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codebjeyesterday at 12:09 PM2 repliesview on HN

On the one hand, hundreds or perhaps thousands of studies might be wrong. On the other hand, this one might be wrong. Who's to say?


Replies

estearumyesterday at 12:32 PM

Not even that! This study doesn't even say contamination is causing overestimation. It says that it's possible.

But as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, everyone knows that it's possible and take measure to mitigate it.

A paper that said those mitigations were insufficient or empirically found not to work would be interesting. A paper saying "you should mitigate this" is... not very interesting.

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throwup238yesterday at 12:35 PM

That has happened many times in scientific research. The aforementioned fad in DNA sequencing was one such case where tons of papers before proper methods were developed are entirely useless, essentially just garbage data. Another case is fMRI studies before the dead salmon experiment.