Wix comments on "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us" - Less Wrong

7 Post author: gwern 19 December 2011 06:48PM

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Comment author: FAWS 19 December 2011 09:35:53PM *  1 point [-]

Drug results and correlation studies, both environmental and genetic, mostly. Which should be high enough volume that the "at least a high percentage" part should be true even if you add more reliable types of research, no? Or is medical science the wrong word for the category that includes both?

Comment author: [deleted] 19 December 2011 10:10:49PM 0 points [-]

How much is a high percentage?

Or is medical science the wrong word for the category that includes both?

I do think so. A lot of pre-clinical medical science is more about understanding specific mechanism, not looking at correlations and mapping out risk factors.

Drug results and correlation studies, both environmental and genetic, mostly,

Do you have some data? I do agree that it's hard to actually learn something solid from epidemiology, biology is complicated and factors do not usually add in any intuitive way. But then there are categories where epidemiology is invaluable take for example people with hereditary colon cancer where the majority (with a specific set of mutations) get colon cancer. But you might be right that a lot is not really useful information . . .

Comment author: gwern 19 December 2011 10:28:36PM 3 points [-]

Of course there is data. Besides the Ionnidis citations in the linked article, I also linked my previous post on the topic which, among other things, links to my section in the DNB FAQ on this topic with dozens of links/citations.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 December 2011 11:59:21PM 0 points [-]

My bad, only browsed through "Why Science Is Failing Us", behaved kind of like a politician, will do my homework before opening my mouth next time.

But I still think that one should use medical epidemiology instead of the cluster word medical science.

Comment author: FAWS 19 December 2011 10:27:48PM *  3 points [-]

How much is a high percentage?

Let's say more than 20%

I do think so. A lot of pre-clinical medical science is more about understanding specific mechanism, not looking at correlations and mapping out risk factors.

I didn't necessarily mean to exclude things like that, just to include both of the categories mentioned.

Do you have some data?

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 20 December 2011 06:43:10PM 0 points [-]

How much is a high percentage?

From the article:

One study, for instance, analyzed 432 different claims of genetic links for various health risks that vary between men and women. Only one of these claims proved to be consistently replicable. Another meta review, meanwhile, looked at the 49 most-cited clinical research studies published between 1990 and 2003. Most of these were the culmination of years of careful work. Nevertheless, more than 40 percent of them were later shown to be either totally wrong or significantly incorrect.

Those didn't analyze all of medicine, of course, but it does sound pretty bad for the overall percentage.

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