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More Studies Doesn’t Mean Better Science
Why one good study is better than hundreds of bad ones
In the Age Of COVID-19, scientific research has gone from the esoteric mutterings of geeks like me to the everyday parlance of pretty much everyone the world over. Instead of discussing the weather, or politics, suddenly you’ll find yourself dipping into seroprevalence results, or the potential benefits of anti-malarials for the treatment of viral disease.
Truly, 2020 is a weird time for us all.
But something keeps coming up in almost every discussion about COVID-19. It’s a pretty simple mistake to make, and very easy to understand — one of those things that we all intuitively think, because it just makes sense. I’m talking about adding up studies numerically, and counting that as the best evidence. Because more studies must mean better evidence, right?
Wrong. Totally, utterly wrong.
In fact, the opposite is true — often, when people simply add up studies and count them up, they are making a bad faith case that something is true, despite a total lack of evidence that it is. You see, the number of studies is…
