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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."
The distinction is that people tend to be miffed at these studies when they are funded with tax dollars.
They feel their money could be better spent elsewhere (and at times it could). Now, while I do not claim to know where the money for these studies came from I do know that a lot of money which could be better spent does get funneled into "questionable" funding (how about painting some rocks to look like other rocks because after new construction on a highway some rocks did not look weathered...) because the politicians funnel it to their district.
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You have to do science to be a scientist. The gathering and publishing of facts and observations is not science and those that do it are not scientists. Even a statistical analysis of a bunch of facts isn't science either as it can be done with little thought or consideration.
Explaining how these facts can, or can not, be integrated into our existing body of knowledge in a systematic, consistent and coherent fashion is science. It's about understanding and not just knowledge. That's the difference.
The problem is, as usual, that few people can distinguish between what is science, what is technology and what is nonsense. Those that merely state the obvious (i.e. well known facts) are not scientists.
On the other hand, in medicine I've seen some pretty obvious trials. For instance, the recent "Combining morphine + ibuprofen is more effective than the same level of morphine and no ibuprofen in relieving pain" and by the same author (I guess he figured it was a gold mine) "Combining two opioids is more effective than one opioid at the same dose as the first opioid alone". Who would have thought! But worse, it was a meta-analysis. Which means some other reasearches already did the same study and he just pirated their data.
Most of the pain research isn't very good to begin with, but this type of stuff only sucks up the limited grant money that could be used for meaningful work.
I would love to see pain research that focused on what could be done to prevent acute pain from becomming chronic. Every once in awhile in the surgical setting you see a good study, like one that found you could reduce allodynia, hyperalgesia, and RSD/CRPS by 90%+ by pretreating patients with an NMDA antagonist, long acting opioid, COX2 inhibitor, and after surgery maintaining the LA-opioid, a decent breakthrough medicine, and some tylenol for 2 weeks. A 90% reduction in those complications and better outcomes is big news. I wish someone would apply the same basic principle to when patients first present with pain. Maybe we could stop 90% of them after modifying doctors standand practices from going on to develop chronic pain, but no one is doing the research, so we will never know.
Instead we get treated to the 127th confirmatory study that NSAIDS are effective on mild to moderate arthritis pain.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
You, parent, and the whole /. counterpoint cabal need to relax. You don't have to provide b.s. counterpoints to every popular thread just for the sake of being a contrarian...
You and parent are also wrong.
And like the parent poster says, you can't just go around saying "Why research that? It's obvious?" We get proved wrong on "obvious" shit all the time.
There IS a such thing as stupid research. For example, from TFA:
In what its sponsors called a "landmark study," scientists found that when your fingers are numb and turning that lovely robin's-egg blue, you make more typing effors. Er, errors. "When employees get chilly," the scientists concluded, "they are not working to their full potential."
Can you tell me one logical reason why anyone might think that people with stiff, cold fingers would not make more typing errors than people with normal fingers? That's the point of the whole thing: only an idiot would need to test that hypothesis. That's like testing to decide if people who read non-fiction often like non-fiction.
There are some things that do not need to be tested with methodology to be agreed as true. You don't need a study to find out that shooting yourself in the head will hurt you.
Wait, maybe you should test out that hypothesis...
Thank you Dave Raggett
"A few months in the lab can save you a few hours in the library."
When I posted check this out, I meant to link: http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkersh adow_illusion.html
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In undergrad classes, research is commonly assigned by the professors. In postgrad classes, students are often required to come up with a research topic of their own. To make matters worse, it has to be something new. So, consider a sociology student working towards a PhD. What area of sociology hasn't been researched over and over and over? How about job satisfaction!
I am not attempting to claim that some areas of study are worse than others because they aren't always on the breaking edge of new research. I'm also not attempting to claim that postgrads shouldn't be pushed to perform new research. I am only stating that in some fields, students just don't have much to choose from. So, they end up doing what we would call worthless research. In reality, it isn't worthless. It is specifically designed to get them a degree so they can (hopefully) make a lot more money.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
" 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.?"
;)
Hehe. I'm one of those people. I'm a digital artist. I make pretty colored pixels for a living. As such, I've been exposed to a LOT of information about visual perception, including 'seeing black'. If you caught me at a different point in my life, there's a real chance I would have said "duh" and I would have told you (what I thought was...) the answer.
But you know what? That would not have been very scientific of me. What can I say? I'm a jackass know-it-all. The funny thing is, I don't know that I'm right because I never explored it. Rather, I drew conclusions based on my observations. The reality is, even if this project you did restates precisely what I think, I still wouldn't actually know until I read your report. (Note: I haven't read your work, that's why I'm being vague...)
In a roundabout way, what I'm saying is that you're right and maybe now I'll be less of a jackass know-it-all.
"Derp de derp."
Isaac Asimov once wrote an excellent essay on scientific progress named "The Relativity of Wrong". He wrote on the ever evolving precision on the shape of the Earth.
It went something like: There was a time when people thought the Earth was flat. In those times the error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth was "x". Then people thought that the Earth was spherical. The error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth was "y". Then people realized that the Earth was an oblate spheroid. The error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth was "z". After launching satellites in space and measuring the perturbations in their orbit caused by the Earth's shape, scientists have been refining the model for tha shape of the Earth more and more.
But the error in measuring the true curvature of the Earth has been ever decreasing, from flat to sphere to oblate spheroid to tri-axial ellipsoid to arbitrary shape. The difference from an oblate spheroid to the true shape of the Earth is several orders of magnitude smaller than the difference from a sphere to an oblate spheroid.
That's where science makes a difference. Sicence is cumulative. The knowledge that you learn through sicence may be improved, but not disproved.
For example, somebody was saying the other day that he knew all along that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Um, no, he didn't. He hadn't ever even been to Iraq. Heh.
I was reading the Times back in the 90's, and it discussed Iraq's inflatable fake weapons, used to fool long-distance information gathering by being indistinguishable in a satellite picture from an actual missile, plane or tank.
Sometimes it's worth it just to refine the testing process.
Verily.
You can't take the sky from me...
What I always thought was interesting about Eratosthenes' experiment was that he had to assume the sun's rays arrived parallel for his calculation to be valid. Do you know what earlier work might have been done to establish the sun as sufficiently distant that he could make this assumption? It's not something I'd expect him to pull out of thin air, but I can't recall hearing where he might have gotten it from.
And the brethren went away edified.
It never will work.
So it's your contention that one projectile colliding with another projectile on a consistent basis is impossible? All the current missile defense programs have shown us is that it's harder than initially anticipated, but to think it's theoretically impossible shows a complete failure to grasp classical mechanics. There's absolutely nothing going on with two missiles that makes colliding them impossible. Criticize the right wing propagandists all you want, just realize the left spews bullshit like this "missile defense is impossible" too. Seriously, how is this parent modded informative?
And as for funding such programs... eventually, there WILL be another war with a state with ICBM technology, and you'll be very happy if we achieve an effective missile defense system before this happens. So I think it's worth the money. If you don't, fine, it's a valid opinion, but don't give me bullshit like "it's impossible to do".
Many years at Newsweek, WSJ - won awards for being able to convey complex ideas in everyday language. And this person seems to have risen to the top of her field without a true understanding of what she is writing about. I don't mean the details where a few errors are understandable, but the actual underpinnings and ideas. This article is proof in point. Yes there are obvious questions and bad science but someone who understands science would pick examples that repeated previous studies, or were based on bad data, or badly interpreted data rather than experiments which confirms "common" sense.
To be fair, maybe she does understand all of this but had a deadline to meet for the next issue. In any case, this is very poor science reporting even for a mainstream publication like the WSJ...
Actually, there was a study somewhere that concluded that the shape we have is more effective than many other shapes at removing another man's semen from the vagina. The thrusting head sort of acts like a pump.
Everyone assumed that:
- A heavy object would fall faster than a light object
- The speed of falling for a given object was constant.
These were so obvious people thought that they were true.Galileo tested the first hypothesisby dropping two objects off a tall tower, and the second by rolling a ball down a slope past a some bells spaced at regular intervals. Both these obvious facts were proved false.
It may not be as sexy as the rare eureka moments enjoyed by a lucky few, but it embodies the corner stone of the scientific method. Would we prefer the diametric opposite: taking an established belief for granted as true? Which would be the more foolish?
Engineers certainly couldn't achieve much without quantification, and it often leads to new insight when interacting systems do not agree at a given level of detail.
I would be wary of people with another agenda attempting to ridicule science.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1861 1947)
The mistakes of a clever man are equal to the mistakes of a thousand fools.