of it, I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy. Much discussion has been had on what to do if it is the former but if it is the latter, what needs to change in the education process so studies are be…

Individual studies shouldn't be the primary focus. It shouldn't fall to every individual researcher to be fully accurate and honest. This is just not possible because people are imperfect, and have all the wrong incentives in many cases.

What we need is a system designed to deal with this better. My suggestion would be greater incentives to the publication of negative results, and incentives to reproduce research. Create a system that encourages reproduction as a second step to peer review. This should also increase quality. If your research can't be easily reproduced it's probably not doing a whole lot of good even if ultimately you got the right answers.

Test driven research, if you will.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#14

Post by dc-programmer » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:17 PM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

As the replication crisis grows, or we're simply becoming more aware of it, I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy. Much discussion has been had on what to do if it is the former but if it is the latter, what needs to change in the education process so studies are be…

Personally this is one of the reasons I chose to go into software instead of statistics when I was a young math major. The idea that you could make a small mistake that invalidates all your work and you might not even know it until much later or even never always made me uncomfortable. With software I can write tests till my neuroticism has been placated

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#15

Post by gpt5 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #7

I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.

You could make the same argument about a study that says that meat is good.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#16

Post by crims0n » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #7

I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.

I agree but for different reasons... namely, our ancestors have lived off red meat for hundreds of thousands of years. We can still eat red meat our entire lives with minimal, or at the very least, hard to link direct consequences to our health. It can literally sustain a human for their entire lifespan - so asserting it is unhealthy should be an extremely high bar.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#17

Post by ravenstine » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #7

I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.

The standard of proof should be conducting actual science, not epidemiology or surveys. Epidemiology is good for some things, but as someone with an ongoing interest in health and especially metabolism, I don't believe epidemiology is very good at all for assessing what's optimal for human health unless the datapoints are overwhelming (ex. smokers have tar in their lungs that is rarely found in non smokers). Such evidence doesn't present itself against meat eating, nor dietary cholesterol or saturated fat. To assume that the science is settled for any one of those things in isolation is a display of ignorance of the highest order. Though they can be debated, as can anything.

But we're unlikely to see better scientific research because there's ethical problems around keeping people behind forcing people to eat specific foods and keeping them behind lock and key for observation, and so they don't eat a single gram of anything outside the boundaries of the study. Unless more of such research can be carried out, too much of what we do is uncontrolled to make meaningful observations about what's unhealthy and what's not.

What meat eating has that other diets don't have is not just the phenotype of our digestive systems (being like that of other meat eaters), or archaeological evidence of our ancestors using sharp tools and arrows, but stable isotope testing of fossil evidence linking our recent ancestors to a substantial amount of meat eating for around 4 million years. If you compare that to the amount of time we've had agriculture, ~30k years, the time in which we've been subsisting not only on more plants but plants selectively bred to be more nutritious than they were in the wild is a flash in the pan.

My opinion is that we should reconsider the ethics around researching nutrition, because it's been an overall failure, and has probably harmed more people than would scientific studies. This isn't to say that ethics in science should be abolished, but relying on the mouse model and epidemiology doesn't appear to be doing the most good.

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#18

Post by GenerocUsername » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

gpt5 wrote: post #15

narrator wrote: post #7

I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.

You could make the same argument about a study that says that meat is good.

Except that eating meat is a common activity globally for all of human history...

It would be like publishing a paper that says walking upright is harmful and then people start crab walking. Like yes you can explain many back problems with walking upright, but does that actually justify a different form of walking?

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#19

Post by mattgperry » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:28 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #7

I think any study that says eating meat is unhealthy has to have a much higher standard of proof because there is so much money floating around from environmental and animal rights activists to fund any scientist who is willing to make that case.

The inverse is probably more true, being the animal industry is extraordinarily well funded and established?

Re: 'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

#20

Post by mumblemumble » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 3:29 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #4

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

As the replication crisis grows, or we're simply becoming more aware of it, I do wonder how much of this is due to poorly aligned incentives causing researchers to error on the side of what will get the most attention versus researchers in general simply being sloppy. Much discussion has been had on what to do if it is the former but if it is the latter, what needs to change in the education process so studies are be…

> what needs to change in the education process so studies are better designed Remove politics, free kidnapped and gagged science.

Politics and education are certainly factors, but I would argue that they are minor. The bigger issue is the natural incentive structures that academia has created. If you want to have a career, you get both attention and funding in return for headline-grabbing results. This creates two huge second-order effects: first, everyone's incentivized to look for big impressive new effects. Second, focusing on confirmatory work is a great way to tank your career. And those create a third order effect: people who cut corners thrive, and there's not much to keep that in check because people who cautiously vet their work and others' get stuck in adjunct professor hell until they finally give up and exit the field.

Politics just adds some spin onto that. Education, I just don't think that's even a possible solution. The math involved in some of these fancier statistical techniques can be devilishly hard to get right, and it's often simply asking too much to expect someone to be an expert at both that and molecular biology. You could argue that that means people should look for competent co-authors to cover that side of things. But, see above - current incentive structures don't really favor the researcher who says, "I know! Let's bring on some nerd whose only job is to find reasons why we shouldn't publish!"