Live data from Hacker News

'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

thetimes.co.uk

201–210 of 227 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change

...is not a political agenda.

But it is, even if climate change is true. e.g. the original paper aim has nothing to do with climate change, but it mentions climate change 6 times in the paper and 5 more in the reference.

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

#202
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand this argument. Why does what our ancestors did mean it's either healthy or unhealthy? We know these things are not healthy or unhealthy enough to meaningfully affect reproduction so there shouldn't be an evolutionary argument.

Well, first off, you seem to be confusing the concept of survival of the fittest and evolution, which are two separate things. Evolution is nothing but the genetic mutations we get and give to our offspring. And it's happening constantly, regardless of whether it meaningfully affected reproduction. It's just that over long periods of time, mutations which are well adapted to helping a species survive their environments and reproduce tend to make it into the next generation. Thus, species tend to evolve/adapt to suit their environments.

So if our diets largely involved meat for millions of years during as our time as hunters and gatherers, it's likely we have evolved to eat and digest meat quite well by now without it negatively impacting our health. We do know we have eaten meat for at least a million of years, as we are omnivores and have some carnivorous teeth. And we likely evolved to be omnivores because it probably helped some of our ancient ancestors survive periods of food (plant) scarcity. Some evolutionary researchers think meat eating may even be apart of how we were able to develop our human intelligence.

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

#203

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…

You're framing this as if they're mutually exclusive options, which they're not. My impression is that it's "all of the above": the incentive structure in academics is completely broken, and this incentivizes both unethical practices, as well as being sloppy "to get things done".

I can think of numerous examples of both from my career, from working with various colleagues and in stories I've heard. All of this is the tip of the iceberg I think: what you hear about usually are cases of blatant fraud, with high-profile or high-importance research. The bulk of greyer malpractice, with softer squishier levels of ethical dubiousness, and more indirect, cumulative impacts on peoples' careers and literature trajectories, are more hidden.

It's gotten to the point where I no longer put much stock in the reputation of individual researchers. Too many times I know in the best case there's an institution, or department, or subcommunity, or doctoral students or postdocs behind it, with who knows what sort of manipulation or luck. In the worst case there's years of fraud or other forms of corruption. Call me inappropriately cynical but I didn't start out this way.

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

#204

Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result. This will make PhD harder to get, so PhD’s will become more valuable (and more vetted), and we will have people verify published studies.

You've just passed your viva-- now all that's left to do is eat this marshmallow, or wait 10 minutes and get two marshmallows.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From reading papers of various different types in the past few years it really depends a lot on the exact field in question. Nutrition? Would be surprising if there's much political distortion there but there's lots of really bad methodologies, partly because it's hard to get good data (people are bad at reliably writing down what they eat). Social bot/misinformation research? Basically just politics masquerading as…

Academia is pretty corrupt or corruptible (well, it's humans after all). If CS research isn't corrupted at the moment, it will be if it being corrupted becomes useful.

I don't know about hard CS, and I don't know about that word "corrupt" because it implies malice and I think that Hanlon's Razor is probably a useful heuristic here. But, in machine learning, I've see plenty of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Papers often introduce new algorithms or techniques whose improvement over the competition can plausibly be attributed to excessively tuned hyperparameters that overfit the data on one or more benchmarks. It's really not all that far removed from p-hacking in my opinion.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/feed-required-to-produce-...

It's absolutely incredible how much more efficient cow milk is per kg compared to beef. Some of that must be because milk is even more watery than meat is, but the rest must come from being able to get milk from cows throughout their (kind of miserable, sadly) lifespan. A huge amount of muscle is grown and destroyed cyclically as part of a cow's natural life. It's horrific, but imagine if meat could be "harvested" fr…

I think the equuvalent that still produces meat is lab grown meat. Then you can just grow the parts you need to eat it, which should be about as efficient as it gets once it's all figured out.

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

#207
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue here is the bioavailability of those proteins when digesting. red meat is 100% digested and bioavailable for all amino acid that are required for life. Bio availability of protein in plant is far lower, and doesn’t cover the full amino-acid profile. But well, I worship Darwin and let the vegans dying from malnutrition. Latest story is that mother getting life sentence after killing her baby with vegan…

> I worship Darwin and let the vegans dying from malnutrition. Please don’t be snarky.¹ Known athletes trivially disprove that claim.² ³ ¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ² https://www.mensjournal.com/sports/nate-diaz-and-other-vegan... ³ https://www.livekindly.com/vegan-athletes-swear-by-plants/

You didn’t let them live enough long. Also please provide the complémentation list ( all the chemical they need to add into their daily diet to sustain this narrative).

No need to cherry pick far right elements of the bell curve. For centuries diet poor in meat is associated with bad health, shorter life and multiple specific diseases. This topic is widely reported on old littérature from 17th 18th and 19th centuries. 0 meat diet is malnutrition whatever the artifice you use to hide it.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the point

I think the problem here is that articles and publications in general do not provide enough detail to reproduce the results. Even though, that is the exact reason you write an article -- to make research reproducible. Peer-reviewed journals should, and they progressively try to be more strict about it, enforce the necessary level of detail and open-sourcing of methods. Reproduction in science is a though problem -- n…

Today, I'd say reproduction of results is far more important than getting more research published.

I would even go so far as to say that peer review is worthless, it may well be time to replace it with peer reproduction as a prerequisite for having an article published.

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

#209

Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result. This will make PhD harder to get, so PhD’s will become more valuable (and more vetted), and we will have people verify published studies.

> Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result Speaking for my own PhD (now around 25 years ago): it's hard enough getting one's own damned work to reproduce, never mind the work of a complete stranger.

If you can't reproduce it, that is also a valuable result.
Post reply on HN