Scientific Research That Could Have Been Avoided

indian_rediff writes "An article from Friday's Wall Street Journal (reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) details how some of the research being done by scientists ends up simply stating the obvious. Their observations make for some interesting and hilarious reading." From the article: "Want job satisfaction? A 'careful choice of career is the key,' researchers concluded in a paper this spring in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction. People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown."

Comments

Re:A subtle distinction...

[Daetrin]

Do you have any idea complicated drug interactions are? I don't, but i've gotten a vague idea from talking to a friend who's going to pharmaceutical school. Assuming that since one drug has effect A and another drug has effect B that using both of them at once will give the equivalent of numerically adding both the effects is a good way to get people killed.

Even if the combination is safe there's no guarantee that the result will be the "obvious" one. Perhaps the drugs combine in some way to cancel each other out. Perhaps they use the same receptors and interfere with each other. Or perhaps some interaction multiples the total effect (but not strongly enough to back into killing the patient territory again.)

You can argue about the relative merrit of these kinds of studies vs other more original kinds of research, but i don't think you can reasonably argue that it's useless.