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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

Please do expand on your thought there. What makes it likely this will be retracted?

The experimental set-up seems fairly sound. They controlled for the obvious factors that could influence the outcome. It is somewhat consistent with what we know in other areas - yes, pain is felt less under increased stress, and yes, the presence of other males is a stressor.

The interesting part is that it's an inter-species stressor. But then again, testosterone as a male hormone is shared across a lot of species - it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that scent markers might be similar too.

So, what makes your BS sensor go off? (I ask in all seriousness. I'm always interested in calibrating my sensor, and it didn't go off for this).

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Like I said, and I meant it seriously, it does at least propose a non-silly mechanism that makes sense. But it A: proposes a sweeping result which, if taken seriously, ought to invalidate a lot of other experiments and B: pushes a moderately political button with the gender issue.

Neither of those is a disqualifier, but A in particular at least somewhat gets into the realm of "an extraordinary claim that will require extraordinary confirmation".

The proposed mechanism would also seem to imply that female hunters don't exist. I would have preferred a proposal that you're inclined to hide your weaknesses around a male in general (lest he either take your woman or harass you in other ways), and the mechanism is likely keyed off of testosterone in general rather than mouse smells in particular, which seems reasonable.

My head isn't going to explode if this is established by further experiment. But it's suspicious to me.

To siyer's point, impeccably-done research can still come up with coincidental results, unfortunately.

No, the mechanism is increased stress, and it has already been experimentally verified (although I'd like to see it repeated). Mogil has a guess about why that might happen, and it's called out as supposition, not an "extraordinary claim". Other potential explanations include a few male rat-farmers who were rough with the rats, which made the rats edgy around males later in life.

No, the mechanism is increased stress, and it has already been experimentally verified (although I'd like to see it repeated)

Until it has been repeated, it has not been verified. That is how experimental science works.

Science is repeatable, not repeated. It's not true that one experimental result is meaningless but two are gospel. The first has a probability of being a fluke, and the second reduces that probability, that's all.

Indeed, this is true as well. Science isn't the right place to look for absolute certainty. But still, there are some obvious things you can do to increase confidence in a result, and one of those is to get other people to try to reproduce those results.

"and the mechanism is likely keyed off of testosterone in general rather than mouse smells in particular, which seems reasonable."

Yes, this is what Figure 1c and 1d of the paper demonstrate. (To be precise, not testosterone, but adrostenone, androstadienone, and 3M2H).

"My head isn't going to explode if this is established by further experiment. But it's suspicious to me."

Supplementary Fig. 1 and Supplementary Fig. 3 describe replications performed in two other laboratories, one at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and the other at another laboratory at McGill.

Look, I'm all for scientific skepticism, and it's true that there's a lot of low-powered stuff out there. However, papers are best evaluated on what they actually say (which, incidentally, is why open-access/archiving is important), rather than on a filtered impression of what a press release says. If you'd like a copy of the paper, let me know, I'd be happy to send you a pdf.

The sweeping button pushing is the headline, not the study. I'm ignoring headlines these days, since they're all written as click bait :(

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