1. Just for the benefit of the readers, the authors of the paper, in order, are Erik van Zwet, Andrew Gelman, Sander Greenland, Guido Imbens, Simon Schwab, and Steven Goodman. I like our paper; I just think all the authors deserve credit here.
2. Erik responded in comments regarding your claim that the paper is "unreproducible" and related data issues.
3. At the very beginning of the post, you write that we "aimed to show that all randomized experiments are false." We never said that or implied that or anything like that. Indeed, I have no idea what it even would even mean to say "all randomized experiments are false."
In summary, I get that you have strong feelings about reproducibility, based on a background that is different from ours. And I see that some of your commenters below appreciate your contrarian stance. That's all fine. The problem is that you seem to think you're arguing against us, but you're actually arguing against things we never did (perform an unreproducible analysis) or that we never said (something something about experiments being false).
It's kinda frustrating because I fear that people will read your post and not our paper (or this comment) and, as a result, come to the false impression that we did an irreproducible analysis, that "no one knows" what happened to 11,285 of the studies, and that we "aimed to show that all randomized experiments are false." To call of that a distortion of our paper would be an understatement; it's pretty much the opposite of what we do and say in our paper!
Ben:
1. Just for the benefit of the readers, the authors of the paper, in order, are Erik van Zwet, Andrew Gelman, Sander Greenland, Guido Imbens, Simon Schwab, and Steven Goodman. I like our paper; I just think all the authors deserve credit here.
2. Erik responded in comments regarding your claim that the paper is "unreproducible" and related data issues.
3. At the very beginning of the post, you write that we "aimed to show that all randomized experiments are false." We never said that or implied that or anything like that. Indeed, I have no idea what it even would even mean to say "all randomized experiments are false."
In summary, I get that you have strong feelings about reproducibility, based on a background that is different from ours. And I see that some of your commenters below appreciate your contrarian stance. That's all fine. The problem is that you seem to think you're arguing against us, but you're actually arguing against things we never did (perform an unreproducible analysis) or that we never said (something something about experiments being false).
It's kinda frustrating because I fear that people will read your post and not our paper (or this comment) and, as a result, come to the false impression that we did an irreproducible analysis, that "no one knows" what happened to 11,285 of the studies, and that we "aimed to show that all randomized experiments are false." To call of that a distortion of our paper would be an understatement; it's pretty much the opposite of what we do and say in our paper!
Thank you for engaging Ben in such a fact-based and respectful way. I wish he had responded to your comment.
The consensus is there is no concensus.