> I did not miss his fundamental point. I was making a different fundamental point about why I view virtually every meta-analysis out there to be even more suspect than regular research.
It certainly sounded like you missed it, but regardless: meta-analysis is well-aware of the selection issue. Dealing with that is half the point of meta-analytic techniques - p-curves, heterogeneity, funnel plots, the binomial test, trim-and-fill, etc. Publication bias is an issue which has been repeatedly quantified, and these techniques work reasonably well: when meta-analyses are compared to very large RCTs where selection issues are not a concern, the agreement is pretty good (confidence intervals are blown a bit more than they should be, but not horribly so). So you're either ignoring OP's very interesting points or you're tendentiously overrating an issue. Neither is a worthwhile comment.
It certainly sounded like you missed it, but regardless: meta-analysis is well-aware of the selection issue. Dealing with that is half the point of meta-analytic techniques - p-curves, heterogeneity, funnel plots, the binomial test, trim-and-fill, etc. Publication bias is an issue which has been repeatedly quantified, and these techniques work reasonably well: when meta-analyses are compared to very large RCTs where selection issues are not a concern, the agreement is pretty good (confidence intervals are blown a bit more than they should be, but not horribly so). So you're either ignoring OP's very interesting points or you're tendentiously overrating an issue. Neither is a worthwhile comment.