The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - Printable Version
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The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - BostonCard - 05-21-2020
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/stanford-lost-soul-coronavirus/
Quote:But during the current pandemic, Stanford is making a mark for something less admirable than birthing the tech revolution. Stanford has become the main academic vector for contrarian Covid-19 thinking, helping give legitimacy to arguments that the world is overreacting to the virus.
Reference is made to Richard Epstein's editorial and the Ionnidas study.
BC
RE: The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - dabigv13 - 05-21-2020
The article is interesting but surface level. I think some of the critiques are valid, certainly in the 2000s and perhaps going back even longer, the humanities were the neglected stepchild. And it sounds worse now. The Santa Clara study was a black mark and the coziness of industry and academia certainly is a problem.
But this article could've been written in half an hour with only cursory knowledge of Stanford. A deeper dive on the role of the administration and actual choices by the university would be a lot more interesting to me as a graduate.
RE: The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - 76lsjumb - 05-21-2020
And exactly why would anyone care what some buffoon [to borrow one of his words] at The Nation thinks...?
RE: The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - burger - 05-21-2020
There's a new Ioannidis preprint--not mentioned in that Nation article--that's possibly even worse than the Santa Clara County study.
Read all about it here (read the whole thread--it's worth it):
[tweet]https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1262956011872280577[/tweet]
[For bonus fun, read through the responses to learn how graduate students and post-docs shouldn't be allowed to comment on professors' studies. Yes, this is the sort of lame argument that Ioannidis' defenders are using now.]
RE: The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - BostonCard - 05-21-2020
I mean, the IFR is not as low as .02%, so I agree with the thread. On the other hand, estimates for the CFR had been 3.4% and for the IFR it had been above 1%. So the idea that the initial IFR was overestimated is not wrong, even by the thread's authors review (estimating an IFR of 0.74%), shouldn't be controversial.
BC
RE: The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - JustAnotherFan - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 02:58 PM)BostonCard Wrote: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/stanford-lost-soul-coronavirus/
Quote:But during the current pandemic, Stanford is making a mark for something less admirable than birthing the tech revolution. Stanford has become the main academic vector for contrarian Covid-19 thinking, helping give legitimacy to arguments that the world is overreacting to the virus.
Reference is made to Richard Epstein's editorial and the Ionnidas study.
BC
It hurts because it is true.
RE: The Nation accuses Stanford of losing its soul - BostonCard - 05-21-2020
It's a little sad to see in John Ioannidis. I mean, he is someone who spoke up about the problems with genetics research that everyone sort of knew were there but were too embarrassed to say out loud, and his critique of the discipline came out around the time that I was starting in the field, so I found it very impactful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pf-dVuBZVk
I think a lot of the improvements he cites in the clip above came about because he (and others like him) were willing to speak out. So I have to say I'm a bit disappointed to see him digging his heels on the IFR question. As some of the people in the twitter thread have noted, the lower bound of the IFR of New York City, even if there were no more deaths and you assumed that every single New Yorker has been exposed to the virus, is already higher than the lower bound of his estimates. Would be better to recognize that his optimistic view had been wrong and that the IFR really will wind up several fold higher than influenza (but several fold lower than the CFR that was first reported when we didn't realize how many people were asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic).
Alas, we are all human and prone to the same biases we can detect in others.
BC