Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567374

Points: 30

# Comments: 3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44387659

Points: 529

# Comments: 176

Otherwise it's a really fun idea! Can I suggest you also scrape from https://www.medrxiv.org/? This is where a lot of medical research preprints, not arxiv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free

So, a specific SNP mutation being predictive of a gene expression / protein is basically a p-value of 0.

Can't speak for physics experiments, but this is almost certainly not a statistical error

That is the minimum threshold. This study found that peak was at p < 1e-37 or so. But that is where the biological analysis begins. Unlike social scientists, we don't stop with the statistical correlation, we then go on to look at what we know about that gene, the type of mutation, if it's a loss or gain of function, what role that gene has in various tissues, etc. And mendelian randomization is another way to unpick the causal direction of effect.

Not to say this is the truth or causal, but it's a lot closer to causal than what you are implying.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/us/politics/john-kelly-tr...

I'm very interested in my research at the moment in pleiotropy, namely mapping pleiotropic effects in as many *omics/QTL measurements and complex traits as possible. This is really helpful for determining which genes / proteins to focus on for drug development.

The problem with drugs is in fact pleiotropy! A single protein can do quite a lot of things in your body, either through a causal downstream mechanism (vertical pleiotropy), or seemingly independent processes (horizontal). This limits a lot of possible drug target as the side-effect / detrimental effect may be too large.

So, if these tools can create ultra specific protein structures that somehow only bind in the areas of interest, then that would be a truly massive breakthrough.

He should be grilling his assistant profs / research fellows to get their act together and raise the bar, but this doesn't show malfeasance.

Wait, this is the social scientist who wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, whom a Danish Science committee found to be "scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts, but Lomborg himself not guilty due to his lack of expertise in the fields in question." [1]

And now he's written a book about another topic he doesn't have a deep understanding of. Forgive me if I give it a miss.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#The_Skeptic...

I do genetic epidemiology (which is considerably more compute intensive than regular epidemiology), and R is still the most common language, with the most libraries and packages being used for it, compared to python for example.

I think maybe you should consider being less forthcoming with your opinions on topics which you are not well informed on.

That being said, I usually just stick to one notebook per thing.

It's also interesting, how if school didn't play a factor, putting your kid into a under-performing inner city school wouldn't matter (or conversely, elite private schools wouldn't either)

Glad they've come a long way since then.