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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."
They do the research, and if they find nothing interesting to say, they say something that isn't interesting. That is how they get more money to do more research.
Sometimes, science advances by asking questions about things that, on the surface, seem "obvious." For instance, at one time, everyone "knew" that:
...etc. Perhaps the problem is, too much attention is paid when these questions come back with the expected answer, rather than the fact that these questions are being asked.
* The Earth was flat;
* Objects slowly came to a stop unless a force was exerted on them;
* Matter and energy were always conserved;
* Time was a universal constant;
Question everything, but sometimes the answer is "yes, that's correct."
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
. . .researchers at an American Heart Association conference proclaim that if you work full time and watch television, play videogames or surf the Internet in your off hours, then you are probably not engaging in as much heart-healthy physical activity as full-timers who spend no time with TV, videogames and the computer.
On my job I walk between 10 and 15 miles per day OUTSIDE, year round, uphill and downhill! I dare say that very few, if any, employees of the American Heart Assoc. get anywhere NEAR as much exercise as I get. If I want to sack out after I get off from work, I don't think it's going to affect my health.
Seeing as how they didn't link to or even cite any of these studies, I think I'll reserve judgment. Half the time the problem with "stupid science" is really stupid journalism. You'll have this perfectly good biology research that looks at how a specific enzyme facilitates a particular aspect of the metabolic system that wasn't completely understood before, and is a good step in the direction of understanding how our bodies work. And how does the news report on it? - "eating fat makes you gain weight". Well no duh. It wasn't that that was interesting, it is the details of how it causes you to gain weight that were meaningfull.
Furthermore, "common sense" can be used to explain all sorts of conflicting ideas. If the study had come out the other way, everyone would be saying that it's obvious that people are happier if they jump in and try out all sorts of things before settling on what you really want to do - "life is a journey", "you need time to find yourself". Psychology is the study of scientifically testing what common sense ideas about ourselves actually are true, to what extent, and in what situations. Of course some psychologists are better than others, but just because you could have guessed the answer doesn't mean it's not worth finding out for sure.
There is also a problem with papers written for the sole purpose of getting published, and I don't like that. I wish that more universities would wise up to the fact that knowledge is becoming more and more in-depth and specialized, and therefore it will take longer till someone is far enough along in thier specialty that they can begin doing research that is new and meaningfull. If you force people to write thesis earlier, 90% of them will be rediscovering somthing that has already been discovered.
But I stand by my statement that stupid jounalism is more of the problem than stupid research, and that knowing something is better than thinking it.
So will not sucking down smoke ten times a day. As a mtter of fact, I am sure that not hacking up a wad of tar every morning will also kill you.
"Ordinary people marvel at extraordinary things. Extraordinary people marvel at ordinary things." -Confucius
Why in cog. sci? Let's think about seeing the color black for a minute. Pretty ordinary. If I told you that I did my Ph.D. on our ability to see the color black, what would you think? "For this you got a Ph.D.?" If I stopped there, you could probably write a short, shallow article about how scientists wasted time and money doing research on things that's mundane. But let's think about it for a minute. How do we see? Light entering our eyes. What color is a projector screen? White. So how is it that we are able to see black on a movie screen during a movie? If we see because of lights entering our eyes, where is the black coming from? The projector shines light, the white screen reflects it back, the portions that we see as black has no light, how do we end up seeing black on a white screen? Maybe not everything we see comes from the outside world. In fact, black is something our brain creates, which then really makes you wonder about shadows. Don't believe me? Check this out.
So we've gone from something that seems really ordinary to a startling discovery. In fact, it's usually the deeper truth behind ordinary things that surprise us and make us go "wow" and inspires us. Stars from the ground are nothing more than specks of light. I guess we can call astronomy look at specks of light through glass and mirrors. Sounds pretty boring too.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
rtfa;
this is an editorial piece, nothing scientific about it. there are no references to the supposed studies they quote, there are not even second opinions from authors or other scientific researchers. pure speculation.
and many those research problems cited are *not* obvious, but the author belittles the studies they quote to make the research questions sound more obvious than they really are.
* on a finding that men over 55 are a high risk group for digit loss due to power tools... this requires good statistics to know, its *not* obvious.
* that workers are less efficient in a cold environment... again, not obvious, and many workplaces (imho) keep the thermostat too low.
* that asthma and smoking aggregate worse than either, again not obvious... many people falsely believe this is not true.
* that doctor-patient communication is critical for reducing harmful effects of mixing drugs, also not obvious -- now we know that communication skills are an important part of medical training.
granted, many of the studies conclude with obvious recommendations, e.g., "be careful with power tools", and the author makes great fun of these "obvious conclusions" when in fact, they are not the substantiative conclusion (i.e., factual finding) of the research, just a recommendation for how to interpret the finding.
FTA: In April, scientists reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research that college students tend to drink much more alcohol than they think.
Is this really amusing and obvious? And, as opposed to the "choose your career wisely" conclusion, this has some pretty serious consequences. People engaging in potentially abusive behavior who are under-reporting it to themselves are much less likely to ever think there might be a problem brewing.
You have to laugh at the whole abstinence-based sex education thing, or else you are liable to cry. It would be like if in drivers ed they told people not to drive, because they might get into a car accident. That would be absurd. Just about everyone is going to drive anyway. Instead, the rational thing to do is to teach people to be safe drivers, wear seatbelts, etc. This is how sex education classes should operate as well.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Then again, "90% of everything is crud." That being the case, it follows that 90% of research will be utter BS by definition.
Or to put it more scientifically, research, along with many other things both in nature and man-made will follow the 1/f power scaling law. So it is rather ironic -- and gratifing -- to note that research itself does not escape the deep laws of nature it hopes to uncover!!!!
Chew on that one over the holiday...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Exactly. Sometimes the 'conventional wisdom' is just 'convenient foolishness' until someone comes along and plays the WTF card.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Common sense isn't always right. It's good to have scientific research to backup what seems "Obvious". Some times, what's "obvious" isn't always true.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The WSJ kindly didn't give us a reference, so we don't know what was actualy in that paper. However, having read a few papers in my time I bet you my left arm that it didn't consist of "we made this guy's fingers really cold and his typing sucked". I bet it says precisely how poor the typing was. Do you know exactly how badly cold affects typing? Just how cold is "chilly"? Is it 280K or 290K? How is the error rate correlated with temperature? How is it correlated with age and sex?
If it's so futile to perform the experiment, if the answers are so obvious, you won't mind telling us the temperature at which a healthy 30-year old male experiences a 10% temperature-induced error rate.
I'm sure you wouldn't mind using your guess when deciding when you should shut down air-traffic control if the heating malfunctions, but I'd rather the people making decisions like that have some hard data to work from.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
From the article: "When the office temperature in a month-long study increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing output jumped 150 percent...raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about $2 per worker, per hour"
If I employed only 5 typists, thats $400/wk. More than enough to pay the increased heating and start saving for my end of year bonus for being clever and commissioning the study.
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
Researchers get funding by the number of papers they write and by the number of times they get cited, not by whether they do anything new. For this reason, scientists who do things that are new are rarely cited and tend to live in poverty, those who do things that are certain to be referenced get the big grants. Even if the only ones citing them are psychologists studying academics who write useless papers.
In consequence, you EXPECT most papers to be highly quotable - the academic version of the "soundbite" - rather than obscure stuff that nobody will find a way to even reference for another hundred years.
Over the past hundred years, scientists have discovered that making revolutionary, staggering and phenomenal discoveries that will reshape humankind are largely ignored. I bet very few on Slashdot can even name the person who discovered the laser, or even in which decade. (Clue: It was a long time before anyone could find a use for it.)
You will even find colour photographs of Russia in the Library of Congress. Dated 1916 and earlier. A little before Kodak's time! The ancient Greeks even had a working theory of robotics, 2000 years before anyone had the technology to build one.
Pure research (ie: stuff with no known markettable value) and appliable research for which applications can't yet be profitably built is all a dead-end, these days. The stuff with the high market value - which is also the stuff with the great soundbites - is also the stuff that is "obvious", very close to what the consumer already wants and is willing to pay for, and is the stuff corporations will foot the bill to carry out.
No, I don't think this can be blamed on journalism. This is the fault of a commodity-driven private-sector R&D machine, where science in the public interest means science the public can be made interested in, NOT science that may actually benefit said public by advancing our understanding of the world.
Understanding doesn't sell nearly as well as ignorance.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"We don't percieve black" is a bit of a misleading statement... it's the kind of thing this article is really about, people summing up science papers in one sentence then misinterpreting them, or their value.
:)
My point is that the a zero reading on a dial is still a measurement, cameras percieve black perfectly well. Humans also do a lot of post-processing (up to the point of 3D modelling) on the measurements that cameras don't do. Instruments can't duplicate our vision, but they can record and reproduce the incoming light - which is what they should do! If they did all the post-processing our eyes do it would get applied twice and everything would look very weird indeed.
So, basically, stop overstating your case to sound dramatic. That kind of behaviour is ultimately self-defeating.
I can't tell you that, buddy. I can tell you that TFA guotaion I cited said the study was about typing in an office, so your air-traffic controller point is null.
And your point would be what? Air-traffic controllers don't work in an office environment? They work out in the middle of the desert, or at the bottom of the ocean, or on top of Mt. Everest, do they?
Being an ATC must be a lot more exciting over on your world. Over here on my world, ATCs spend a lot of time sitting in a chair, watching a video screen, and typing. Sort of like, oh, I don't know, an office.
I've never been to Mars, but I know there are not any apple trees there.
Well, no, you really don't. It seems very unlikely that there are any apple trees on Mars, given what we do know, but you don't know. You (and I) merely assume so based on the evidence so far. Normally, that's fine and I wouldn't complain about the term "know", but in the context of a discussion regarding whether it is a waste to test things we already "know", it's good to remind ourselves that what we think we know are really just assumptions.
And your assumption about Martian apple trees is based on far less evidence than the assumption that time is absolute--an assumption that Einstein proved wrong, of course. And, frankly, I'd be less amazed by the discovery of apple trees on Mars than I still am about some of the findings of 20th century physics.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I don't think either of those things are all that obvious. Sensible and unsurprising, yes. But if the research had not been done, would you be able to look me in the eyes and tell me you were absolutely certain that snacking through the day is healthier than a controlled, scheduled diet?