Comment by cconcepts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cconcepts | Hacker News Reader

A couple of things:

1) Isn't the default answer to a question headline supposed to be "No"?

2) How is one supposed to sift the wheat from the chaff these days? Everyone uses terms like "scientists agree that" and "here's a list of studies supporting my point of view". I took Ivermectin seriously because of Brett W etc (and perhaps I still should) but as humans we need heuristics, people who we can trust to give us well researched info, otherwise each and everyone of us needs to be an experienced researcher in every field to have any confidence of the "facts". I don't have time for that - I have a living to make, kids to spend time with, sleep to have....where are the smart people that we can trust?

Sorry Dang, I know this is kinda off topic but....kinda not?

The unfortunate reality is that you can't sift wheat from chaff as casual layperson reading a paper here and there.

You don't necessarily need to be one of the anointed, but you do need to read a lot of papers in a particular field critically. You need to read and understand enough papers in a field that you can tell the difference between a normal paper and a completely bonkers one, to tell which have novel methodology and which methods are less rigorous; you need to read enough to understand the context of each paper in the broader body of research. What other research has been done in a similar vein, which papers agree with each other, which are incompatible. Whether the data in one paper can be accounted for by the hypotheses in another.

Any individual paper can be flawed, unlucky or outright fraudulent. When you just grab a paper or two at random, you're engaging in a dangerous sampling problem. When the papers aren't grabbed at random, it's even worse.

> When you just grab a paper or two at random, you're engaging in a dangerous sampling problem. When the papers aren't grabbed at random, it's even worse.

I think you summarized the current situation perfectly.

It's an inverse Russian roulette of knowledge where only one of the bullets is missing :

hospitalized, gave grandma covid, no go into malls and trains in France, "nudged" into vaccination, dead, perfectly healthy with no adverse or long term effect from anything

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