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by toolz 1907 days ago
I'd personally be extremely cautious of a rebuttal in a twitter thread rather than a professional rebuttal which is how these sorts of things should be sorted out in the scientific world. A twitter thread to rebut a peer reviewed paper actually makes me sad that this is where scientists go during a period where we need their input more than any other time.

Also, fwiw I followed antibody testing studies for the better part of a year and anything over 0.004 IFR was rare. I was surprised to see it as low as 0.0014 from this review expecting close to 0.002-0.003 but 0.0068 is incredibly high.
1 comments
brutos 1906 days ago
That's a valid, but still weird take to me. Academic publishing takes a very long time. Every paper I was involved in took many months from submission to eventual publishing (completely ignoring the time it takes to prepare a submission).

Ioannidis published something extremely controversial (if not even flawed) and one of the main authors he attacked responded with a lengthy explanation so that this manuscript would not remain unchallenged. I found that aspect way more important than the venue of response. Would you prefer to leave Ioannidis' work unchallenged for potentially months instead?

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toolz 1906 days ago
I've seen multiple published (not peer reviewed) rebuttals published in academic papers within a week or two during this pandemic. Not everything published needs to be peer reviewed before going before a wider audience - twitter simply isn't the platform for generating useful dialog - maybe for any context, but certainly not in an academic context.

edit: do you recall the paper that made waves in the U.S. claiming covid causes heart damage? That paper was published and editted prior to peer review based on criticism multiple times within a week or two IIRC - the appropriate way to handle conflict in science isn't by trying to get twitter to chime in and make things personal. Ioannidis "attacks" were unprofessional - in my mind, though, they were absolutely not on the level of trying to call out an author on twitter.

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