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Beer-Drinking Scientist Debunks Productivity Correlation
austinpoet writes in with a blog post debunking the theory we discussed a few days back that scientists' beer consumption is linearly correlated with the quality of their work. Chris Mack, Gentleman Scientist and beer drinker, has analyzed the paper and found it is severely flawed. From his analysis: "The discovered linear relationship between beer consumption and scientific output had a correlation coefficient (R-squared) of only about 0.5 — not very high by my standards, though I suspect many biologists would be happy to get one that high in their work... Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer."
beer > coffee/caffeine
Gone!
C'mon, I thought the (ancedotal) evidence proving(?) that beer is and isn't good for productivity is adequete! It should say that beer, in certain levels, is good for productivity, and in excess ... it is bad. Really, people write papers to prove this?
I think it's safe to say that the paper they are "debunking" was meant as a joke.
Scientists Claim there is a direct correlation b/w pot smokers and an amazing talent to link string theory with life on mars
too scared to forget random user names
It's more about the quality of their beer. Not that I have anything against Pilsen. I think they make a perfectly fine beer over there.
What?
So beer may or may not hinder a scientist's creative abilities. On the flip side, will scientists ever start taking drugs in order to improve their skills? Would this ever lead to drug testing researchers that announce amazing new scientific breakthroughs? (sort of far fetched but an interesting idea nonetheless).
This has to be a lost Monty Python sketch, right?
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
Besides, seriously, there has been some interesting studies that creative folks, especially writers, musicians, do their best work on the wagon. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, famous drunks. Consider all the great musicians dead of drug overdoses. Correlate that, kids.
More research is needed.
So it's safe to drink beer again. And to think I was actually going to cut down!
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/161/3/228 "... moderate levels of alcohol intake may be associated with improved cognitive function and reduced risk of cognitive decline and dementia."
Social drinking leads to better job performance and career success. http://www.ithaca.edu/ithacan/articles/0610/05/opinion/2drinking_.htm
Excess alcohol consumption, on the other hand, is almost always a bad thing. There are some studies that show the benefit of moderate consumption but there is no studies that show that heavy consumption is anything but bad.
They've looked for a linear correlation, so if what you've said is true then the analysis they used wouldn't find it.
In order to find a correlation where the input IV (beer consumption) has an optimal value, you would have to do the regression on a transformation of the variable. Perhaps a quadratic would suffice, or else abs(X - k) for some unknown value of k.
The comic xkcd was there first and called this effect the Ballmer Peak. Most likely, this effect was also tried in Vista and Vista SP1 design meetings, but the balance was all wrong and didn't come out as (they) expected.
I know scientists who devote their entire lives to their work, never go out, never have a good time, have no children (or never see them), etc. etc.
Are they *better* scientists? I don't think so.
Are they *more productive* scientists? Not in every case, but on average, yeah, I'd say they are. There are situations where spending all your time on work and neglecting other aspects of your life is a self-defeating proposition, especially in creative work (which generally includes science, although what scientists actually *do* varies a lot from one scientist to another.)
But burn-out aside, if you're willing to sacrifice other aspects of your life, you can get more science done. Pretending that this is not, generally speaking, true, because you want to pretend that it doesn't cost you anything to have a life, is not productive.
That said, the article-author is right about the statistics. Bad Czechs!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
In social science .5 is huuge! they don't even usually square r-scores in social science because it's so depressing. .5 is a MASSIVE correlation in social science. Consider how many factors are involved in research success: luck, competence, etc. So if these findings actually show causation (which, admittedly,l they might not), that would mean that beer results in 50% of success or failure, and all the luck and technical skill and social factors that go into success combined can only match beer, with another 50% of the variance. I would go so far as to say that such a high correlation actually makes causation almost impossible; there must be a lot of poor scientists drowning their sorrows and whatnot that this is also taking into account.
I had a friend who always cracked open a cold one when he sat down to work (while at home, of course). I could never understand it - but he worked like a maniac. And he did it for years... until he failed a drug test and was fired. He was a manager for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer. Go figure...
If you were one of the five worst scientists in a field in the Czech Republic, you'd probably turn to drink, right?
it depends on the kind of drinker you are, do you drink moderately and only open that first alcoholic beverage later in the evening (after supper)? you know anybody that pops the top off any alcoholic beverage too early in the day and drinks excessively until they are slobbering & stumbling recklessly wont be a good anything (especially a scientist)...
i drink a mixed drink every evening after supper daily and only one, using a shotglass to measure the amount, i do enjoy a mild buzz but i hate being drunk and i dislike drunks since they can cause lots of problems (loss of careers/jobs, wrecked marriages, even cause fatal traffic accidents on the road)...
moderation is the key...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
They gave him the bird!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Seems to me that the authors of this study were heavy beer drinkers.
If we're going with anecdotal evidence here, Einstein was a renowned pipe smoker, so ... smoking must be the new wonder-drug for intellectuals. Maybe soon we'll see nicotene tests on college campuses just like we see steroid tests in MLB.
If, on the other hand, he means the correlation coefficient r=.5, that means that R^2=.25. Still, a quarter of the variance in "work quality" is explained by beer drinking. That is still very high.
His point about outlying ornithologists and the points not being independent may still be valid; determining if they are is an empirical matter. Do these outlying scientists, in fact, socialize together? What other sources of nonindependence might there be, and do they affect THIS data set? Also should we really claim that 5 out of 34 (15% of the sample!) constitute OUTLIERS? Those aren't outliers, those are a subpopulation.
He didn't debunk the study; he rather raised some interesting questions.
R-squared is the amount of variance accounted for by the variable in question. That means half their productivity is explained by beer drinking, and half on all other variables combined.
As a comparison, 0.3 is pretty much the top end R-squared in personality psychology. that field is built on correlations that account for no more than 10% of the observed variance.
To combine the two, it's far more likely that TFA didn't actually measure beer drinking, but rather how much beer those scientists who drank beer would admit to drinking. Those who'll drink it are probably more likely to relax, which will make them more productive, and those who will admit it are less likely to fall prey to negative opinions of others, a major source of which is reviewers' comments on papers submitted for publication. Such comments are often undeservedly harsh, and in many cases coming from someone who doesn't know as much as the author about the topic. That can turn away those who place great store in the opinions of others, especially perceived authorities.
Next, on to Russia and WOTKA!
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Excellent article. My faith in the scientific community is restored.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's a kdawson post. It's to be expected.
*burp*
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Seems I'm a Troll, and Insightful, and Overrated. I always knew I had identity issues, but this is one to tell my therapist ;)
Question: there seems to be a lot of complaining recently about specific people posting stories that aren't seen as well-researched or newsworthy. Why does this happen? I assumed that editors just evaluated stories as they came in against objective criteria - is that naive? Sorry if this is offtopic.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
That the 5 worst scientist drink a lot, I would drink a lot too if I was that kind of failure.
Our next speaker is Dr. Ivan Crow, well known as one of the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic, author of Using Airguns Correctly and The Prague Beer Guide. He will be talking to us about "Birds and why they suck".
It beats the daily Microsoft Windows Vista article(s). Those don't get interesting no matter how many beers you drink before reading them.
Whtao said evver beeeaara beeeeeeeeeeee bbaad for youya ?
The only "ethical dilemma" is wether or not we should allow the government to dictate what substances adults can and cannot put into their bodies.
"how do you accept these discoveries without supporting...[XYZ]?"
Does acceptance of Newton's Principa Mathematica automatically infer I support teaching math via 'visions' from a bowl of mecury?
Should I have read and supported the roughly one million words Newton wrote on the number 666 before I look at pictures from the Hubble telescope.
Must I support people sticking pins into their own eyes before I accept Newton's theory of light?
Scientists suffer from human frailty just like the rest of us, by all accounts Newton was both an obnoxious prick and one of the most prolific and profound polymaths that ever lived. What a tradgedy it would have been had he been burnt at the stake for his heretical alchemy.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's a recursive debunking. Debunking the paper that beer improves productivity while drinking beer itself debunks his own debunking thus nullifying his analysis. This of course leaves us with a quandary that can only be solved by drinking more beer.
I just used my last mod point, or I would have gladly modded this up.
When bored, hackers write viruses, scientists - papers.
You can be sure this is true by the comments posted to the blog, many of which run, "Hey, instead of trashing the Czech paper, you should conduct your own study and publish counter-results."
For the record, IAAS. (and I drink beer)
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Social activity leads to "rubbing shoulders" with those with the ability to affect your career. Argo:
Social activity with beer would likely lead to scientist's getting tenure; most people will agree that tenure doesn't help produce "quality" papers (defined as those likely to be sited a lot and in prestigious journals). Just like most nobel prize winners tend to do little productive work in their field after that accomplishment. I'm from a physics background, our nobel prize winners have been known to go into such great research areas as "proving aliens exist" and throwing temper tantrums that quantum mechanics doesn't "feel" right to them.
Not to say that the tenure system is bad, we need independence/security for researchers so they aren't forced too much to do what will get them grants and keep them in a position. As well, I'd rather have the heavy beer drinking crowd safely behind a desk then operating a crane above my office. However, I don't think it is great that the entire university heirachy revolves around getting tenure as a status symbol. No one's job should be so secure that they cease having to try.
Well, beer-drinking scientests... it's just fun. There's nothing wrong with throwing in something funny among all the oether ones about quantum cryptography, scientology and nuclear weapons in China. It's comic-relief. And writing a paper about drinking beer? Why not? It's one way of having fun while still doing science - a kind of an in-joke with scientists. And if it doesn't blow TOO much research money on the project, then what the heck?
/.?
As for people complaining about it... does it really upset you guys that much that this article took up 1/10th of your visual space on
The paper's pretty hilarious. He even cites a paper about the correlation between mushroom picking and scientific productivity. Another good (though less statistical) debunking post is here.
I know about the Ballmer series, but am I wrong to see a chair in that graph?
I don't think I've ever enjoyed dissenting comments as much as this. I'm not disagreeing them them, only expanding on them and explaining why I formed my opinion.
Symes sez:
> but with such a small sample size the researchers would not have been able to adjust for
> exposure, or age in this case....
> age could easily explain this beer/science relationship - younger scientists drink more - as could a whole host of other variables.
A small N should have the same effect on all the variables. Without seeing the author's calculations, or reconstructing them from the original data, I would assume* he took N into account in his variance calculations. But point taken. If the N is too small Fischer's Exact Statistic should be employed.
cvd6262 sez:
> it does not mean that "all other variables" only account for half the variance in
> performance because other variables could "share" the variance associated with beer drinking.
Again, I assume* that the author determined the interactions and found them to be negligible and so used correlation, almost certainly as you said by ANOVA. Since he was looking at how the two variables covary, correlation is the proper stat to report, but that doesn't preclude using ANOVA on the same data to examine the interactions. (For the less familiar, correlation looks at whether things are adequately similar to say they're connected, ANOVA or its minimal derivative Student's T** looks at how different things are. When there's at least two variables and they're looked at in at least two ways, they can interact resulting in an effect not due to any primary comparison alone.) I almost mentioned just this in my first response. I'm glad you did.
* I rarely assume an author (and editors involved) performs adequate tests on their statistics, particularly in social sciences. Many simply know what's most used and use that. But when an author published a correction or a change in conclusion based on secondary analysis, I believe I can trust it. This usually means either they understand the stats adequately, or [have come to] understand the intent of the tests used by their software (SPSS or SAS most often in social sciences), or has obtained expert advice on the stats from a statistician or another from their own field more conversant with stats.
** Ironically, this test was developed by a book keeper for a beer company. He feared the reaction of his employer if they found he was "moonlighting" as a statistician. He had his paper introducing the statistic published with the pseudonym "A. Student" for this reason, hence the name of the test. It is the minimal form of ANOVA (analysis of variance), testing the difference between only two variables without cross testing two others such as different conditions. To employ this or a more complex ANOVA the author would have had to group the data (non-drinkers vs. drinkers for two, non-drinkers vs. drink few beers vs. drink lots of beer for three). He apparently wanted to compare the variables along continuous axes, so correlation was the proper statistic to report.
For those who have Twain's comment "lies, damn lies and statistics" pop into their minds, I say that it applies only to those who don't understand statistics. Those who do might disagree with a particular test in a particular case, but for good reason, and they don't confuse that with a lie.
That was fun. Thanks.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
... that an R-square of .5 was *good*. that's what I was taught in my biostatistics classes. It means 50% of the observed effects are caused by the beer drinking- which doesn't sound conclusive (and it's not absolutely conclusive) but in biology it's pretty good. :/
the ancient mayas used an enema;-P