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Comment by gloriosoc | Hacker News Reader

Oof now we are saying that my work is not of publishable quality? The data are from two days ago so it would be hard to get it peer reviewed in that time. But I do plan on publishing. I am putting it out there so people can make more informed decisions (about schools etc) in real time.

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Not the original commenter, but no, I'd hope not, in its current state. It's a shallow analysis, and it does a poor job of analyzing the data to try to understand causality in explaining case trends.

For example:

> Why would Floridas numbers start to decrease if not for herd immunity? We know they aren’t being more careful. Disney land reopened and there is a police sheriff who literally made a rule that police officers and people going into the station were not allowed to wear masks.

As I mentioned in another comment:

> For example, bars opened in early June in Florida. They closed on June 26th after cases started spiking.

To miss a policy change this significant in such a piece is pretty egregious if you are claiming that this is publishable quality.

I'll assume this was a good faith effort, but the piece has many flaws and draws conclusions that aren't well supported.

> Oof now we are saying that my work is not of publishable quality?

You can think of all the feedback here as equivalent to the feedback submitters get from their peer reviewers. IIUC, that's the point of the website?

Actually, yes this is the point. I think this thread has been very useful feedback for the most part and has made me feel pretty optimistic about the utility of crowd sourced review. The "oof" is more reaction to the framing of that particular feedback, which felt more like a personal insult than constructive critique- it basically said that I wasn't a good enough scientist to be published. And of course the post isn't a publication- it's a blog post- so perhaps different standards in a lot of regards.

Yeah, taking feedback isn't easy, and feedback received from strangers online can be particularly brutal.

You could put this up on biorxiv and invite other researchers to comment.

That's a good idea- that too will take some time- writing a paper is not a small task but I will put it on the to do list.

And actually there is a comment feature on the blog- so anyone can comment including my colleagues.

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