Jonathan Haidt, who's been driving a lot of the work against social media for kids, directly refutes these findings in this post https://www.afterbabel.com/p/fundamental-flaws-part-3.
Even a simple sentence like, "Ferguson did both of these things and his findings thus do not “undermine” our causal claims; he failed to accurately test our causal claims," comes across as scathing compared to the paper.
This tendency of people nowadays to focus on tone and other irrelevant characteristics of an argument (as it is made) is dumb.
Wordplay is another, and there is plenty of it in this HN thread.
Boy that Einstein fellow's paper sure had a gruff tone I'm sticking with Newton!
Science uses a watered down but more ~practical form of epistemology, for example equating the knowledge of scientists with all of reality (There is no evidence [that I know of]). Some disciplines (military) use special language to circumvent this problem, at least sometimes.
There is what is true, and then there is the human experience of it, and scientists like most other humans mix the two up regularly. Doing otherwise is "pedantic", and is strongly culturally discouraged.
I'm not sure how tone would be irrelevant; similar to what a sibling commenter said, tone conveys quite a bit of information. It seems unwise or "dumb" to ignore that, because we're still humans talking to each other, even if it's bits over a wire, and we're working together in good faith to learn and solve problems, aren't we?
And yes a posited fact is also known as a claim.
That's an extremely poor way to determine truth.
The summary is this:
The uptick is adequately explained by changes to mandatory reporting requirements for screening questions of mental health for teenagers from Obamacare and increased access to healthcare for those teenagers.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s...
The number of suicides now is little different for men to 1990, and is significantly lower than it was in the 1970s.
Edit: And here’s a link to their earlier free episode recorded before this new meta analysis: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-25-is-it-the-pho...
I'm not old enough to remember doctors appearing in TV adverts claiming the health benefits of smoking. But I do remember those 1980s green-washing campaigns from Shell and Esso (Exxon) showing animals frolicking through the wonderful planet oil and gas were creating. I also remember all the plastic recycling campaigns that turned out to be rotten hoax.
Let's face it science gets used and tossed aside these days. Seeing research papers that flat-out contradict each other every week is tiring. All I want to say is that this utterly devalues science to see such disingenuous conflict, and to know that at least one side is making stuff up. It's going the same way as political debate and is an embarrassment to everyone who participates and believes in science.
Obviously there is emotion on all sides. And there is surely a humongous pot of money on one side. But I think where this is heading... it's classic Sirkov style full-spectrum disinformation, funding both sides and designed to undermine the very belief in scientific research itself.
It benefits the anti-rationalists and nihilists who can say, "you know what.. fuck science, I'm just going to assert what I like based on my emotion alone!" That tends to favour the might-is-right crowd and the shrill angry mob.
Maybe it also helps to immunize people to those same contagions as well: that seems less obvious that would happen, to me at least...