Slashdot Mirror
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+
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.
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.