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Khoth comments on Scholarship and DIY Science - Less Wrong
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Comments (21)
For chemists making glue, fine. The stickiness of glue is obvious enough to everyone that making sticky glue will work better than employing scientists to claim that your glue is sticky.
For things like pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc, you're far more likely to encounter distortion.
Yes, if the companies are just competing on brands of otherwise identical tobacco products, then we should expect uniform bias; and that's what we see.
But the pattern of bias in pharmaceuticals surprises me. One might expect that competing companies would be biased towards their own products. If that were so, we could extract unbiased estimates by comparing across drug companies (at least for patented drugs). But that's not what we see. There might be a small bias towards their own drugs, but it is swamped by a large bias towards in-patent drugs, regardless of owner, against off-patent drugs.
Yes, I can think of explanations, like that they are cooperating in not using up the public good of FDA credulity, but this isn't what I would have predicted ahead of time.
That surprises me too. Do you have a citation for it?
In fact, I'm surprised that drug companies do studies on each other's drugs often enough that the effect can be discerned.
I don't mean to imply that I have a good grasp on the biases, just that they are surprising. The particular effect with patents happened with SSRIs, that they fell apart as their patents expired; I probably imply too much generality.
Drug companies study each others' drugs all the time, because FDA approval of a particular drug requires the claim that it is better, at least for some population. A typical phase 3 study compares the company's own drug, a similar recent drug, and the standard treatment that the two drugs are trying to displace.
Maybe the bias there is in expecting that the competitor's drug is similar to their own (therefore also good), and that it's newer than the standard treatment (and so more advanced and better).