Researcher experiences of funder suppression of health trial findings
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
There is an ethical problem with accepting subjects into a clinical trial, and potentially putting them at risk, then suppressing the results.
Many trials are registered, required by law to be published, but still not published, because there is no enforcement: https://fdaaa.trialstracker.net/ https://eu.trialstracker.net/
Or trials alre registered, but then published with a different main result than the one that was registered as the main result (so-called outcome switching). This should be noted in peer review, but often it's not. And if you point it out to the journal later they should publish a correction, but they don't.
Other issues in behavioral health studies:
Self reporting can be unreliable.
The types of assumptions you make shape the questions you ask which can bias results. (I.E. "Which color is it? Black? Or white?" "Neither. It's yellow." "I don't have a category for that. I will record that as white.")
Honesty of participants for sensitive topics like sexual behavior and drug use that could have serious consequences for them.
One way to help get around that is to ask the respondents to flip a coin—heads they answer truthfully, tails they answer falsely. This gives the respondents plausible deniability and the true underlying rates can still be estimated statistically from the raw results.
An easy way to see this is if you suppose there's a question for which the truthful answer is "Yes" for 100% of participants. After the coin flip, you will get 50% "Yes" and 50% "No", which is the exact same result you would get if the truthful answer were "No" for 100% of participants.
"Differently from the usual Direct Response technique, in RR, respondents toss coins to determine whether they will respond to the question or just mark “yes”. This still allows admission rates to be calculated, yet it guarantees full anonymity to respondents because no one can tell whether an individual respondent answered “yes” to the question or because of chance."
However, if heads answer yes, tails answer truthfully "Have you ever raped a woman"?
You get 52% saying yes, you can conclude that 2% actually did so. You need a considerably larger sample size for the same accuracy of data, though.
“He who pays the piper calls the tune”: Researcher experiences of funder suppression of health behaviour intervention trial findings
It is a fallacy that is quite obvious with just a little thought. Example: "Someone prove to me in a written reply here that Fermat's Last Theorem is true. If you can't, then I submit that it's false." Complete nonsense.
I understand the feeling because I frequently tell the vaccine-hesitant why they should vaccinate, but it's not nearly that bad if you actually try to inform people.
Also, you're not accounting for the reverse, where something is popular but wrong and asserts that it should never ever have to explain why it's right.
Finally, a more useful heuristic is to listen to explanations from people who can and do tell you how things work. The BS artists generally either have models that directly contradict what we know of the world or have no coherent model at all.
Incidentally, the above post is an example of this, is something I've explained many times, and took me nowhere near 10 times as long as your post to write unless you can type significantly faster than 120 WPM.
Also, I've gotten down the rabbit hole of debating with eg vaccine skeptics IRL, and sometimes giving a details-based answers helps, sometimes it doesn't. Some people just stick to their arguments like a shield, and will just cycle between arguments if you knock one of them down. Explaining that eg mRNA has a very short half-life and is unlikely to have long term side-effects doesn't really help.
Right now. I also mentioned posting among those who are against vaccines which is... not.
> Also, I've gotten down the rabbit hole of debating with eg vaccine skeptics IRL, and sometimes giving a details-based answers helps, sometimes it doesn't.
I don't think it's possible to convince everyone, ever. Some people have distorted learning and/or experience that may or may not even be possible to untangle.
But as you pointed out, some can be convinced. Also, only a small minority of people ever post, leaving stuff out there with no explanation of why it's wrong is perhaps even more dangerous.
Right, that's why it's necessary to do it yourself if you want your opinion to be heard.
> If the latter were the case, we could all get college educations for free just by asking questions to the right people.
Honestly, you basically can do that at this point with the info on the internet. You might not get the credential itself, but you absolutely can get all the knowledge and then some with things like Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseware, etc.
Regarding things like OpenCourseware, etc., that's not about anyone being obligated to support their position to people asking questions, which is what we're discussing. I never said people can't consult video or a book to learn more, but it's not the same thing as demanding answers from any expert and obligating them to explain. You're basically changing the subject now, and you've proved my points pretty well, so I think we're done here.
Given that you've badly misconstrued what I'm saying, then randomly declared victory despite not really even being in the same book, let alone on the same page as me... yeah we're done here.
But as noted, we both still tried to explain our points. Actions speak louder than words, etc.
And sometimes people ask questions because they know very well what someone is insinuating, but are trying to force them to actually say it outright.
How do you feel about a free press asking questions?
But they don't automatically deserve to be taken seriously, especially if taking them seriously requires way more effort than they put in when they asked their questions.