[lofatdairy]

Yeah I don't disagree that the article does have a nitpicky streak. However, since it's in the service of having a higher standard in publishing, I don't think it's useless, except in the sense that it dilutes the more useful recommendatios.

Speaking from my own experience, a lot of the statistical and clichéd methdological phrases also appear in some lower-quality biology papers I've seen, and it's mistakes I see grad students make and even submitters make. The fact that the authors can point to thousands of google scholar hits shows that the paper is addressing a real issue and was a worthwhile endeavor. If anything, this is what I feel more commenters should have criticized. Not that it appears in the paper, but that the state of the field is such that the familiarity with statistics (and I argue math, history, philosophy, etc) is so poor that such inaccurate language is so frequently deployed.

I can't speak to how this relates to practice, especially with regards to psychiatric practice. Quite frankly I was less concerned with that than the obsession with the sign/symptom distinction that's both commonplace and useful, and the weird attempts to preserve phrases like "steep learning curve" when what's being criticized is actually the lack of specificity the phrase encodes.