[HN Gopher] Researcher experiences of funder suppression of heal...
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Researcher experiences of funder suppression of health trial
findings
Author : aww_dang
Score : 101 points
Date : 2021-08-28 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.plos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.plos.org)
| phren0logy wrote:
| This is the problem trial registries are supposed to solve.
|
| There is an ethical problem with accepting subjects into a
| clinical trial, and potentially putting them at risk, then
| suppressing the results.
| hannob wrote:
| The problem with trials registries is that they're only one
| piece of the solution, but many more things need to work for
| them to be effective.
|
| Many trials are registered, required by law to be published,
| but still not published, because there is no enforcement:
| https://fdaaa.trialstracker.net/ https://eu.trialstracker.net/
|
| Or trials alre registered, but then published with a different
| main result than the one that was registered as the main result
| (so-called outcome switching). This should be noted in peer
| review, but often it's not. And if you point it out to the
| journal later they should publish a correction, but they don't.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Because all of that has always been what science promised to
| justify its hold on funding and power while not delivering
| any of the accountability it claimed.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Very interesting. But it's worth keeping in mind that the most
| common suppression tactic was to ask the researcher not to
| publish (9%), and we have no idea in how many cases it worked
| (since the unpublished trials didn't make it into this study)...
| aww_dang wrote:
| Full title:
|
| "He who pays the piper calls the tune": Researcher experiences of
| funder suppression of health behaviour intervention trial
| findings
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| For me, if anything is surprising here, it's that it wasn't
| worse.
|
| Other issues in behavioral health studies:
|
| Self reporting can be unreliable.
|
| The types of assumptions you make shape the questions you ask
| which can bias results. (I.E. "Which color is it? Black? Or
| white?" "Neither. It's yellow." "I don't have a category for
| that. I will record that as white.")
|
| Honesty of participants for sensitive topics like sexual behavior
| and drug use that could have serious consequences for them.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Combine this with the public desire to suppress questioning the
| efficacy and safety of certain medications, and you have a recipe
| for disaster.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If it takes 1 unit of effort to ask a question, it takes 10 to
| answer if you know the answer and the audience knows the
| prereqs. It takes 100 units to answer if the audience needs a
| quick refresher and 1000 units to answer if the audience is
| missing fundamentals. Likewise, it takes 1000 units to do the
| research if you don't know the answer and 1,000,000 units if
| nobody knows the answer and it needs to be discovered. Your
| epistemology _must_ take these ratios into account or it is
| trivial for a bad actor to fabricate truths by "just asking
| questions," creating unreasonable expectations of a quick and
| easy answer, and then inviting you to infer the truth of their
| malicious narrative from the absence of a quick and easy answer
| to the question they just posed.
| awesomeusername wrote:
| Wow interesting I've never heard it put like that. What a
| good framework for thinking about this
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Absolutely. For as long as the internet has been around,
| there has been this notion that someone asking questions is
| not only entitled to an explanation, but that it must fit
| into a brief response, the asker must be able to understand
| the explanation, and they must be thoroughly convinced by it.
| If none of these criteria are met, the asker concludes that
| the explanation does not exist or is wrong.
|
| It is a fallacy that is quite obvious with just a little
| thought. Example: "Someone prove to me in a written reply
| here that Fermat's Last Theorem is true. If you can't, then I
| submit that it's false." Complete nonsense.
| Natsu wrote:
| Or you can write the answer once and copy it infinitely.
|
| I understand the feeling because I frequently tell the
| vaccine-hesitant why they should vaccinate, but it's not
| nearly that bad if you actually try to inform people.
|
| Also, you're not accounting for the reverse, where something
| is popular but wrong and asserts that it should never ever
| have to explain why it's right.
|
| Finally, a more useful heuristic is to listen to explanations
| from people who can and do tell you how things work. The BS
| artists generally either have models that directly contradict
| what we know of the world or have no coherent model at all.
|
| Incidentally, the above post is an example of this, is
| something I've explained many times, and took me nowhere near
| 10 times as long as your post to write unless you can type
| significantly faster than 120 WPM.
| Jiro wrote:
| The flip side is that it's as easy to blow someone off by
| sneering at "just asking questions" when they either honestly
| don't know, or where they disagree with you but honestly
| think you can't answer the questions.
|
| And sometimes people ask questions because they know very
| well what someone is insinuating, but are trying to force
| them to actually say it outright.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Your logic can also be applied to questioning whether we
| should start a war.
|
| How do you feel about a free press asking questions?
| dootbin wrote:
| For those of you that also hate Reddit's new interface...
| https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/pd4y5m/apples_new_...
| flenserboy wrote:
| This has been obvious for decades. A very interesting deep dive
| would be one showing just how firewalls have not been established
| which would mark particularly trustworthy studies.
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(page generated 2021-08-28 23:00 UTC)