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Comment by cudgy | Hacker News Reader

Title should read “Scientists throw tantrums and quit their positions over disagreement with other scientists”. Why quit your position and not object through the normal channels if you really wanted to inform people? Abruptly quitting just makes you look unprofessional and easily triggered when others present information you don’t agree with.

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Except that's not what's happening.

They thought they were working for a "good, solid, respectable journal". Turns out their employer wasn't as respectable as they thought, so they quit - not over a disagreement with their peers but over a disagreement over the journal's standards.

How do you know what’s happening? Because you read a single biased article? Quitting abruptly is not the proper way to handle this. It’s overly dramatic and the author of the article provides a one-sided view that reeks of the corrupt, establishment rhetoric spewing out of the virology community. Note that some of the scientists that quit worked on vaccines and the companies that produce these vaccines may have influenced the production of this article.

Pretty sure they quit as an act of public activism about some popular political issue. Unfortunately, when scientist are also activists, they can no longer be objective. You don't see mass resignations when other crap papers get published. If it doesn't embarrass them politically, they accept it.

I think it's a combination. Bad papers that reach conclusions scientists agree with will be generally ignored, while bad papers which reach conclusions they don't like will trigger protest. This is especially problematic in fields where individual studies are extremely noisy and meta-analysis is needed to see the truth. Because the meta-analysis then just ends up showing the prevailing bias.

To put a different spin on that: it would presumably be bad for a scientist's career to be associated with a garbage journal that publishes dangerous nonsense.

Most medical journals publish a lot of bullshit papers though. The only difference is that this one has political relevance, so in effect politics dictates what kind of bullshit people accepts.

Please read the article. There are no "other scientists" involved.

Huh? All were researchers. One was a physicist, and one a data scientist. One of the reviewers was a chemist.

They may be scientists in their own fields, but in the relevant field they are not.

This raises for me a serious question, how good "scientists" they can be in their own fields. If they accept the method of cutting corners like this, or pulling data out of whatever, are they able to output trustworthy science in their own papers? I would think rather not, but I also don't know anything else about them.

First author is a science historian, and the physicist studies keto diets, I don't think they're used to particularly rigorous academic standards.

First author also apparently specializes in "alternative and complementary medicine" (i.e. homeopathy) and "parapsychology"[0]. Sounds like a crank.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Walach

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