Kate Sheridan and Casey Ross tell this horrible story of Chelsea Polis, an epidemiologist who is being harassed by a SLAPP suit from a company whose scientific claims she’d criticized.

The funny thing is, I can kinda see where the company is coming from in suing her. It’s the wrong thing to do, scientifically, morally, and I think legally. But I can see where the confusion arises. We live in a capitalist society in which so many things can be bought. Much of our legal system is based negotiation. So it must be frustrating as hell to be in charge of a company and have millions of dollars at your disposal, and still not be able to shut up some pesky scientist. I imagine it would seem unfair, almost, that there could be any values in our society and our legal system other than money. You mean you can’t silence someone by throwing lawyers at them? What good, then, is the court system at all??? This is the sort of thing that makes me glad I live in a free country where we have freedom of speech—and also makes me a little bit scared of the rich people who are working hard every day to take that freedom away from us. Perhaps there’s not enough of a disincentive to deter companies from filing these SLAPP suits, so they keep doing it.

P.S. Polis shared some links in the comments, and I see some connections to other themes that have come up in the past decade regarding junk science.

1. Most obviously, there’s the ladder of responses to criticism, from the most responsible to the most destructive. Suing someone is almost as bad as it gets: not as bad as violence, but worse than planting negative stories in the press. I guess it’s about the same as trying to get a person fired.

2. The particular case is a Theranos-like example of medical technology that hasn’t been tested and doesn’t do what it claims. Also, like Theranos, the legal system was part of the business model.

3. It’s Bitcoin without Matt Damon. From one of the linked news articles: “according to research by McKinsey, femtech startups received $2.5bn of funding last year.”

4. Credulity about flaky scientific claims is linked to skepticism of mainstream science: “Polis pointed out that some women may turn to these devices because they feel let down by the medical establishment. ‘Sometimes their concerns or their desires are maybe a little bit brushed off,’ she said.” We’ve seen this sort of thing with coronavirus, with skepticism about vaccines or even about the existence of covid as a serious problem, linked to credulity about ivermectin, etc.

5. An unsupported claim that their device was “99.4 per cent effective.” This reminds me of the dude who claimed based on overfitted data to be able to predict divorces “with 94 per cent accuracy.” Or who could forget those Harvard eminences who stepped down from their mountaintop to inform us that the replication rate in psychology is “statistically indistinguishable from 100%”?

6. The bit about the sloppy measure of the menstrual cycle reminded me of those horrible studies of ovulation and clothing and ovulation and voting. I guess that people have these weird folk beliefs about biology and sex which make them suckers for claims of predictions of ovulation, sex of babies, etc.

P.P.S. The last link above is an amusing time capsule from 2013:

It’s not clear why Psychological Science, which has a citation ranking that regularly places it in or near the top ten psychology journals worldwide, would have fallen for such a “sloppy” paper. According to its editor, Eric Eich, the journal now receives well over 3,000 submissions a year from top researchers in clinical psychology, evolutionary psychology, industrial psychology and the like, all of which are read in their entirety by a specialist in the given subject, as well as a generalist. About two thirds are rejected after an initial review by the editorial team, while the other third receives “extended review” by two or three outside experts. Most of those, too, are “triaged” for not being “sufficiently groundbreaking.” . . . Eich’s first guiding principle throughout this process is to “do not harm.” But ultimately, he seeks to fill his pages with “the most exciting, innovative research that is apt to interest a broad cross-section of readers.”

“Exciting” and “innovative” . . . they don’t say anything about it being true or replicable or even plausible. Back then, “p less than 0.05” was enuf.

Again, though, this recent case with the epidemiologist was much worse: she was actually sued! This seems to be the website of the lawyer who sued her. It says he has “tried in excess of 60 business cases, winning over 90% of them.” On the other hand, here it says he has “tried in excess of 80 business cases, winning the vast majority of them.” I guess something happened between cases 62 and 81 where his winning percentage dropped below 90%. Still kinda scary, though.