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Comment by strangeloops85 | Hacker News Reader

Another odd thing: One of the co-authors of the study, Andrew Bogan seems to manage a hedge fund, and then published a WSJ op-ed on the study. He didn't note in the op-ed that he was involved in the study (and a co-author no less!). A lot of conflict of interest potential here. These authors seem to have an agenda and end-result in mind, no matter the data.

Edit: here's the WSJ op-ed (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-data-suggest-the-coronaviru...

The more I think about this, the more outrageous I find this. It's a form of astroturfing to advance the beliefs of the authors of the study. (Note that the senior author Bhattacharya and of course Ionnadis were advancing this theory before data collection began. This means their analysis deserves even more scrutiny)

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> Note that the senior author Bhattacharya and of course Ionnadis were advancing this theory before data collection began.

Declaring a hypothesis publicly and then gathering data to see if it’s supported or not is good science, not bad.

Is it though? Why declare publicly at all then? You’d just be giving the impression that when you do collect the data you’d be cherry picking, exactly like what’s happening here.

> Is it though?

Yes. It’s widely accepted as best practice by mainstream scientists.

> Why declare publicly at all then?

So people know what you were testing and so you can’t fudge it to a test more convenient for your career, politics, or bank balance.

> It’s widely accepted as best practice by mainstream scientists.

Simply declaring your hypothesis is not best practice. Publishing the details of your experiment--the protocols, analytical methods, etc--are what's best practice, AFAIU. Few scientists run an experiment they expect to fail, and without publishing the details ahead of time it's trivial to fudge an outcome, so simply pronouncing your hypothesis is entirely uninteresting.

This is one of the sources of the replication crisis. People would do experiments to test a hypothesis but find nothing conclusive, they would then p-hack their data until they found something worth publishing back-hypothesize.

The solution is to publish hypothesis and test methodology ahead of time and publish your data afterward.

Yes it doesn't work unless you include your methodology in what you declare upfront.

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

Yes... that link supports what I’m saying.

> The process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions.

the reverse order would be bad science

I don’t know what to tell you except that what you’re saying isn’t what most reputable scientists think.

deciding your hypothesis after collecting data ?

edit: i think we agree, misunderstanding

> Declaring a hypothesis publicly and then gathering data to see if it’s supported or not is good science

Not for something like this. This study isn’t about running an experiment to see if treatment A or B is better. This is an observational study that is supposed to determine the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the population. There is no hypothesis here - That is to say, there shouldn’t be anything to prove. Whatever answer you measure, you measure (ignoring any other data collection issues).

But if you declare “I think the rate of infection is X”, and you end up with a rate of X, then no one knows if you’ve really found the rate to be X or if you put your thumb on the scales.

This should have been a fact finding mission to establish some of the basic numbers that will be needed to design the next wave of experiments or to guide policy.

Very beautiful said. I always belive that bad scientist will say with certainty that "this is the reason". Good scientists will always say it's probable ,they usually don't give certainity. Policy makers want certainity which is why there's always a tiff between good scientists n policymakers. My principle- When we are not sure of data usually simple models beat complex models.

They made a hypothesis and conducted a study to validate it. Perhaps they are wrong. Would be far from the first time studies are proven wrong. At least they did something. Make a better study. Make a hundred better studies. Prove them wrong!

I think the user is referring to the conflict of interest and the lack of interest in proper ethical conduct by one of the co-authors. If they won't follow generally accepted ethical guidelines, what other rules will they ignore or bend?

The conflict of interest part is fair.

The "Note that the senior author Bhattacharya and of course Ionnadis were advancing this theory before data collection began" is not. That's how science is done: you advance a theory, then you conduct experiments to validate / invalidate the theory.

It's one thing to advance a theory in academic papers during normal times. It's another to pen widely-read op-eds advancing said theories in the middle of a pandemic. Their theory and op-eds have already, and are, influencing policy - and it's clear they want to influence policy. Hence, it merits more scrutiny than the average study. These results are being used by policymakers to make decisions - skepticism and criticism is most definitely warranted.

I'm in no position to conduct studies, though I am certainly doing things in my wheelhouse to help. Other studies will clear up matters, but results may be weeks away. And these results may be used to end quarantines in the intervening time.

I think there's a difference between postulating a hypothesis, and then testing it, which is what I believe you're referring to, versus going around advocating a particular position as being true and then "testing" it.

When people are strong advocates of a particular position, they tend to find ways to design or process experimental data in ways that support that position. The ways in which bias can seep into the experiment are not always easy for outsiders to see.

So it comes down to whether their "advancing this theory" went beyond what a reasonable scientist would do in postulating a hypothesis that needs testing.

It's not just a matter of conducting a study and "perhaps they are wrong". If it can be shown that their study made unreasonable assumptions, and there was a conflict of interest, then any conclusions drawn from the study need to be taken with a grain of salt. When a primary researcher in the study has a financial interest in a specific outcome, it is at best a poorly designed study, and should be suspect. When the author has, prior to actually collecting data, advanced a desire to influence policy as if the results were a foregone conclusion, that is a problem.

They made a hypothesis and conducted a study that cannot falsify their hypothesis, even if repeated a hundred times.

That also reflects very poorly on the WSJ.

Many of the people who read the Wall Street Journal love those articles. There are 1400 comments

I read the Journal every day. News like the Stanford study is weaponized.

They tend to do hit pieces on climate change too

Here’s a recent WSJ comment:

“ USC just replicated the Stanford study proving that the COVID death rate is 0.1% - 0.2% and the true infection rate is 50x the official numbers.

This means every model has been wrong, lockdowns were foolish, and this is a bad flu.

In light of this new information I don't understand why the narrative hasn't immediately shifted to an unconditional opening of the economy everywhere. Please, enlighten me.”

Not at all

EVEN IF the rate is 0.1% this virus spreads much faster than the flu due to having no symptoms. We still need to flatten the curve to prevent overwhelming the hospitals.

That's a quote that's supposed to highlight the absurd comments that you're responding to,

The WSJ's opinion page is mindbogglingly bad. Their pro-Trump stance borders on worship, and almost every article is dedicated to either promoting Trump or defending one of his positions (in this case, lifting lockdowns).

The comment section is even worse. Breitbart-esque.

Entirely predictable after Murdoch acquired it.

It's hard to find a consistently reliable and credible source these days. Last year I switched from an FT subscription to Bloomberg after the FT moved all the adult content (non-blog type articles from senior staff that aren't just reiterating a liberal Twitter consensus) to a much more expensive subscription level. But Bloomberg has too much content. I can barely wade through it and don't know where to start. I'm not a trader--I just want an objective, consistent, and timely eye on global political-economic happenings beyond what comes off the AP wire. sigh Maybe I should go back to the FT.

For what it's worth, the rest of their reporting is still fairly high quality; from what I understand, newsrooms and editorial boards are entirely separate entities at most news companies.

If you're looking for deeper analysis-type articles, I would recommend The Economist--they only publish once a week, but they provide broader views on political and socioeconomic trends that daily papers lose amongst all the details. (They are owned by several rich families including the Rothschilds, though, and some of their articles have a globalist bias.)

I use the Bypass Paywalls extension[1] to read FT premium articles; the daily "US markets open higher/lower/flat on <insert post-rationalization here>" on the FT's front page does get tiring.

[1]: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

I like the Economist, but the Economist isn't timely. If you pick a dozen of the best political-economic reporters, especially the ones following the scholarship, aggregate their articles, and connect the threads, you've got an Economist issue 6 months to 2 years before the Economist does, except the Economist articles will elide all the messiness so that the concepts seem more definitive.

That’s fair. I find their COVID-19-related reporting to be fairly current, at least.

A comment from Australia's previous Prime Minister on Murdock's newspapers, who lead a government on the right https://theconversation.com/e-136746:

> News Corp “I think was well described as ‘a political organisation that employs a lot of journalists’”; The Australian “defends its friends, it attacks its enemies, it attacks its friends’ enemies, and the tabloids do the same.”

And we also have this comment from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/apr/16/malco... :

> Turnbull says his fatal flaw, according to media barons, was not that he was “too liberal” but his lack of deference and his personal wealth, because all the billionaires liked a politician who depended on them.

That last statement has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory - no evidence, and so appealing to the intellect.

Seems that doesn’t mean Trump won’t bash em and call them fake news:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/492084-trump-sla...

Sociopathic political manipulation (via astroturfing) in aid of bumping a hedge fund a few points? Sounds about right.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-25/how-hedge...

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