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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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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
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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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.