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by Malician
4639 days ago
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Yes, I understand this. This is correct if the result of the test on that said subpopulation is only interpreted by the public and/or scientific community as applying to the subpopulation. However, if the results of the original test are hidden, the results of the second test could well be taken as evidence for a wider or stronger effect, yes? If this isn't the case, then I wouldn't see a problem with that behavior - but from the reading I've done, I suspect it is in fact the case and is common practice. edit: I may be completely wrong on this - if, indeed, that's not a significant problem. |
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what i think you're saying is that they would hide the original negative study and publish a subsequent (new, separate, on different people) positive study.
[aside - that's not a perfect description because for one particular group the first study was positive; it's just that the group in question wasn't explicitly targetted].
and, in general, that's considered a bad thing. because (1) you can keep repeating studies until you get a positive, and then publish and (2) because the negatives aren't published, people have incomplete information.
but it's not a terribly bad thing, because if something isn't true then, if you repeat a study, it's likely going to show it isn't true. the standards are set high enough that you'd need to do hundreds of studies before you showed something to be true (when it really isn't).
and because hundreds of studies are expensive, it's unlikely to happen (but then you think of the industry as a whole, and it is doing hundreds, and so some of those are likely wrong...).
in contrast, what this guy was prosecuted for was hunting in the data. you can think of that like doing a new study, but without the cost. it's pretty easy to dream up hundreds of different questions you can ask existing data. and just by luck you're going to find the occasional surprising answer.
so hunting through data is like doing hundreds of studies until you find something, but it's cheap! and that's why it's "worse" than simply hiding negative results and repeating studies. because it's much more likely to happen in practice.