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by glimshe 915 days ago
He doesn't have the burden of disproving it, the study has the burden of proving its claims. I consider studies funded by an interested party as weak evidence at best - perhaps enough to encourage an independent party to conduct another study.
3 comments

All medicines in the US are approved using studies funded by the company that submitted them. There's a simple reason for that - nobody else would care enough to do it.

If you can't read a study well enough to tell if the methods it uses are good, that's your problem.

Even a study that never took place could specify methods that look great on paper.

You pretty much have to repeat the study yourself to see whether you get the same results.

All studies like this are "believe us when we say that we did this, and observed that".

If you're paid by X, and the result is favorable to X, then I don't believe you as much.

Proving or disproving a claim is the purpose of a study. At this point, it's out of the researchers hands and up to other research teams to replicate the research and confirm or deny the results.
> perhaps enough to encourage an independent party to conduct another study.

Is that an option that’s on the table? Or do we have to take the information we’re able to get and just interpret it critically?

I think people do crowdfunding for studies sometimes, but doing it just for a replication sounds like a waste.