Unfortunately the author John Ioannidis turned out to be a Covid conspiracy theorist, which has significantly affected his reputation as an impartial seeker of truth in publication.
> Why Most Published Research Findings on Covid Are False
Well, that's why there was so much focus on replication, multiple data sources and meta-analyses. The focus was there because the assumption is each study is flawed and those tools help extract better signal from the noise of individual studies.
> and that goes against the science politics
I don't think I follow you here. Are you referring to the anti-science populism? That's really the only science politics I'm aware of now that creationism and climate skepticism have been firmly put to rest.
> If only he had avoided the topic of Covid entirely, then he would be well regarded.
I think it's more that his predictions were bad and poorly reasoned and he chose to defend them on right wind media outlets instead of making his case among scientists.
He's not the first well-regarded scientist to go off on a politically-fueled side quest later in his career. Kary Mullis is a famous example.
And please, don't pretend like there is no left wing aligned science politics that is as much based on science as flat earthers. I assume you haven't been hibernating during the covid times. All the doctors who did exactly that are doing fine with regard to their reputations.
I know about Barrington and many of his other claims, but I don't recall him actually saying anything that I would classify as conspiracy theory. Certainly in my world, a credentialled epidemiologist questioning the accuracy of government statistics during a world health crisis, and suggestion that perhaps our strategy could be different, is not conspiracy theory.
I fully agree. (Well, with some caveats. I think credentials matters less than facts. And I think epidemiology is still in its infancy, so I personally don't put much faith in any single epidemiologist.)
Maybe conspiracy theorist is the wrong term. What he did was show a very political concern with public policy (especially IIUC his opposition to lockdowns) and very little concern about the quality of his research or the people it affected.
This article seems pretty decent at containing details: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis...
You mention Barrington, from the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration
> The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies stated that the strategy would be dangerous and lacked a sound scientific basis.
So I guess maybe less "conspiracy theory" and more "recklessly dangerous" or "abandonment of the Hippocratic oath".
I saw a lot of "epidemiological immune system" activity during COVID- if you didn't toe a specific line, the larger community would attack you, right or wrong. My guess is that this is mainly from historical experience with vaccines and large-scale disease outbreaks, where having a simple, consistent message that did not freak out the population is considered more importantly than being absolutely technically correct.
The Lancet estimated that about 40% of US covid deaths could have been avoided if the administration had better policies. That's a bit over 400,000 deaths. That's about the same number of Americans lost during WWII.
Not all of that can be directly attributed to John Ioannidis's advocacy against lockdowns, but it at least gives us a sense of how big a blunder it was.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...
Such careless use of statistics is hardly uncommon; but it's funny to see that he succumbed too, perhaps blinded by the same factors he identifies in this paper.
Beyond that, he sometimes advocated for a less restrictive response on the basis of predictions (of deaths, infections, etc.) that turned out to be incorrect. I don't think that's a conspiracy theory, though. Are the scientists who advocated for school closures now "conspiracy theorists" too, because they failed to predict the learning loss and social harm we now observe in those children? Any pandemic response comes with immense harms, which are near-impossible to predict or even articulate fully, let alone trade off in an unquestionably optimal way.
It's more accurate to say that his ideas were dangerous and fringe and unsupported by the science. And while he was derelict in the science, he was very active promoting his opposition to lock downs to the White House and to conservative media.
It would be more accurate to say that he heavily fueled the conspiracy theorists rather than he was one himself.
I may have misunderstood your tone, but it sounds like you think it's a good reason to have a bad opinion of him as a person or a scientist, or even prevent his ideas from being heard? I wouldn't want to live in a society like that.
One of the main things that fuelled conspiracy theories the most were draconian measures against dissenting opinions which were perpetrated by social media platforms. Silencing wrong ideas by force damages trust in science much more than engaging with them, and gives these ideas much more credibility.
I don't have a bad opinion of him as a person, although I think he acted dangerously and in a politically motivated way. I think lots of folks were freaking out at the time and their reactions are understandable. I don't expect anyone to be super human. But lots of people were also advocating policies that would (and in some cases did) result in mass death. And I do expect professionals to check themselves and try to prove themselves wrong before they embark on a political mission like he did.
I don't have particularly bad opinion of him as a scientist either. I've known several big name scientist types and usually they're very bright but only really reliable in their established field. You sometimes get to be a big scientist by taking a large contrarian bet, and I would guess he has a natural contrarian streak that served him well in some of his research. The problem with being a contrarian is that you're reactive. Your gradient isn't toward truth it's away from what you perceive as the current central tendency. So you more often end up more wrong than everyone else.
While I don't have a bad opinion of him as a scientist, I do think this episode will make me read his papers much more carefully for conclusions he's reached by contrarian intuition rather than careful reasoning. And it does to me call into question whether his motivation was to find truth or rather to offer a Marx-style criticism of everything to show how much better he is. I don't think the criticize-everything approach has proven productive in the long run.
> One of the main things that fuelled conspiracy theories the most were draconian measures against dissenting opinions which were perpetrated by social media platforms.
I wasn't on social media, so I can't say. It does suck to have your opinion dunked on. On the other hand, social media was full of inorganic influence campaigns. I don't have all the solutions, but I think it's reasonable to have some counterpressure to misinformation.
> Silencing wrong ideas by force damages trust in science much more than engaging with them, and gives these ideas much more credibility.
I'm not sure about this. The campaigns to damage trust in science were quite pervasive and organized. I'd think they wouldn't have spent all that money if the public policies did it just as well without spending on the influence campaigns.
The ideal would be if everyone were educated enough to consume the science directly. But for various reasons mass education is considered political so there's a political divide over who has the foundations to understand it.
Ad hominem attacks against ideas can safely be ignored.
(2) I'm not opposed to any ideas in this paper. I think the paper stands on its own merits.
You've tried your best.
>(2) I'm not opposed to any ideas in this paper. I think the paper stands on its own merits.
You're just preemptively setting a limit to how much thinking we can do. After all you made a post in this very thread:
>>So I guess maybe less "conspiracy theory" and more "recklessly dangerous" or "abandonment of the Hippocratic oath".
Which is odd, since medical research has no Hippocratic oath or recklessly dangerous caveats. After all, they were doing gain of function research on coronaviruses in the very city where covid-19 started. Unless geography is now a reckless pseudo science which we must sensor for the good of all.
But John Ioannidis is a physician and has served in a number of medical organizations. Even non-medical researchers are bound by IRB boards for research on humans and more generally are bound by all sorts of codified ethical standards.