Mega-silliness

by reestheskin on 25/11/2016

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In 1978, the distinguished professor of psychology Hans Eysenck delivered a scathing critique of what was then a new method, that of meta-analysis, which he described as “an exercise in mega-silliness.”

Matthew Page and David Moher here in a commentary on a paper by the ever ‘troublesome’ John Ioannidis, in his article titled, “The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses

To which, some of use would say, this was all predictable when the EBM bandwagon jumped on the idea that collating some information, and ignoring other information was ‘novel’. Science advances by creating and testing coherent theories of how the world works. Adding together ‘treatment effects’ is messier, and more prone to error. Just because you can enter data in a spreadsheet, doesn’t mean you should.