Comment by rad88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rad88 | Hacker News Reader

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This analysis is mindless and inappropriate. If you care about this at all do yourself a favor and just read the study.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445

Otherwise redo your napkin math and cursory search to answer, specifically, whether all these cancers disappearing within weeks of dostarlimab treatment could be a fluke. And do not compare this to "rectal cancer's rate of survival", which is irrelevant and a completely different set of (parametrized) statistics, and also do not compare it to the total number of "cancer studies", which was an arbitrary choice and yielded this meaningless conclusion. Even if this kind of analysis was useful, why did you compare against the number of cancer studies, rather than rectal cancer (1910), or dostarlimab (41), or studies with the same staging and genetic pathology? It's meaningless.

I don't believe you're qualified to tell anyone about the significance of this study, and much less dismiss it as a fluke.

I bet he’s good at programming though.

This is one of my favourite HN threads LMAO.

Turned into Reddit's armchair experts' discussion.

> LMAO

Pun intended?

Most definitely!

The point of that napkin math is not to get an exact prediction, it's to get a order-of-magnitude estimate to see if this study is different from any other of the large amount of "promising drug cures X" articles that never actually turn out to work.

I concede that if a quick remission is extremely rare that does change the outcome, though I don't know how common that it.

Picking 'Total number of "cancer studies"' was not arbitrary. A similar article could have been crated for e.g. "promising drug cures breast cancer" so you need to take all of them into account. Actually probably every study conducted of all high-profile diseases that are likely to wind up on the HN frontpage - in a counterfactual universe we could be discussing a miracle Alzheimer drug or the like.

No, you can't actually figure out whether a cancer therapy worked by counting the number of articles published in a given year. You're focused on this "zero-knowledge" approach because you are completely ignorant about this topic, not because it is actually a more powerful approach.

If you don't even know whether spontaneous remission is rare then you should not be offering an opinion about this. It's not even pertinent because these remissions were clearly not spontaneous, but it should alarm you to have spoken so recklessly about a disease which is essentially fatal. What you're saying amounts to "there's a good chance cancer just goes away on its own". Incidentally, this is also the least amount of math I've ever seen in a napkin math argument.

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