Without making claims about the conclusions, I think this argument is of very poor quality and shouldn’t update anyone in any direction.
“As taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent”
Taking all claims at face value, you should not be persuaded that more money causes retractions just because retractions increased roughly in proportion with the overall growth of the industry. I checked the cited work to see if there were any mitigating factors which justified making this claim (since maybe I didn’t understand it, and since sometimes people make bad arguments for good conclusions) and it actually got worse—they ignored the low rate of retraction ( It’s 0.2%), they compared US-only grants with global retractions, they did not account for increased oversight and standards, and so on.
The low quality of the claim, in combination with the fact that the central mission of this think tank is lobbying for reduced government spending in universities and increase political conservatism on campuses in North Carolina, suggests that the logical errors and mishandling of statistics we are seeing here is partisan motivated reasoning in action.
Without making claims about the conclusions, I think this argument is of very poor quality and shouldn’t update anyone in any direction.
Taking all claims at face value, you should not be persuaded that more money causes retractions just because retractions increased roughly in proportion with the overall growth of the industry. I checked the cited work to see if there were any mitigating factors which justified making this claim (since maybe I didn’t understand it, and since sometimes people make bad arguments for good conclusions) and it actually got worse—they ignored the low rate of retraction ( It’s 0.2%), they compared US-only grants with global retractions, they did not account for increased oversight and standards, and so on.
The low quality of the claim, in combination with the fact that the central mission of this think tank is lobbying for reduced government spending in universities and increase political conservatism on campuses in North Carolina, suggests that the logical errors and mishandling of statistics we are seeing here is partisan motivated reasoning in action.
willbradshaw made the exact same point, earlier, and had lower karma. What’s up with that?
EDIT: Retracted because the parent comment is substantive in different ways. Still, acknowledging the earlier comment would’ve been nice!