Cochrane Collaboration
Article
Cochrane Collaboration is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 22, 2022 and April 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “this same thing apparently happened around the same time with Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration”; “and the Cochrane Collaboration that have been worrying about p-hacking since 2004”. It most often appears alongside 1984, 9-11, Anatoly Karlin.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 22, 2022
- Last seen: April 30, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 1984 (1 shared issues)
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- Anatoly Karlin (1 shared issues)
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- AnechoicMedia (1 shared issues)
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- Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Bay Area (1 shared issues)
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- Bible (1 shared issues)
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- BMJ (1 shared issues)
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- Brad DeLong (1 shared issues)
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- Brahmins (1 shared issues)
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- Brooklyn (1 shared issues)
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- Buffett (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
36: An interesting recent spat between BMJ and Facebook: BMJ, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world) published some article about poor clinical research practices at a vaccine company. Some anti-vaxxers shared it on Facebook, and Facebook responded by adding their “missing context” tag to the BMJ article. This made the BMJ angry (well, this plus Facebook’s explanation which called the BMJ a “news blog”), so the editors wrote an Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg, saying “actually, we are one of the most powerful medical establishment institutions in the world, you can’t do this to us”. The fact checker who Facebook subcontracts their censorship decisions to, Lead Stories, then wrote a surprisingly thoughtful response saying: they thought the BMJ article lacked important context, that was all they told Facebook, and they stand by their decision even after learning that the BMJ is much more prestigious and important than they thought. I’m having trouble figuring out what emotions to have here: on the one hand I hate censorship, but on the other hand seeing the BMJ seething at their inability to pull rank is oddly satisfying. Also, this same thing apparently happened around the same time with Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration.
Obviously this doesn’t mean that there’s no possible way medical studies could ever be biased. But I worry that people act like “studies can be p-hacked” is some sort of secret knowledge that elevates them above domain experts. Medical evidence is processed by groups like NICE and the Cochrane Collaboration that have been worrying about p-hacking since 2004, trying to factor its existence into their recommendations, and organizing pretty successful campaigns among journals and other stakeholders to minimize it. This doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but I think we’re beyond the level where you can say “what about p-hacking” and use it to throw out every clinical study in favor of three social science experiments that explicitly admit they don’t have enough power to test these kinds of questions.