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0 pointstimr2y ago0 comments

> Small complex long-term effects in humans are fundamentally inaccessible to the kind of science that collects and analyzes data. Either the necessary data cannot be collected at all, or collecting it would be too expensive, time-consuming, and/or unethical to be worth it. When the truth is inaccessible, science focuses on establishing the boundaries of what can be known.

That requires reliable data. If the only data you have is hopelessly confounded, then you don't just shrug and accept it as "truthy" because it's dressed up like science and is published in a journal, and hey, that's the best you can do anyway.

Science is about the quality of the methodology you use, not the grandeur of the institution that surrounds it. If your data doesn't answer the question, then it doesn't answer the question.

(For whatever it's worth, I'm biased in favor of the hypothesis, but crap experiements are crap no matter what I believe.)

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jltsiren2y ago

This was not an experimental study, as the word "biobank" in the abstract should have made clear.

Biobanks are about collecting more detailed data on more individuals than would be possible for any particular study, and spending a lot of effort to ensure the quality and consistency of the data. Any conclusion you can make from biobank data is a hypothesis likely worth investigating. And publishing, because further studies would likely take years.

You would then collect new data designed to answer the specific question in your subsequent study. But due to financial constraints, that new data would likely be less detailed, smaller in scale, and of lower quality.

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