“Of course, the problem with this form of social media circulation is that all of the details about the study got stripped away,” Williamson said. “All that was left were the major claims, which certain social media users helped boost and propel. All this helped the paper get a huge amount of attention, even though the findings really were not supported by the underlying research at all.”
Williamson has not been alone in such concerns. When the paper was first published, Ilkka Tuomi, chief scientist of the research institute Meaning Processing Ltd., posted on LinkedIn about the pitfalls of such meta-analysis studies attempting to “draw conclusions about incompatible and ill-defined outcomes” from experimental results involving very different populations. “The only reason to do these studies seems to be that statistics and meta-analysis tools can crunch out numbers that look [like] science,” Tuomi wrote.
I don’t want to “attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” but this seems like exactly the kind of thing everyone involved in publishing this should have been aware of.
I think we need to amend Hanlon’s Razor for the current era…
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence — or by the blind pursuit of toxic incentives.
This is just normal in modern academia, tragically. The system is rotten to the core due to “publish or perish” and the players involved all know it.
The fact it got retracted is the surprising part.
The indicator is now the goal. Peer review does not promote career advance, paper mills are a thing, and a few researchers when they make it to fame hold on to power and have their minions publish hundreds of articles with them as the lead author. It’s totally fucked up.
The real problem is finding something better. I want researchers who research and publish.
What a coincidence. Read a paper about the use of big babble machines in higher education just today and how it impairs long term knowledge retention.
In case someone is interested:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.102287
