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Matt_410's avatar

Jané's post was pedantic. Jon didn't represent his post as a new meta-analysis. He just criticized problems in Ferguson's meta-analysis. I thought it was a valuable contribution that will improve the kinds of experiments people design next.

Stat bloggers seem less and less constructive lately. I guess people go viral for big take-downs more than improving the research process.

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Alistair Penbroke's avatar

The misinformation paper is typical for the genre and doesn't say much. The core problem with all academic misinformation research is that it takes as axiomatic that misinformation academics are capable of figuring out what's true or false on a large scale across many different questions, and also selecting questions in a way that's representative of the full span of people's beliefs.

Neither belief is true and arguably these beliefs are obviously foolish. A typical failure mode of such papers is to compile a list of "untrue beliefs" that are simply things the researchers found by reading right wing media. No justification for the beliefs being untrue is ever provided, and if any left wing beliefs are included at all they are deliberately chosen to be as obscure as possible. And that's all it takes to conclude the problem of misinformation is "partisan bias" (read: non-leftists).

You can't draw any conclusions from a research foundation that weak. All such researchers deserve to be fired and banned from receiving money from the government ever again.

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