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Scientists' Success Or Failure Correlated With Beer
mernil sends in an article from the NYTimes that casts a glance at a study done in the Czech Republic (natch) on what divides the successful scientists from the duffers. "Ever since there have been scientists, there have been those who are wildly successful, publishing one well-received paper after another, and those who are not. And since nearly the same time, there have been scholars arguing over what makes the difference. What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud? After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex, and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer."
I guess that people having more fun in their life have better results!
I hope that this article doesn't result in more alcoholics though..
The study says that beer consumption is inversely proportional to academic success. The more beer you drink, the less likely you are to produce high-quality, well-regarded papers.
It's been long known that beer is the drink of the underclasses. Wine, of course, being the preferred drink of the upper classes. And hard liquor a habit of the dregs of society. Is it any wonder, then, that people who consume beer, being from the lower classes, would be unable to create and innovate at the level that wine drinkers do? No, it only stands to reason that, as Murray 1996 shows, that intelligence is intricately tied to success. Therefore, the lower average intelligence of beer drinkers would necessarily be unable to compete with the higher average intelligence of wine drinkers.
In other words, beer consumption is a symptom, not the cause of the lower quality academic product.
One day I read that to 100% restore high-level brain functions, one needs 2 weeks of sobriety. The one who has couple of beers/wine etc each week or two is simply working on suboptimal level if brain is the main tool. It's ok for other workers and maybe CEOs, but not for scientists, where you need as much advantage as you can.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
In many research groups it is common to go out and have a few beers once a paper has been accepted. So this should lead to a positive correlation between beer consumption and research output. However, it is likely that among Czechs these paper beers do not have a large effect on their overall consumption (they drink even more beer than Germans).
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Women in Denmark have larger breasts than women in Canada. There are more moose in Canada than in Denmark. So more moose means smaller breasts.
Statistics are like miniskirts; they show a lot but hide the most important facts.
As a professional scientist who travelled a lot between universities in Europe, USA and Japan, I can say the following:
a) Correlation does not imply causation. Some regions are generally poorer, meaning their universities get less money, they attract less good scientists, etc. And these regions also have higher alcohol consumption. And so observation that alcohol consumption anti-correlates with scientific achievements doesn't necessarily imply that drinking makes you bad scientist.
b) I just moved from UK to USA and the amount of alcohol people drink in UK is completely unheard of in USA. Basically, we used to have three British pints 4 times a week. Properly drunk. In USA I can convince my colleagues to have one beer (over two hours!!) once a week. And yet, UK is THE most scientifically successful country per dollar spent.
c) My feeling is actually the opposite: alcohol acts as a social lubricant and many personal frictions can get dissolved that way. After two pints, the guy who you hate so much for having more papers than you, suddenly seems an ok chap. People are more likely to speak about their work, share opinions on papers, don't be secretive about future projects, etc. This effect must have bigger positive impact than negative effects of drinking.
What I find interesting is that the article makes it seem like this is some ridiculous myth and there is no justification to believe it.
Personally I would not be surprised to see that it is alcohol consumption rather than beer that is the problem. Alcohol is a poison that some individuals consume readily and it would not surprise me a bit to discover that it has long term affects on the body and mind. I suspect it has more to do with the brain than science specifically but the effect may be subtle and show itself more readily in a hard thinking field like science.
As for other drugs, I wouldn't make the wild leap to assume that anything that causes euphoria is bad for you. Last time I looked it was still completely preposterous that many medications list euphoria as a NEGATIVE side effect.
There are all kinds of things that it is coming to light are probably good for our brains in small doses. Nicotine, Caffeine, Cannabis, and even MSG all have negative effects at high doses and positive effects at low doses. Amusingly, MSG in high doses (which isn't much for msg) mass murders brain cells and yet we use buckets of it in our food, where Cannabis has no known permanent effects on the brain and we throw people in prison for possessing it. The difference? Euphoria of course.
Oh, yes oh, yes oh, yes!
Also: How many scientists have not been pushed into obsession because lack of companionship? You know Newton never married and never had a girlfriend. He didn't have too many friends either I think. So could not some of his work have been created by a man that had nothing else to do? By someone who is desperately fighting the loneliness that comes creeping up anytime he closes the book?
I have written some of my best things (granted, I'm still just studying for a BS) on a saturday or a friday night. You simply have so much more uninterrupted time to get very heavily into something you are working on. The downside is, of course, loneliness.
It actually works that way, to a point, yes. If you drink lots and regularly, you build up "alcohol tolerance". I.e., small quantities of alcohol which would make someone else tipsy, just get you back to the baseline. It compensated all right.
The problem is that that compensated state remains so even when you're sober. That's how eventually DT happens. The brain chemistry is "compensated" to work right with a lot of alcohol in the system. Without that alcohol, however, you're fucked up and can even die.
It's, if you will, like compensating for pushing a wardrobe to the right. Hard. So you compensate by slanting it to the left. When that force is applied, congrats, the components cancel out and the wardrobe stays like that. But when that force isn't applied any more, now it falls over to the the left.
That's in a nutshell how you die of DT. It's not the alcohol that kills you, it's the lack of alcohol. At that point your brain has changed so much to keep working when marinated in alcohol, that eventually it became unable to function without it.
That incidentally, also has the following implication for the post-alcohol-impairment I was talking about. It's easy to think "bah, I'm resistant to alcohol. Why, I only even start feeling a little warm after the fourth pint." Congrats, if you're at that point, your brain's equilibrium is now already waay off center. You _will_ have decreased brain power even when alcohol has left your system. In fact, _because_ all alcohol has left your system.
I couldn't care less, actually. Equally, a couple of century ago, mercury was the only known treatment for syphilis. It doesn't mean we should keep doing that. Nowadays we have better ways to deal with that.
Similarly, nowadays we know how to filter and disinfect water. So whatever need for alcohol might have existed, doesn't exist any more.
I'm not proposing to ban either alcohol or tobacco. If you want to nuke your brain, be my guest. I wouldn't even stop you from hanging yourself or playing russian roulette. If you want to, by all means, go ahead.
I'm _only_ saying "don't be surprised if it affects your IQ", really. But if you can live with that, go ahead and drink yourself silly, for all I care
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amen to that brother! My most productive 2 years of research were in a miserable city of south california where the absence of anything remotely close to culture almost depressed me. My most enjoyable "cultural" experience was taking a good book and going to a locally owned coffee shop to read...
scientists are a very weird cast and most of them have been stuck to pre-adolescent personality development stages. So they identify their scientific persona with their own self and unable to distinguish between the two they strive for development and perfection of the former at the expense of the latter...
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