Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadmeister | Hacker News Reader

This has been pointed out in previous threads, but this Twitter is full of alarmist unscientific BS and it appears to be spammed with some regularity on HN recently.

View on HN

Alarmist, yes. Unscientific BS, not really. He’s got the background to make comments from a position of legitimacy. If we can’t trust this guy, even with some healthy skepticism, who should we trust?

https://scholar.harvard.edu/ericding/home

Edit: by trust, I don’t mean blindly believe, but mean one should consider his comments seriously.

From that link, it seems like he is commenting far outside of his expertise in "behavioral interventions" to improve things like "medicare cost."

Don't trust anyone, just weigh their claims and their background. In this case, I have yet to see people with serious credentials in genomics make this claim (outside of the original scientists who published the paper relating it to HIV - IIT is impressive, but I don't really know how to assess their credentials writ large)

How is this outside his area of expertise? He has a doctorate in epidemiology.

He graduated from The Johns Hopkins University with Honors in Public Health and Phi Beta Kappa. He then completed his dual doctorate in epidemiology and doctorate in nutrition, as the youngest graduate to complete his dual program at age 23 from Harvard SPH. Teaching at Harvard for over 15 years, he has advised and mentored 2 dozen students, and lectured in more than a dozen graduate and undergraduate courses, for which he received the Derek Bok Distinction in Teaching Award from Harvard College.

That largely depends on the credibility of the source of the Twitter posts. The author in the referenced thread does seem to be a legitimate commentator on the subject.

This particular person doesn't seem to be an example of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ding

He's also calling for confirmation before everyone goes nuts:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1223325141364592640

The Twitter user seems legit. The Internet in general is full of BS yet we don't guilt-by-association the entire Internet.

We should question the veracity of the information presented. The nature of this fluid topic is a good example. I read the first part, a few days ago, and most of the information presented tallied with what was presented elsewhere. However, since then Dr. Eric Ding's profile has risen in prominence and the Twitter feed is commingling speculation with credentials, so it is entirely justified to question the validity of your source.

It would seem that there were doubts around the content in the Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

From 2K followers to 64K+ followers in less than 7 days! https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/drericding

Reply on news.ycombinator.com