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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."
It gives someone the oppurtunity to look at the scientist and state: "THANK YOU CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!"
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
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.
Scientific research shows that scientific research could have been avoided.
Ugh, now my head hurts. I have to go lie down.
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.
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
Unless you want a job as a professional skydiver, that is...
Thankfully, in this market, the employee should not have a problem finding job satisfaction. There is no reason you can't take a few months or years off to find that perfect job. And considering how there are so many unfilled high-paying, enjoyable jobs in this industry, any employer will be thrilled to have your interest.
Most fortunate of all, the employee has all the power as they do not have any necessary expenses and there is always an employer willing to pay more than the current offer. Employers care about your satisfaction, too. The last thing they would ever want to do is upset your job satisfaction by outsourcing your entire team, division or city to an offsore center for cheaper wages and expenses.
Yes, my friends, glory in the simplicity of overwhelming demand for technical expetise and the underwhelming presence of employables.
Ha ha. Funny stuff. What a waste.
Let's not forget the billions and billions poured into bogus Star Wars missile defense technology R&D over the last 20 years. It doesn't work. It never did work. It never will work. Ande even if it DID work it's easily defeated. Not to mention that it could never be tested in any realistic scenario. Most of this absolutely wasted money was spent as part of classified budgets so nobody really knows exactly how much of a boondoggle it really is. When all you hear about are the much publicized tests - virtually all of which end in failure - you know there's a lot more that never sees the light of day.
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.
"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.
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.
"A few months in the lab can save you hours of research time in the library."
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
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
Is reading Slashdot considered research?
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.
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
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.
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.
No, but it's a great way to have fun while getting paid for doing research! ("Just water for me tonight, I'm the designated-control.")One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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...
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)
Captain Obvious would obviously wear a fluorescent hazard-orange obvious-suit, and instead of a cape, he would tow a highway billboard with the words "I'M CAPTAIN OBVIOUS" in flashing neon letters.
His only weakness is he would turn up to work as a mild-mannered reporter wearing the exact same thing.
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.
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."
Scientists have now discovered the secret to why blondes have more fun.
:-]
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.