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I am sorry but this @WIRED article is a pretty sloppy caricature of John Ioannidis. @dhfreedman (whose @TheAtlantic article is how I told my parents who I was going to do my @FulbrightPrgrm with), sadly has not kept up w/ John's work or meta-research 1/ https://www.wired.com/story/prophet-of-scientific-rigor-and-a-covid-contrarian/?mbid=social_twitter&utm_brand=wired&utm_campaign=wired&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter
Keeping up does not mean reading abstracts & press releases & then calling the author. It means reading recent papers, not just the same 2005 one. Many meta-research investigations (led or co-authored by JPAI) show a murky & complex picture, w/ acknowledged caveats. 2/
The issue is how to interpret murky results, allowing 4 all the complexities. The caricature of the John Ioannidis brand as "everything is wrong & should be thrown to trash" is v far from reality. Most of his papers are seasoned w/ caveats, if you go past the title/abstract 3/
This simplistic & highly romanticized ("fall from grace") take does no justice to JPAI's work, or meta-research in general. The difficulty of examining biases is that they are elusive, fickle & often compensated for by good studies, or tools like good reporting & registration. 4/
Noone is really out there to show research is all wrong, and less of all John Ioannidis. For instance, in a paper we co-authored we had no "psychological COI" to report the absence of differences between industry-funded vs non-funded trials. 5/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30151688/
In 2017 as the first large-scale @CAMARADES_ results of how bad reporting was in animal research were emerging at the @peerrevcongress, I asked John at lunch what he thought should be done with, you know, this disastrous field (I, unlike him, was out to get them all). 6/
He looked at me in surprise and asked about the alternative. Testing everything in humans first, which - he underlined- would be THE disaster, so animal studies, badly reported as they are, are essential. This reasoning rather than "throw it all away" is quintessential JPAI. 7/
Finally last year I proposed a new project to John. I was going to go after the #mindfulness business. I was going to search for speaking events, from there for key speakers, then for their conflicts of interest & show how it's all a corrupt mess of money and shoddy content. 8/
He stopped me dead in the tracks, pointing out I was going after single individuals who never claimed their activity was even scientific, I was using partial information, & at best would show things that could *look* suspicious but probably had little to do w/ systematic bias. 9/
So this is the John Ioannidis I & others who collaborate or pore over his papers recognize. I am not claiming he, like every scientist, should not be the object of scrutiny & criticism. But caricaturing his work & positions does not help. Maybe @dhfreedman could consider this 10/
I am lucky to be a little noone here on Twitter so I hope to escape the wrath of social media. In any case, my COI disclosure (*btw, improper use of COI, which is financial): John was my Fulbright mentor in 2016-2017, and we have collaborated ever since. 11/
