This is not an April Fools post. Instead, it’s a story illustrating the difficulty of introducing satire in scientific discourse.
A correspondent who surely wants to remain anonymous points us to this article by epidemiologist John Ioannidis, which begins:
The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) and the John Snow Memorandum (JSM), each signed by numerous scientists, have proposed hotly debated strategies for handling the COVID-19 pandemic. The current analysis aimed to examine whether the prevailing narrative that GBD is a minority view among experts is true.
Here are the results:
Among the 47 key GBD signatories, 20, 19 and 21, respectively, were top-cited authors for career impact, recent single-year (2019) impact or either. For comparison, among the 34 key JSM signatories, 11, 14 and 15, respectively, were top cited. Key signatories represented 30 different scientific fields (9 represented in both documents, 17 only in GBD and 4 only in JSM). In a random sample of n=30 scientists among the longer lists of signatories, five in GBD and three in JSM were top cited. By April 2021, only 19/47 key GBD signatories had personal Twitter accounts versus 34/34 of key JSM signatories; 3 key GBD signatories versus 10 key JSM signatories had >50 000 Twitter followers and extraordinary Kardashian K-indices (363–2569). By November 2021, four key GBD signatories versus 13 key JSM signatories had >50 000 Twitter followers.
I think the paper is intended to be a joke. I don’t mean that in a bad way, as in, “That paper is a joke”; rather, it’s my impression that the author is using the intentionally silly “Kardashian K-index” as a way to make the larger point that numerical measures of eminence are silly.
The background on this is that Ioannidis is a backer of the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, and he’s not happy that it’s seen as a minority view among experts.
One way to counter the idea that most experts disagree with the Great Barrington Declaration is to disparage the concept of expertise in this area, and I think this is the tack that Ioannidis is taking in this article. Given the failures of some purported public health authorities such as the notorious Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, as well as some flat-out ridiculous pronouncements from Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the U.S. government, I think we should be skeptical about claims of expertise. It’s tricky because often these authoritative-sounding people are not experts at all, so the problem is not with “expertise” so much as with non-experts selling themselves as experts. On the other hand, actual experts get things wrong too. In any case, all this seems to me to be a reasonable justification for an article using absurdist statistics to make a satirical argument against consensus measures of expertise.
My only complaint with the article is that it does not fully deliver on its own promises. In particular, the first section of the abstract promises to “examine whether the prevailing narrative that GBD is a minority view among experts is true”—but, to do this, you’d need to have some measure of expert opinion. Instead, the article evaluates the expertise of some of the people who signed the documents. That’s addressing the question of the expertise of the signatories; it does not at all address the question of what are the prevailing opinions among “experts,” however that term is defined. Even a satirical article should show internal consistency. (Here’s an example.)
Some people missed the point
In any case, some critics of the article didn’t catch the joke, as we can see from the rapid responses published in the journal, BMJ Open. (Great idea to publish responses right on the website, by the way. All journals should do this!)
Here’s Michael Rigby:
The paper by Ioannidis is fatally flawed by the assumption that citation counts and Twitter activity correlate with scientific quality or health and policy impact . . .
Sure, but . . . the analysis was supposed to be fatally flawed! That was the whole point of using the obviously ridiculous “K-index.” Commenter David Gorski almost gets the point—he recognizes the article as satire but concludes that “it is so subtle that it is impossible to recognize as satire!”
I think what Gorski is missing is that satire is not just about joking. We often use satire to make a point. In this case, Ioannidis has a serious point, which is that he believes that the Great Barrington Declaration has been unfairly disparaged because of a perception that the majority of experts disagree with it, and Ioannidis’s reaction is that measures of expertise are themselves too flawed to be useful, a point he makes by deliberately conflating the conventional citation indexes with the parodic K-index. I’m pretty sure that Gorski disagrees with Ioannidis’s substantive point and would argue that the community of public health experts should in fact be taken seriously. I won’t take a position on that particular debate here; my point in this post is to clarify the serious rationale for the satire.
My favorite response came from Matthew Nurse, who turned the whole thing around by playing it straight with the K-index and concluding:
In short, there is nothing inherently wrong with being a science Kardashian. Indeed we would argue that the world needs more of them.
There was one thing that really bothered me in the rapid responses, though, which is when some commenters argued, not just that the article in question was silly or bad science or whatever, but that Ioannidis should not have been allowed to perform the analysis without permission. Joseph Bak-Coleman wrote, “From an ethical standpoint, it is somewhat surprising that the author declares no human subjects are involved. . . . the author explicitly investigates whether named individuals choose to use Twitter by searching for a linked account through google. Decisions about whether or not to use Twitter are reasonably private. There is no reason to believe someone who has chosen not to use Twitter has consented to their presence in a study on social media use. For these reasons review by an IRB seems warranted,” and Gavin Yamey writes, “None of the scientists who were demeaned and belittled gave their consent to be publicly humiliated in this way, and nor did the author ask an ethics review committee to approve this study.” This attitude distresses me: it’s major ethics-review mission creep! Part of the reason this bothers me is the conflation of tone and substance: if it would require IRB approval to say something mean about somebody, it should require approval to say something nice too! If you publish an article, you’re putting your name out there and you can get criticized; no consent required. The other thing that bothers me is the idea of requiring the permission of some local commissar before you can publish research based on public information. It should be possible to believe that a particular article is in poor taste and should not have been published, and to disagree with the impetus behind it, without having to bring in the IRB.
All of this points of the challenge of mixing genres. April Fools blog posting is one thing, unlabeled satire in the BMJ is another story. In the rapid responses, Darren Dahly writes that “nothing of scientific substance can be learned” can be learned from Ioannidis’s satirical article, and Dominic Pimenta writes, “These discussions were around the deaths of millions of individuals . . . To be labelled as ‘non-serious’ because of a joke index, distorting science, is frankly appalling and, to be perfectly frank, utterly idiotic . . . seriously, grow up. If I were the BMJ I would like to remove my good name from this ‘journal’.”
I was going to say the following: In the modern era of polarized politics and general mistrust, maybe there’s no longer room for unlabeled satire in scientific journals. But then it got me wondering: Has there ever really been room for unlabeled satire in scientific journals? I can’t think of many examples. There’s the article about randomized control trials of parachutes, but that was published in the journal’s Christmas issue, right? So not quite unlabeled as satire. And there was the MRI of the dead salmon, but I think this was just a conference presentation. I did manage to get my zombies paper on Arxiv, but (a) it was on April Fool’s Day (even better would’ve been Halloween), and (b) it was clearly just a series of jokes and could not every have been taken as anything else. The parachute people and Ioannidis played it straight. Jonathan Falk and I have another satire paper that we didn’t even ever try to get published, which is kinda too bad because includes some good jokes, especially in the footnotes. Anyway, it seems that satirical science articles are few and far between, so I can understand how many of the readers of this recent BMJ article didn’t get the point.
In retrospect, maybe Ioannidis should’ve played it straight, just writing an opinion piece for the journal making the argument that, in his view, the Great Barrington Declaration didn’t get the respect it deserved, that it was unfairly taken to only represent a minority of experts, and that this illustrates a serious problem with how expertise is used in scientific debates, and this can be illustrated by considering the example of the K-index, etc. Then the debate that followed would be on these important questions, rather than getting tied up in the details of the satire and whether it should’ve been published at all. Medical journals publish opinion pieces all the time.
P.S. Also, relevant, not to the issue of satire but to the issue of problems with the experts, are this article by Trisha Greenhalgh on how the international public health establishment failed us on covid, and these discussions by Nassim Taleb and others on failures of early covid-19 forecasts.
P.P.S. The commenters convinced me that the article was, unfortunately, not just a satire; see discussion here.
It’s not in a journal per se, but astronomy has a long history of “April Fools” papers on the arXiv, including some that are “kidding, not kidding” addressing topics that could be of interest to the readership here. For example: making surface maps of a terrestrial planet in reflected light in the TESS telescope (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019arXiv190312182L/abstract), inferring the inverse square law from a snapshot of the solar system (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010ApJ…711.1157B/abstract), finding and measuring the orbit of a comet from a web image search (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012AJ….144…46L/abstract), and many more. Of course there are also pure-gag papers like yesterday’s “direct measurement of the Hubble constant from mooniversal expansion” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16551) or “First Detections of Exop(lan)ets: Observations and Follow-Ups of the Floofiest Transits on Zoom” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.17185) written by some of the graduate students who run the excellent weekly astrobites blog summarizing (serious!) papers that appear on the astro-ph section of the arXiv (https://astrobites.org/).
So at least in this community, to the extent that you consider arXiv “publication,” it *is* possible to publish satire.
Will:
Sure, but if they have April 1 dates, that’s a special case, comparable to the journals that publish satire in their Christmas issues. I was able to post my zombies paper on Arxiv on April 1 too. (Halloween would’ve been even better!)
The idea of the “kidding, not kidding paper” is interesting and it relates to the idea that the best satire holds up on its own terms as well. For example, Animal Farm is a satire but it’s also excellent if read as a straight-up fable.
The point of the satire would seem even stronger if many commenters missed the point. If some of these count as experts at some level (they are reading and commenting on a journal article), then it seems they have become part of the satire by missing the point in it.
Well JPI’s competing interests statement (below) does disclose that is very skeptical about signature collection for scientific matters and citation indices.
And as he informed us in that email list, it is impossible for him to have conflicts of interest as he only follows the evidence.
Competing interests The author has signed neither of the two documents and has many friends, collaborators and other people who he knows and he admires among those who have signed each of them. JPI has previously published that he is very skeptical about signature collection for scientific matters (BMJ 2020;371:m4048). He has no personal social media and he believes that the fact that his citation indices are extremely high only proves (when compared against his self-acknowledged vast ignorance) that these indices can occasionally be very unreliable. JPI congratulates all the thousands of signatories (of both documents) for their great sense of social responsibility.
> And as he informed us in that email list, it is impossible for him to have conflicts of interest as he only follows the evidence.
JI and those who agree with him on the science are apolitical and are seeking the truth – in stark contrast to those who disagree on the science.
Finally, I think this is the most intelligent take on this article. It seems everyone has managed to miss the point.
The other thing that I would mention is that the discussion veered into social media “beef” territory rather than substantive criticism. Criticisms are merely clouded attacks (and often not very good ones). Which is actually what JPI says needs to be avoided in the article. Even if the research is a bit shoddy, it’s hard to say that he’s wrong.
Reginald:
Yeah, social media beefs are a problem. And I say this as someone who’s involved in a couple hundred beefs myself.
One satiric source is the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Is it still published?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Irreproducible_Results
Add to this The Darwin Awards https://darwinawards.com/
Why not just use the authors’ Erdös numbers, and skip all the complicated formulas? (Or perhaps the Erdös-Bacon numbers.) For the relevance in this context, see generally Orin S. Kerr, A Theory of Law, 16 GREEN BAG 2D 111 (2012).
> One way to counter the idea that most experts disagree with the Great Barrington Declaration is to disparage the concept of expertise in this area, and I think this is the tack that Ioannidis is taking in this article.
The problem is that this is the same guy who responded to a technical critique of one of his analyses by pointing to the critic’s “expertise” along a credentialist scale. So I don’t buy that this is some kind of overall statement about the “concept of expertise.” Rather, even if this article is satirical (I think that the follow-on egnagement would be key to making that determination and I suspect that JI’s follow-on engagement doesn’t support that take), I think this is just another example of someone gaming “expertise” in a tribalistic manner.
You can see this constantly. Understanding the notion of how “appeal to authority” is a fallacy doesn’t exempt someone from constantly engaging in that same fallacy. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen climate “skeptics” complaining about “appeal to authority” only to then turn right around and appeal to authority – often to their own authority or but even more systematically by selectively referencing expertise when the experts referenced happen to agree with their viewpoint.
It’s just sad all the way around. I’ve been dismayed by the extent to which Ioannidis has engaged at a gutter level. Of course, he can always point to other gutter-dwellers as an excuse.
Sad.
Appealing to authority is a fallacious method of proof, but it is *required* in communication with those who would not understand an actual proof. “Sez who?” is not a scientific argument, but if you can’t answer it with authority, you’d better be prepared to be ignored.
But we now reach the next level of this game, since the people who can’t understand the science and are forced to rely on authority now have to have some way of assessing whether the cited authority to teh question “Sez who?” (a) actually made the claims attributed to them; (b) were competent to make those claims as authorities in the given area; and (c) made those claims with evidence (evidence the “Sez who?” questioner is incpable of assessing, of course) and not just from political bias or social affiliation or careerist ambition.
This satirical piece takes on that claim by purporting to prove the level-two claim. The amusement (such as it is) is that this requires a level three claim to verify from readers unwilling or unable to follow the level two “proof.” That is, we need authorities to verify that the eminence of the authorities who signed the letter has been properly quantified.
Rebutting the proof itself won’t do, or will only do so for people qualified to assess the second level proof. Those capable of assessing neither level of proof are still saying “Sez who?”
> Appealing to authority is a fallacious method of proof, but it is *required* in communication with those who would not understand an actual proof. “Sez who?” is not a scientific argument, but if you can’t answer it with authority, you’d better be prepared to be ignored.
From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty much always a recursive “Sez who?” all the way down. To a large extent that happes because it’s sexy to attach personalities to scientific arguments and because saying “Sex who” seemingly makes it easier to parse the science (it’s a hueritic, afterall) and to delimit the uncertainty.
Expertise is relevant. but not dispositive. It’s information. It’s context. If someone argues that it’s irrelevant (in the climate “skeptic” world it often takes the form of “consensus is anti-science”), or ridicule the relevance of “expertise,” IMO, they’re way more than likely full of it, and they’re just trying to change the calculation to fit an agenda
I largely agree with you (and I’m going to be using “Sex who?” for a while) but the “consensus is anti-science” view is, on a charitable reading, exactly what I referred to as a careerist retort. I’m not saying I *believe* that the consensus is wrong (in fact I don’t) but I’m honestly not sure whether I think the bulk of the consensus opinion on climate is evidence-based or career-based. I’m not at all sure that the views of 10,000 climate scientists aren’t really the views of 20 of them amplified out of fear. And I’m definitely skeptical that what happens at governmental climate conferences has much to do with science in any real way.
Joshua:
Now I’m thinking the above-discussed article is not a satire, exactly, but more what they call in poker a semi-bluff. The Kardashian index thing is a big joke and is a signal that the article is not to be taken seriously, but, yeah, it does seem like the author is arguing that the GBD people have more legit credentials while the JSM authors are less like scientists and more like media-connected poseurs. So I think the article is kind of satirical and kind of trying to make the affirmative point that the GBD authors should be taken more seriously.
From that perspective, I think the article would be stronger if it were straight satire. The article’s implicit attempt to use these silly numbers to bolster the credibility of GBD and disparage the credibility of the JSM is, I think, a mistake, in that it creates a weakness—the Kardashian index—which the critics very appropriately criticize. To return to the poker analogy, the critics called the semi-bluff and the cards didn’t hold up.
Andrew –
>… but, yeah, it does seem like the author is arguing that the GBD people have more legit credentials while the JSM authors are less like scientists and more like media-connected poseurs….
I think it must all be placed within the big picture. The GBD crowd portrayed themselves as victims of the intolerant and censorious mainstream consensus-enforcing mob, even as they had direct access to Trump, DeSantis, etc. to influence policy.
That’s not an across the board defense of how the policy debate has been engaged on the other side, but this all seems akin to the IDW crowd complaining in NY Times Magazine articles and massive social media platforms about how cruelly they’ve been marginalized and canceled merely for seeking truth. It’s just all part of the contrarian playbook that I’ve seen for years in the climate-o-sphere.
I guess I should have expected it if I had thought about it but seeing JI – who reached such an elevated status by advancing the science of deconstructing bias in analysis – be so oblivious to his own biased form of politicized advocacy has increased my already healthy respect for motivated reasoning. I’m not sure there’s a higher horse for someone to get knocked off of.
I know this is tangential, but:
“From an ethical standpoint, it is somewhat surprising that the author declares no human subjects are involved. . . . the author explicitly investigates whether named individuals choose to use Twitter by searching for a linked account through google. Decisions about whether or not to use Twitter are reasonably private. There is no reason to believe someone who has chosen not to use Twitter has consented to their presence in a study on social media use. For these reasons review by an IRB seems warranted,” and Gavin Yamey writes, “None of the scientists who were demeaned and belittled gave their consent to be publicly humiliated in this way, and nor did the author ask an ethics review committee to approve this study.” This attitude distresses me: it’s major ethics-review mission creep!”
Well, the commenter is partially correct, and that level of mission creep was instituted as policy several years ago. Here’s what the regulations, like them or not, are:
1. The analyses performed deal with information about living persons whose identities are known to the investigators. Consequently, this is human subjects research within the meaning of the Federal statutes that govern such activities.
2. Because the information is gleaned from existing public records that were not created for the purposes of the investigation, the research qualifies for exempt category #4.
3. At one time, investigators were permitted to make their own determinations about qualification for exempt categories, but due to the high frequency of misclassifications under this regime, the policy was changed and, now, all human subjects research protocols that would otherwise require IRB review must be submitted to the IRB and the IRB determines whether it is exempt. When, as here, the circumstances are clear, the exemption determination is usually made by one designated member of the IRB who approves it rapidly.
So, because the author was, I believe, at that time, a faculty member of an institution whose IRB operates under a Federal-wide assurance, he should have submitted this research to the IRB with a request to have it declared exempt, and the IRB would have promptly granted that exemption. No further interaction with the IRB thereafter would be required. In short, going through the prescribed procedure would have been a brief bureaucratic interaction with no real hassle associated with it.
All I can say is that if you choose to use the argument from authority heuristic on this topic, you should be dismissing any “expert” that ever claimed there would be herd immunity to covid. That is either due to infections or vaccinations.
There was never any chance of this happening. It has never been observed for a respiratory virus, that just isn’t how your immune system works.
Even experts will get some things wrong. That doesn’t mean that their expertise is irrelevant on any related discussion, especially as compared to people who think that using the Google makes them an expert.
Of course, “expertise” while relevant also isn’t dispositive. And no doubt, sometimes “expertise” translates into group think or some other limiting factor.
It’s always a matter of playing the odds, working with the information available. It would be no less stupid to just dismiss “expertise” than it would be to assume that “expertise” is dispositive.
If they are unfamiliar with the most basic aspects of the topic they have “expertise” in, then you can be assured they are a poor source of information.
Eg, the current CDC director, supposedly an expert in infectious disease, claiming no one ever mentioned waning or variants. Many of these people are totally clueless and confused. Anyone who has been reading this blog for awhile should know why we are in this current situation.
Oblig Fisher quote from 1958:
Fisher, R N (1958). “The Nature of Probability”. Centennial Review. 2: 261–274. https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher272.pdf
IMO, it’s foolish to just apply some blanket rule to all “experts,” or “experts” in broad strokes against an entire field based on one person (or even a group of people) with expetise saying something in a media snippet where you don’t actually know all the details necessarily of what they meant, or how well it reflected their background knowledge, especially in a context of high uncertainty. Of course, “experts” do say stupid things somtimes but we could just as likely cherry-pick an “expert” who says something that turns out to be true even though conventional wisdom at the time is that it wasn’t true. We can cherry-pick whatever we want to advance whatever agenda we want. It’s easy. The point of focus should be on not cherry-picking. A big problem with your argument here is that you try to lift some kind of a rule or heuristic without considering the numbers. You want to say expertise can’t inform us reaonsably about probabilities because an “experts” said something you disagree with. Except you haven’t put that into context. How often to “experts” say things that turn out to be right? What are the proportions?
In my experiences online – it seems particularly difficult for people who are smart and knowledgeable and who are even trained in how to control for bias in their analyses. That’s what I see in the climate wars all the time. Kahan even has a theory that people with greater ability for sophisticated reasonsing are more prone towards such “motivated” reasonsing (although I think there are some flaws in his thinking in that regard at a couple of levels).
I think it’s better to judge the quality of individuals’ expertise based on more complete knowledge. And we should always respect the uncetainties and have some humility. Again, applying some kind of blanket rule that expertise is irrelevant is no worse than simply assuming that something an “expert” says is correct merely because (by some standard) they’re an expert.
The interesting question for me is: Why do people have so much difficulty applying reasonable heuristics with respect to expertise along with humility and respect for uncertainty – especially when they then turn around and appeal to expertise (as you just did by quoting Fisher).
I should have said:
Again, applying some kind of blanket rule that expertise is irrelevant is no
worsebetter than simply assuming that something an “expert” says is correct merely because (by some standard) they’re an expert. (Although I guess at some level it is also no worse).I apply it to “experts” who have clearly demonstrated they don’t know what they are talking about.
Due to the trend since the 1930s of peer review replacing peer replication and testing a strawman null hypothesis replacing testing your research hypothesis, this type of “expert” has grown to outnumber the real experts by a large degree (probably 10,000:1).
Anoneuoid –
> I apply it to “experts” who have clearly demonstrated they don’t know what they are talking about.
You have made some pretty high-profile errors on this blog. You have repeatedly advocated for some analyses that as near as I can tell are highly and pretty obviously flawed. And more relevant that just making errors, you have displayed some poor choices in being accountable for those errors, despite your protestations that your only interest is in some kind of agenda-free truth.
But those are just banal behaviors that we all display to one degree or another. They don’t make you stand out in some way, really, IMO.
But I’ve also seen that you provide interesting information and sometimes highly informed and interesting analysis.
So what does that all mean? It means that I don’t apply a blanket rule to what you have to say. I recognize that you have some sophisticated expertise, can engage in sharp analysis, and that you also make mistakes and struggle to own up to it when you do. It’s all information that I use when I read something you have to say. It would be foolish for me to just dismiss what you have to say just because you’ve made errors in the past or failed to be accountable, just as it would be foolish for me to have some kind of blind trust in what you have to say because you’ve said some interesting and insighful things.
> this type of “expert” has grown to outnumber the real experts by a large degree (probably 10,000:1).
Oy. Ok, let’s look past the subjectivity of you how determine “real expertise.” The problem is STILL that doesn’t mean that expertise is irrelevant, or somehow something to just dismiss out of hand. There are some interesting and sophisticated analyses that conclude that “experts” as some broad class are wrong more often than they are correct. I don’t take those analyses lightly. But even if that conclusion is true it’s far too global to be of much use (for me, at least) on the ground in any particular context.
Ok, the horse is way past dead.
It is just sad at this point. You would name these “errors” if you actually could point to real ones.
“I did manage to get my zombies paper on Arxiv, but (a) it was on April Fool’s Day (even better would’ve been Halloween), and (b) it was clearly just a series of jokes and could not every have been taken as anything else.”
I assigned this paper to my graduate business stat classes (generally students who had not taken stat as undergrads), because I thought it illustrated a particular technique well, and what stat course doesn’t need lightening up a bit? Some didn’t get the joke until it was explained to them.
I didn’t know about the Great Barrington Declaration and just looked at it. One fascinating thing here is that you can be a John Ioannidis and still get stuff within your own area of expertise horribly wrong. One should cultivate humility, especially when one is a highly cited expert.
> you can be a John Ioannidis and still get stuff within your own area of expertise horribly wrong.
Perhaps a charitable assumption that that has not been the case all along (as evinced? by letters to the editor over that past 20 years.)
Being very clever does not mean reasoning well in science.
Leaving aside all questions of expertise and COVID policy, I must say that I find the strongest rebukes to bunk methodology to be using them to demonstrate something the original authors would surely disagree with (and/or find ridiculous) – see: the MRI salmon. If your techniques admit nonsense conclusions, your conclusions are indistinguishable from nonsense. I think there’s still an important place for this sort of turnabout in the literature, but it’s probably best wrapped in a layer of analysis/exposition. On the other hand, that is probably less effective at changing minds in comparison to the trojan horse approach of publishing a satirical paper and letting the reader come to their own conclusions.
To me, the IRB comment was also satire but who knows for sure. The only thing that I can think of that is remotely similar is “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” by Sokal. The footnotes are hysterical.
https://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
Isn’t a big problem that recognized expertise is highly correlated? Get one person who everyone agrees is best in their field by “conventional and widely accepted” standards, that’s something important (it’s certainly not irrelevant), though they might of course be wrong. Now get the opinion of the next 10 best people _by the same conventional and widely accepted standards_ and how much extra have you learned? Surely not 10x the weight. You mostly learned what conventional wisdom (which may indeed be wise) has to say after #1, and a few more experts chiming in is helpful just to confirm your first answer was not an anomaly.
47 signatories identified by metrics very more conventional than the K-index seems doubtfully more informative than two to ten of them. (Of course, to even begin to evaluate a ‘declaration’ further than that you’d need to know how many conventionally-rated experts were approached who declined to sign on.)
Get 47 people judged by more eclectic standards, and this particular problem is FAR less pertinent. But on the other hand you might be getting nonsense from idiots. There’s got to be an optimum, and it’s somewhere between a bunch of signatories by “gold-plated expertise certified by the academy” and “random twitter users”.
iirc, maybe 20 years ago , there was a paper in PNAS to this point
when you ask a group of people to solve a problem, after ~ 6 experts, more experts don’t help, cause they are correlated
after 6 exprets, you do just as well adding non experts, cause the have more diverse views
That sounds similar to a piece of genuine satire by Walter Block:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/03/making_a_virtue.html
But I think Block is genuinely aware of how marginal he is within his field (and is mocking the idea of a consensus), whereas Ioannidis is trying to pull rank as an authority.