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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."
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.