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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that articles from forbes.com should not be seen as having any better reputation than those posted on blogger.com or medium.com.

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Forbes reporting is mostly factual. They don't employ much fact checkers, but don't do glaring errors. Forbes has some Chinese bias and has been criticized for it. It's owned by HK investor. Forbes also has some columnist's who are not very accurate in their opinions.

Those who post in blogger.com or medium.com don't have any responsibility to anyone. I think your opinion spreads the "they are all the same" message that is infantile.

How can one be "accurate" in one's opinions?

They probably mean the opinion pieces themselves have factual inaccuracies and/or dubious sources. They probably don't mean that the opinions expressed in those pieces are themselves inaccurate.

1) is the source reputable? (esp. the journal, magazine, author)

2) is the study well-designed and big enough to detect the signal as being reproducible and significant?

3) did the study ask the question it now supposedly answers?

4) did the study employ methods that discriminate precisely and robustly, like use of random groups and correction for complicating variables? Or is it based mostly on observations? And did it overlook the a priori distributions of variables known to confound the outcome of interest?

If the article/study does not pass all these tests, it's unworthy of trust as an accurate test of its hypothesis or its claims of significance.

By basing opinions on evidence and logical deduction.

"I think the world is flat", is an opinion. You could say its accurate in so much as the subject of the sentence actually believes it. However, most people would say the "opinion" is wrong.

Forbes reporting is factual but these "sites" on forbes.com are not Forbes reporting and it's not made clear on the website. I think that is the point op was making

Vitamin d levels are coorrlated with covid deaths, but that could just be an indicator of some other underlying issue. Supplements may or may not help. There are rcts going on now.

The fact that other studies also indicate D to be prophylactic against contracting covid implies that there's more than a single stray mis-correlation in evidence here.

The only study I saw that showed this had a really small sample size (N was ~50). Larger trails are going on now.

> I think your opinion spreads the "they are all the same" message that is infantile.

In most cases, Forbes contributors (not staffers) receive the same amount of fact-checking as Medium/Blogger writers: zero. Forbes has tarnished its brand so much with its contributor system that clinging to the Forbes brand as a differentiating factor would be the "infantile" opinion.

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/what-the-forb...

https://www.cjr.org/innovations/newsrooms_boost_traffic.php

Check the byline: Forbes "contributor" is a blogger, Forbes "staff" is a reporter.

Yes, Forbes contributors are not fact-checked by editors for the most part. A contributor article on Forbes is like a Medium article.

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/what-the-forb...

https://www.cjr.org/innovations/newsrooms_boost_traffic.php

Most articles on the Forbes website are by contributors.

They are pointing to a study. Should we question the pointer or the study?

Reminder that any Coronavirus treatment, vaccine or mitigation is to be treated as insufficient, unsafe or invalid, unless there is an indefinite timeframe for approval.

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