Comment by hombre_fatal 13 hours ago
I am begging HNers to at least pull up the study in scihub and see if there was multivariate adjustment (there was) before they hip-fire the first thought they had when they saw someone summarize a study in a blog post.
So any mention of a study in an online comment or blog post has to couch it in a bunch of pre-responses to potential kneejerk dismissals from people who won't even look at the study?
You can tell who never looks studies up on scihub because they have no idea that multivariate modeling for confounders (especially income and education) is something pretty much every study does, so it makes no sense to assume you just blindly outsmarted the study when you thought of the first confounder that came to your mind.
Yet it everyone else's responsibility to defend casual mention of every study from a critique you came up in 5 seconds.
Nobody has an obligation to assume competence. Incompetence is very common on both sides. It is reasonable to assume incompetence. Given it's such common criticism and refuting it is simple, yes, the author should pre-respond. Otherwise everyone else has to look at the study which costs more time in total and also allows incompetent scientists to get away with it because unless people investigate further, both look the same on the surface.
I understand but incompetence is so common everywhere in society that mistakes like this genuinely are the first thought people should have.
I have the opposite opinion - if criticism like this is so obvious (and it is), then it's up to the article to refute it immediately - this saves time of everyone reading it and gives it more credibility.