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Comment by cxcorp | Hacker News Reader

> A wasabi company, Kinjirushi Co., provided funding, though the researchers say the company had no role in the study itself.

I'm sure.

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Also relevant:

- "In 2018, Buckley and the other nine senior members of the editorial board resigned, claiming that MDPI "pressured them to accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrients_(journal)

https://www.science.org/content/article/open-access-editors-...

(This is the journal that accepted the OP study).

Even before reading this I definitely got vibes of "Wine makers find drinking red wine has benefits" or "Starbucks finds that coffee is the ultimate health drink" etc.

"1-2 glasses of wine a few days a week associated with better health outcomes" was true, but it leaves out "1-2 glasses of wine a few days a week associated with wealth". There's some correlations there, but neither statement is pointing the finger at the causation.

Also teetotalers, as a group, includes people who don't drink because an undiagnosed underlying health issue makes them feel ill when they imbibe. Maybe a latent hepatitis-b infection.

Funding of the study is a role in the study itself, since it is the study itself that requires the actual money.

Some how I was able to guess this was the case without having any prior knowledge of this study.

This is obnoxious. You cannot disprove a scientific study by pointing at who funded it, and a properly constructed one won't be able to hide bad results since it'd be preregistered.

He doesn't have the burden of disproving it, the study has the burden of proving its claims. I consider studies funded by an interested party as weak evidence at best - perhaps enough to encourage an independent party to conduct another study.

All medicines in the US are approved using studies funded by the company that submitted them. There's a simple reason for that - nobody else would care enough to do it.

If you can't read a study well enough to tell if the methods it uses are good, that's your problem.

Even a study that never took place could specify methods that look great on paper.

You pretty much have to repeat the study yourself to see whether you get the same results.

All studies like this are "believe us when we say that we did this, and observed that".

If you're paid by X, and the result is favorable to X, then I don't believe you as much.

Proving or disproving a claim is the purpose of a study. At this point, it's out of the researchers hands and up to other research teams to replicate the research and confirm or deny the results.

> perhaps enough to encourage an independent party to conduct another study.

Is that an option that’s on the table? Or do we have to take the information we’re able to get and just interpret it critically?

I think people do crowdfunding for studies sometimes, but doing it just for a replication sounds like a waste.

No, you cant disprove a study by the source of funding;Truth doesnt care who funds it.

But its also not obnoxious not to be helplessly naive that you don't scrutinize sources using effective heuristics.

It's not an effective heuristic. Overly online cynical people are just obsessed with the idea that everything is a conspiracy that can be undone by "following the money".

Bad science reporting is common, but it's more common for the reporters to just misread what a study says.

Besides, this is nutrition science, where what's actually happening is scientists are conspiring against big ice cream by refusing to tell you that it's good for you. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...)

> No, you cant disprove a study by the source of funding;Truth doesnt care who funds it.

But the lie does care.

Yes you can. Identification of a conflict-of-interest bias is different from argumentum ad hominem.

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