David Colquhoun

I think this is largely a case of 'moloch' as described by Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

In that long (but excellent essay) Scott points out that self organizing systems like human society can sometimes arrange themselves in horrible local minimas which can be very difficult to escape.

I think the way modern science is organized is decidedly suboptimal. Note that I'm talking purely sociologically: science, as a method, is still by far the best thing we've developed to understand the natural world. However, the incentives around publishing / grants / hiring work are broken in a myriad of ways, from small to massive.

For example:

- High prestige journals/conferences are basically a crapshoot: http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html - consider that getting a paper accepted in NIPS/published in Nature might completely change the way your career shapes up.

- Grant funding is incredibly competitive, and the way they are awarded is also a crapshot: https://psmag.com/why-the-national-institutes-of-health-should-replace-peer-review-with-a-lottery-41d09bcce5d8

- The pressure to publish/obtain grants drives people to either make up data to obtain fancy publications, or even to kill themselves: http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/01/publish-and-perish-at-imperial-college-london-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/

- We reward researchers for brilliant clean discoveries, not brilliant methodologies. However, the outcome of a…

>I have no idea on how they do those clinical studies which say that there is no difference between a placebo and actual homeopathic medicines.

So read up on them. Here's a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy it is very well researched and you can review the papers yourself.

Also:

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6860/has-most-peer-reviewed-research-on-homeopathy-given-positive-results

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1915/has-there-ever-been-a-double-blind-study-validating-homeopathy

>I have doubts that these studies are really done by independent personnel and not by those who get directly/indirectly paid by companies like Merck, J&J, etc.

Oh come on!! Do you really think the National Science Foundation[1] is a Merck shill? or the scientific journal Bioethics?[2]

[1] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/c7s5.htm#c7s5l2

[2] http://www.dcscience.net/Smith-response.pdf

>have seen improvement in my physical condition every time

Please note, the types of things homeopathy is prescribed for are self limiting. Your body will heal over time without intervention, so yes! You will feel an improvement! The remedy you took has nothing to do with it though.

Then that is incorrect. The situation is simultaneously better and worse than your interpretation:

> while a low P value indicates that your data are unlikely
> assuming a true null, it can’t evaluate which of two
> competing cases is more likely:
> * The null is true but your sample was unusual.
> * The null is false.

You're conflating the two populations, and indeed we don't know which is which. But the P-value is only talking about the likelihood of observing your data given a true null. It only has any effect on that first population. Without knowing the size of the second population, you cannot say anything about the fraction of erroneous results in a journal based upon the statistical test alone.

http://blog.minitab.com/blog/adventures-in-statistics-2/how-to-correctly-interpret-p-values

At the same time, though, converting p-values to a bayesian posterior or conditional probability that says something about the likelihood of the _hypothesis_ (like you're trying to do) is hard and generally way more pessimistic than 1 in 20 — it's more like 1 in 3.

http://www.dcscience.net/Sellke-Bayarri-Berger-calibration-of-P-2001.pdf

I try not to stop reading too early. Drudge is not a journalist. Indeed, I have seen at least definition of "journalist" (a "reporter who writes for an editor") that was described in the source I saw it in as an explicit exclusion of Drudge from the ranks of journalists.

A blog post, "Blogs lead in critical thinking, but newspapers still matter,"

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=6083

submitted to Hacker News earlier today to no discussion,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907627

illustrates some of the reach that "traditional" journalism still has. The quality of professionally edited journalistic submissions to HN, as contrasted with the quality of many (although not all) blog posts submitted here, suggests that there is still a role for journalism in promoting more informed, more thoughtful discussion of issues we all care about.

That's actually a very interesting one, and has been written about at length by a number of medical stats people.

Hopefully I do them justice to their arguments by saying that the benefits from supplements (if any) are tiny - as in a hazard ratio of death is pretty much 1 unless you are actually deficient. Equally however the potential downside of them is pretty much zero - expensive wee is what they can mostly be summarised as. Whilst they may be money wasted, the're mostly benign, save the odd tragic case.

If supplements had the side effects of chemotherapies however, they'd be banned straight away - without evidence of benefit, the risks would be too high.

For a more authoratative take, one of my heroes:
http://www.dcscience.net/2013/11/18/we-know-little-about-the-effect-of-diet-on-health-thats-why-so-much-is-written-about-it/

>If used widely, advocates say, substituting some of the drugs we take for placebos could save billions of dollars in healthcare costs.

Drugs are not the 'cost' per pill. It's all in development, so this is a silly point. Cost will go up, or part of the population will get slammed.

Placebo's are over rated. As such you have to be very sceptical of this article, it screams of alternative medicine. I wouldn't base much on this article alone.

http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak-regression-to-the-mean-is-the-main-reason-ineffective-treatments-appear-to-work/

>In 1975, a psychologist in New York was studying taste aversion in a group of rats and got an utterly mystifying result.

I'd be very interesting if this was reproducible.