I mean, despite all stuff I've heard on HN about how a lot of big VCs passed on AirBnB, when I first heard of it it seemed like a very natural evolution from sites like Couch Surfing and VRBO that had existed for years.
Point is, the effect of the company on the society can’t just be measured by market cap.
Back to the original article, the author was using statistical analysis to provide medical advice. Now, it’s incredibly easy to arrive to false conclusions with statistics. That’s why there’s regulations, peer reviews etc. What if the “Egyptian contractors” screwed the data up. Was the founder qualified to spot an issue?
HN has drifted further and further from reality, which has been very strange to watch. The classic example was someone dismissing Dropbox when they first launched, but now it’s turned into dismissing billion dollar companies after they’ve clearly won.
The meta-analysis idea wasn’t terrible. It’s just that there’re many assumptions in a statistical sense, the founder might not be the right person to implement it and he might have targeted the wrong market. Some people are under the impression that everything can be solved just by build an app. However, some fields are much more complicated than your gig economy food delivery.
I also note the "weasel word" idea. This wasn't just an idea, but an implementation.
The same thing might make sense as a value-added feature in a more comprehensive health service (so the "idea" might be good when put in that use).
But as an idea for a service based entirely on it, it failed hard. What exactly twist do you have in mind to save it? Or are you just saying "we'll never be sure" with more words?
I think posting haughty words is a lot easier than trying to make something work.
Also the opposite: dumb ideas are tried again and again to no avail ever.
We just got an impossible vaccine in under a year, I'm happy for all of medicine to spend a bit of time in a "legal gray zone" to see what might happen.
> Many people all over the world think their lives were made much worse since Airbnb is negatively affecting the long-term rental market.
Absolutely, just like the Luddites (Although they would be well off Luddites) their world is worse. But humanity has been made far better.
In all seriousness, with meta-analyses it's still "garbage in, garbage out". It only takes one or a few egregiously bad studies to throw off your results if that study has a large sample size but something fundamentally wrong with its methodology or implementation.
The only assumption you may reject here is that there's no systematic bias in the papers. Perhaps there is... or perhaps most papers are just very unreliable, in which case there should also be no convergence... but if you find convergence, there's a good chance the result is "real".
For a good read about studies with solid statistics and bogus results, see [0].
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
Meta-analyses are a good idea, but the mere presence of a meta-analysis does not denote a useful undertaking. The literature is polluted with thousands of meta-analyses. As far as I can see this is mainly because there is software available which lets almost anyone do it, and once someone else has done a meta-analysis it is much easier to do another one because they have already found all the papers for you. The publication rate of meta-analyses far outstrips the publication rate of all papers, and shows some unusual geographic variation (Fig 2) [1].
[1] https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/...