Constructive and obsessive criticism in science, 2022, Prasad and Ioannidis

Abstract

Social media and new tools for engagement offer democratic platforms for enhancing constructive scientific criticism which had previously been limited. Constructive criticism can now be massive, timely and open. However, new options have also enhanced obsessive criticism. Obsessive criticism tends to focus on one or a handful of individuals and their work, often includes ad hominem aspects, and the critics often lack field-specific skills and technical expertise. Typical behaviours include: repetitive and persistent comments (including sealioning), lengthy commentaries/tweetorials/responses often longer than the original work, strong degree of moralizing, distortion of the underlying work, argumentum ad populum, calls to suspend/censor/retract the work or the author, guilt-by-association, reputational tarnishing, large gains in followers specifically through attacks, finding and positing sensitive personal information, anonymity or pseudonymity, social media campaigning, and unusual ratio of criticism to pursuit of one's research agenda. These behaviours may last months or years. Prevention and treatment options may include awareness, identifying and working around aggravating factors, placing limits on the volume by editors, constructive pairing of commissioned editorials, incorporation of some hot debates from unregulated locations such as social media or PubPeer to the pages of scientific journals, preserving decency and focusing on evidence and arguments and avoiding personal statements, or (in some cases) ignoring. We need more research on the role of social media and obsessive criticism on an evolving cancel culture, the social media credibility, the use/misuse of anonymity and pseudonymity, and whether potential interventions from universities may improve or further weaponize scientific criticism.

Open access, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13839

 

"Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, several institutions and organizations had offered guidance on how scientists could deal with online harassment.25-27 "

Reference 27 is to the document from the Science Media Centre discussed here, SMC: Advice for Researchers Experiencing Harassment

 

Interesting. I was just looking up who the authors were, given they threw out the potential red flag of "and the critics often lack field-specific skills and technical expertise".

I have got distracted by finding the following quotes (in the following paper (Vink and Vink-Niese, 2022: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9141828/ ) - which is perhaps more interesting to other threads and topics but nice to see a figure estimated for:

"Additionally, as concluded by the BRANDO project (Bias in Randomised and Observational studies), which amongst others included Stanford professor Ioannidis, “as far as possible, clinical and policy decisions should not be based on trials in which blinding is not feasible and outcome measures are subjectively assessed” because lack of blinding is “associated with an average 13% exaggeration of intervention effects…Therefore, trials in which blinding is not feasible should focus as far as possible on objectively measured outcomes”

and various other quotes and observations/analysis

 

For those interested, there is a Prasad parody account on Twitter

https://twitter.com/user/status/1559299434059538452

 

Prasad has consistently been one of the worst minimizers out there, managed to be wrong about everything the whole time, still is. Absolutely clueless and proud member of the Great Barrington crap. All the criticism he gets is warranted, as much as Wessely has always deserved the accurate criticism he received. He is simply wrong and unable to hear it, gets high on his own farts. And obviously completely mocks the idea of Long Covid, because the Venn diagram of pandemic minimizers and Long Covid deniers is a perfect circle.

So for Ioannidis to write this alongside him really marks him as non-serious. Absolute clown stuff. Might as well write something about vaccines with Wakefield. People say a lot by the company they keep and choose to associate with. Medical academia is in a seriously dire state and committed to a race to the bottom. The whole profession needs major clean-up but like politics, I don't think it'll happen.

 

I was thrown and wondered for a moment whether I'd somehow found the wrong person of 2 with identical names. I'd theoretically get the power of thinking 'well this is an issue for everyone and there is power from 2 political sides being on the methodology', but I'm unsure whether they are both themselves stepping out of their own expertise on this until I look in-depth at where the data analysis techniques have come from. And some of these ideas equal censoring of populations and valid questions ie are priming retorts that limit good questions from people.

This is the guy who in the paper above is quoted as saying:
"Professor Ioannidis [92] noted a number of important things in a famous article about research findings, including the following.

1. “The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true”.
2. “The greater the flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true”.

Examples of this in the evidence presented by Flottorp et al., are the aforementioned extensive number of endpoint changes in the PACE trial, which created an overlap in entry and recovery criteria and the post-hoc definition of recovery in the FITNET trial, which included the severely ill. Professor Ioannidis also concluded that “investigators working in any field are likely to resist accepting that the whole field in which they have spent their careers is a “null field”. This might explain the reluctance by Flottorp et al. and other proponents of the CBmodel to accept the conclusions by the NICE guideline committee."

So I'm reading through looking for the importance in this. And am somewhat similarly thrown by the partnership - even though 'apparently' research is supposed to see past that, I've experienced most seem to have 'an argument' to be communicated.