The story continues - after @ikashnitsky and I pointed out that this paper was mathematically impossible, and had numerous errors, it was partially corrected
Now, the lead author is calling us "trolls"https://twitter.com/anya1anya/status/1355865046392430595 …
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And guess what? We were right There was a clear mathematical error that completely reversed the results of the paper So the authors rewrote the whole thing to try and salvage something from the ruinspic.twitter.com/Bc9lZ1A5f3
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Now, instead of showing that school closures kill more people than COVID-19, the paper shows that school closures either kill nobody at all or countless millions depending on whether your kids are in the US or EU I kid you notpic.twitter.com/mKC68SLiYc
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For some context, the new figure of YLL that is caused by school closures if you cherry-pick just the results the authors would like to use means that 3 months of closed schools has cost more YLLs than influenza in the U.S. Since ~2015
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I'm not going to go into just how awful the study is again, except to note that if you want your mind to boggle have a look at the threads belowhttps://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1348441370180997123?s=20 …
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But the real story here, to my mind, is that when junior colleagues CORRECTLY pointed out errors in a paper, they were ignored and belittled by editors and authors alike For months
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Meanwhile, the paper has been cited a dozen times academically, is in planning and policy documents across the world, despite the fact that all of this happened when the work was quite simply wrong
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Now, it's very hard to guess at the impact of such a paper, positive or negative But it is entirely possible that this study has literally killed people through the errors of the authors Who have called us "trolls" for pointing out the mistakes
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I should also note that Ilya and I get literally nothing for all of this. We have spent something like 50 hours each carefully identifying errors, writing letters, editing them down etc for no pay, mostly after work and on weekends
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End of conversation
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any chance you can post a legible one? It’s blurry, at least from all of the devices I used.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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