Hacker News Reader

Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

> I have never witnessed this in real life.

It is extremely common in the practice of citations. What you see written in a paper is:

“Intervention X can help patients with condition Y (Smith, 2012)”

But when you actually read Smith the result is couched in limitations, or maybe only holds under some circumstances, or maybe uses a weak methodology that would have been fine for Smith but isn’t appropriate for the current paper.

There just isn’t room in that sentence to reflect the full complexity, and the simplified version is all too easy to slip through peer review. Sometimes papers form chains and networks of oversimplification with each citation compounding unwarranted certainty.

View on HN

This is the root of the problem.

Take the whole "saturated fat is unhealthy" thing.

Here's what happened:

Study finds that unsaturated fat is healthier than saturated fat, but all fat is associated with lower mortality vs carbs.

Repeated as "unsaturated fat is healther than saturated fat".

Repeated as "saturated fat is unhealthy".

This conclusion isn't supported by any research compared to carbs(!).

Same-calorie diet of high fat is healthier than one based on carbs. But we are often taught otherwise.

The saturated fat is bad (wrong) consensus is reached like a game of telephone.

basically saturated fats are the hostage of any high carb (fried and sugary) diet?

Any recommendations for course correction?

Perhaps paper linting/scoring that penalizes assertive statements linked to references vs direct quotes associated with references?

Everything becomes a meme.

I’ve come to appreciate that we communicate mimetically, humans now seem to me more a social-intelligence species than an intelligent one.

We don’t seem to win by fighting against this characteristic, so I’m getting more curious about how to adapt to/with it.

This. There’s no way to evaluate citations at scale. Further, once a medical doctor “learns” a false fact, it’s hard to unlearn it and journals rarely publish contrarian material

It's true, this type of nuance usually doesn't make it into papers for every paper they cite (otherwise, they would be 10x as long), but ime researchers take every study with a grain of salt in real life. I guess someone whose only interaction with science is through reading research papers would never know this and have the impression that many questions are much more settled than they actually are (although there are also opinion and review papers that attempt to assess the actual state of evidence at a given point in time).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com