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JGWeissman comments on Open Thread: September 2009 - Less Wrong
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Taking measurements before and after the treatment is good, but that is not the same as having a separate control group, which could filter out effects of timing, taking the dose with food or water, etc.
The abstract also claims "Therefore, supplementation with only 200 mg/d DHA for 2 wk induced an antioxidant effect." It is likely that there was a more complete conclusion in the full article.
But the abstract does not make any "just right" claims, unlike the summary on science daily. Which is what you where complaining about.
The abstract reads - we did an incremental test, and even at the lowest dosage we found an effect. This suggest that low dosages could be effective. I don't see anything wrong with that reasoning.
The science daily summary is simply misrepresenting it. So, the original commenter isn't missing something in the science news, it is science daily who made the error.
The news article was not based on the abstract. It was based on the journal article (which is available with a subscription) that the abstract summarized. It is not reasonable to expect that every point in the news article be supported by the abstract.
extremely implausible, as a general rule.
ETA:
So, perhaps the news article was based on press release that was based on the journal article. My point was that it was not produced solely from the abstract.
While the article is more reliable than the abstract, the abstract is more reliable than the press release and the news coverage, because there is better policing of its claims. And the abstract is more policed than the article, so though it may be less reliable because of compression, it is not biased towards sensationalism.
I don't see why this is your point? In the very least it doesn't present counter evidence to my claim that the abstract contains information not present in the news article which mitigates or negates the concerns of the original comment.
So what? That point was in response to your other claim about what the abstract did not contain.
It's just that with two distinctly different conclusions from the results mentioned from two different sources: the article authors (in the abstract) and Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief (in the news article), I place a much lower confidence in later being a reasonable reading of the research paper.
But of course we could quite safely argue about readings and interpretations indefinitely. I'd point you to Derrida and Hermeneutics if you want to go that route.
In any case, I'll update my estimates on the likelihood of the research paper having an errant conclusion based on Weismann's quote, and I suggest you do the same based on the evidence in the abstract - and then I suspect we have little more to discuss on the subject.