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by glofish 2387 days ago
I will tell you what they did. They collected data, with no hypothesis or any idea what they are looking for, then desperately fit various models until something showed up as statistically significant.

Of course, you could say: how dare you, how would you even know, ... I work in this field, the p-hacking, harking (hypothesizing after the results are known) is both pervasive and endemic. they massaged the factors, the genders, the ethnicity, the socioeconomic status etc until the model did something that was publishable.

It simply not possible to accurately correlate these two measures: self-reported minutes of touching a baby with the methylation levels of the DNA of that baby - if you are serious about accounting for all the possible variations across all factors
1 comments
PaulDavisThe1st 2387 days ago
Your comments on this?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682215/

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glofish 2387 days ago
A perfect example of what I am talking about. What is the final conclusion of that paper written in 2009!:

> Are the neuroendocrine effects of these experiences across the lifespan also mediated by DNA methylation? The answer to this question is not yet known.

So what happened in the following ten (!) years, have we finally figured out whether the effect is mediated by DNA methylation? Nah. Instead, they published another bullshit paper, this time about babies being held...

Ten years is (or rather should be) an eternity in science! The 1st smartphone was barely released back then - how far have gone in technology in this time? Yet we are nowhere closer to have proven or disproven the mechanism. Instead, they would much rather maintain the status quo and publish another bullshit paper.

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PaulDavisThe1st 2387 days ago
Just a small caveat. When I quit my PhD (computational protein folding models) in 1987, it was because I didn't want to spend 10 years working on a problem and getting nowhere. Turned out I was wrong - way too optimistic!

Until the recent ML-based announcement from Google (and maybe not even with that in hand), protein folding research went nowhere for at least 30 years. So I wouldn't be too critical of a 10 year gap.

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