Item — HN Reader

I'd be very careful about studies that show a result favourable to the current zeitgeist's moral panic:

"A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development.

But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong."

https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/social-scientists-are-lazy

2 comments

One issue with this is that it's a non-peer-reviewed critique of a peer-reviewed scientific article. It's of course still possible that the critique is correct and the article is wrong. However, you'd need to deeply understand this critique, and be at least as qualified as the reviewers to be able to convince yourself of that (or have a good reason to believe the reviewers deliberately accepted a flawed paper). Am I missing something?

Its 2026 and you still believe in peer review, I don’t know what to tell you.

Peer review is imperfect, for sure. What alternative method do you recommend?

Difficult topic, too much for a HN comment. Some good starting points: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/brief-notes-on-scientific-critiqu...

Yet like cigarettes or lead you're not prepared to be very careful about results that claim it's all a moral panic being favourable to a very rich elite.