Slashdot Mirror
Why We Have So Much "Duh" Science
Hugh Pickens writes "Eryn Brown writes in the LA Times that accounts of 'duh' research abound as studies show that driving ability worsens in people with early Alzheimer's disease, that women who get epidurals experience less pain during childbirth than women who don't, that young men who are obese have lower odds of getting married than thinner peers, and that making exercise more fun might improve fitness among teens. But there's more to duh research than meets the eye writes Brown as experts say they have to prove the obvious again and again to influence perceptions and policy. 'Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,' says Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. 'There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.' Kyle Stanford, a professor of the philosophy of science at UC Irvine, thinks the professionalization of science has led researchers — who must win grants to pay their bills — to ask timid questions and research that hews to established theories is more likely to be funded, even if it contributes little to knowledge. Perhaps most important, sometimes a study that seems poised to affirm the conventional wisdom produces a surprise. 'Many have taken the value of popular programs like DARE — in which police warn kids about the dangers of drug use — as an article of faith,' writes Brown. 'But Dennis Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago and other researchers have shown that the program has been ineffective and may even increase drug use in some cases.'"
duh
to justify "Duh" studies.
Who would have thought?
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
We have too much Duh the population.
Smoking is bad for you??!?
Research is a money game, if your research is correct even if its stupid to most people, you will get a grant for the next project easier....
And its [Citation Needed].
My undergrad is in psychology and I helped professors with research many time. One issue is what qualifies as "Duh" or "Everyone knows that".
For example, studies have been done that show a group of people working together on a project instead of having one person in charge can make it better. "Duh" you say? Kinda like Open Source? Well studies have also shown having one person in power calling the shots can make, think Apple and Steve Jobs. Also a "Duh" you say
They are both valid.
Also I don't have the article handy but many things people think of as "Duh" turn out not to be true.
The biggest reason to run "duh" studies is because you really do have to test the obvious. If you assume something is true without testing it, any theory you build on that assumption is on shaky ground. Showing that your basic assumptions is correct is a vital step before you can do anything more complicate.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
you need to be constantly reminded of the facts because cigarette companies will start lying about it first chance they get. Google for 'T Zone'.
Or, as I once read, Common sense isn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sometimes that can be useful to have a huge mass of data to fall back on. When some study comes out that says something unexpected, then you have a bunch of data to act as a buffer so that people have some context, because most people think the truth is the whatever study the media misrepresented last, not the body of evidence as a whole. The more info you've got, the harder it is to deny something when its convenient. It might be a waste of time if people were rational creatures, but if something is being done to add to a body of evidence that people are still questioning, then maybe it isn't such a waste after all. And I suppose having some study to back your case if you want to make a policy change or legal claim too, rather than just rely on what should be common sense, for example, saying that studies show tired people preform poorly is better than just saying that you're tired and have a hard time working when you're tired.
p is less than .05.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
i had no idea about drugs until an officer came to my class, opened up a couple briefcases, and showed me every drug imaginable so i could recognize it. then he told me all kinds of cool ways that the drugs would make me feel like and act like. most important lesson from D.A.R.E. is:
D. rugs
A. re
R. eally
E. xpensive
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
"they have to prove the obvious again and again to influence perceptions and policy. "
They aren't doing science looking to further scientific knowledge, they're doing science in order to influence policy. Immediately, their entire body of work becomes suspect.
If one schmoe's study says that drinking antifreeze will kill you, the Antifreeze For Children's Mopeds lobby will counter with their own study saying it's as safe as milk. Sometimes you need more studies from different angles/people to sink home the facts. How long did it take for people to accept cigarettes as a carcinogen? It was before my time, but I've recently seen some of the Congressional testimony from Tobacco execs and the shameless lying (seed of doubt!) is draw dropping in a modern context.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Real science is quantitative analysis of, for example, exactly how much worse drivers get with age. The specific mechanics of what things they get worse at, etc.
The media takes that, and takes the conclusion: they get worse with age/disease, and leave out the details. The details are for, well, people who actually build cars, or systems or the like. The researcher usually isn't trying to prove a 'duh' point, they're trying to quantify a 'duh' point.
Beautiful women are distracting. Ok. By how much? How do you quantify that? How do you study that? If the presence of beautiful women reduce men's productivity by 0.5% that's very different than 25% - the trend, and effect, may be the same (assuming you can quantify to that scale) to the media. But one is good science, one isn't (and no, you can't even express good science in 2 sentences).
Sometimes you need to state the obvious over and over again because it doesn't take much for a person to internalize a viewpoint that makes the obvious non-obvious. Like Lewis Caroll pointed out, 3 times seems to be enough.
As simple examples, Snopes take on aspartame causing cancer & tumors and as an ant poison The FDA still ends up being inundated with this claim so many times a year that they end up retesting, just to humor the population.
As a more loaded example, check out the belief systems of anyone who claims they are strongly religious. Or Truthers. Or Birthers.
Sadly, it appears that the majority of the population needs to be told what is obvious over and over.
I took Psychology at University, where it seems they were particularly sensitive to the accusation. My instructor read a series of twenty-five research results that should have been obvious before experimenting. Many of them did seem obvious. Then she stated that she had just lied to us. All twenty-five experiments actually found the opposite. Then she read them with the true results, and, surely enough, they did sound obvious that way as well.
In fact, about six to eight did sound dodgy the first way, but that still left far too many.
~Loyal
From TFA:
'Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,' says Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. 'There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.'
This seems like a bad example, because it's not really "duh science" when you have an entire industry using its combined resources to silence your research. The tobacco industry spent decades flooding the journals with studies aimed at proving that smoking was harmless, or even beneficial. What's more, the tobacco industry was uniquely situated to get those results repeated in the press, while the studies that repeated the finding that smoking was harmful ended up sounding like "duh science" and went unreported. (If smoking is still bad for you, it's not news.)
In many cases, the real problem is not the science, or the journals, but how to communicate the science to the lay public, who can only really comprehend what's actually told to them. If you can't guarantee that anybody will ever hear about your findings, the only way might be to repeat them over and over, as many times as you can -- because that's what industry will do.
Breakfast served all day!
An article right under that one is..... "Women who post lots of photos of themselves on Facebook value appearance, need attention, study finds"
If we don't check the things we think we know, we won't find the cases where we're wrong. Of course we're generally right, and thus the propensity of "duh" studies. But those aren't the interesting ones. It's the ones that the findings are counter to what would be "duh" that are interesting. And you're not going to find the latter without wading through the former.
Most "Duh" research isn't "Duh" at all. It only sounds that way because of the atrocious state of science reporting in the popular press. Challenging, technical research has to be translated into terms regular folks can understand, and that often means making ridiculous comparisons or analogies, or just giving an explanation of the research so dumbed down that the researchers themselves would hardly recognize it.
Another contributing factor is the political motivations of people with large audiences who don't know better. For example, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a "report" making fun of a number of studies supposedly representing wasting spending on stupid research. It turns out his examples are actually pretty nuanced and important after all--hardly "duh" science.
The general population just isn't equipped to judge which research is important and worth spending money on. That is exactly why we have organizations like the NSF to evaluate grant proposals for us.
The reason people do "Well, duh!" research is because of how interesting it is when the "Duh!" is wrong. Such as the research into DARE, or similar research showing the ineffectiveness of 12-step programs, or diets, or that losing weight doesn't increase your lifespan (although gaining it decreases it), or that modest alcohol consumption can have positive health effects, or...
I mean, how interesting would it be if...
Driving ability improved in people with early Alzheimer's disease.
Or if women who get epidurals experienced more pain during childbirth than women who didn't.
Or if young men who are obese have the higher odds of getting married than thinner peers.
Or if trying to "make exercise more fun" lowers fitness rates among teens.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I can say that I'm not surprised by the positive correlation with drug use. I personally caught the DARE officer in lies about the side effects of drugs, and all it really taught me was that police hold youth in enough contempt to lie to them "for their own good." That's really not a great thing to teach students.
We humans like to pretend that our assumptions are facts. So when our assumptions come closer to actually really being facts, we have to say that that is a worthless endeavor because otherwise our pretense would be disrupted. It is much nicer to feel superior to those stupid scientists than it is to realize how little we really know.
The more likely explanation is granting bodies. To apply for substantial funding you need to have a project that has clearly defined outcomes that have a high probability for success. The kind of project that has these properties is "the obvious". The short term is very important too. You need to have something you can publish and report in the first year of publication to ensure the grant bodies stay happy and don't become concerned they have wasted their money, again "the obvious" is a good one. Long term or speculative research is strongly discouraged by the current system and interests of granting bodies world-wide. It is almost inevitable that this happen as the granting bodies want something to report to government (in the short term) to show what a good job they are doing. It's a shame as much better research could be done if it were not for having to think in such short and clearly defined time frames.
you need to be constantly reminded of the facts because cigarette companies will start lying about it first chance they get. Google for 'T Zone'.
Oil companies do the same for anthropocentric global warming.
Here's a suggestion for another "duh" research: when big business fear a drop in profits, they spread lies. Google for 'fear uncertainty doubt'
Wow, you read that with a lot of faulty inference. Nowhere the GP said nothing about how much money they've got, only that there are incentives for further research, and the grants you can attract, if you've a positive history.
Not sure how you came to what must have been your conclusion about what he said.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I can credit DARE as the number one reason I took LSD for the first time. I wasn't really aware of hallucinogens prior to DARE and the whole "Just Say No" campaign. I found the idea of having a dream-like state while awake to be fascinating. It seemed like magic, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on some LSD or shrooms. It took me a few years (until my freshman year of high school), but I took acid as early as I was able to find it. I must say, DARE didn't disappoint at all!
In many cases, the real problem is not the science, or the journals, but how to communicate the science to the lay public, who can only really comprehend what's actually told to them.
You're seriously claiming that the 'lay public' didn't realise that the 'coffin nails' they were smoking might be bad for their health until scientists told them they were?
For instance: arthroscopic knee surgery, a very common procedure, doesn't actually help.. If you were afraid of "duh" research, you'd never ask that question in the first place.
It's obvious the Earth is flat, why waste Isabell's gold "proving" someone can sail West and end up back home from the East? Duh.
It's obvious that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, that guy in Pisa must be pulling a political stunt to get tax credits or something. Duh.
It's obvious that Saddam has secret nukes, who needs UN institutional opinions? Duh.
It's obvious that taxes cause job losses, cell phones cause cancer, and the world ended two Saturdays ago except for you heathen boogers, and everything worth inventing was already discovered years ago. Let's close the patent office. Duh.
Cross-discipline value judgements are a slippery slope. Science is not Technology, and we techies look pretty ridiculous by other people's criteria if you haven't noticed already.
"News for Nerds" indeed.
Duh.
This is very much in line with "normal science" as described in Kuhn's classic book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Most of science is "filling in the holes" of widely-accepted theories and ideas. Because it's not paradigm-shifting, it seems obvious that much normal science can be interpreted as "duh science." It's inherent in the way that science and discovery work.
Sadly, the summary pretty much contains the entire TFA... All the links are nothing but the submitter's editorial commentary with sketchy connections to TFA at best.
But there's another reason for 'duh!' science that he misses - quantification. Yeah, it's 'duh!' that driving ability worsens in the early stages of Alzheimer's. But can it be used as a diagnostic tool? Can the nature of the decrease (decreased cognition? slowed reflexes?) lead to further studies of what parts of the brain are affected and how and in what order? Etc... etc... But you don't even know to look for those things until you have the evidence that correlation exists in the first place.
Science isn't just about the Eureka!. It's also about the slow podding duh! that builds the foundation.
You're seriously claiming that the 'lay public' didn't realise that the 'coffin nails' they were smoking might be bad for their health until scientists told them they were?
No, I'm claiming that when people who had been told smoking was bad for them saw stories that had scientists claiming it really wasn't, many of them said, "Oh, that's a relief, then." Similarly, is there anybody on the planet who doesn't know what Coca-Cola is? Not really... and yet Coca-Cola keeps advertising.
Breakfast served all day!
"in which police warn kids about the dangers of drug use â" as an article of faith,' writes Brown. 'But Dennis Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago and other researchers have shown that the program has been ineffective and may even increase drug use in some cases.'"
That is because the "warning" given were utter crap. Some drug like marijeanne were painted as black , dark, and bad as , heroine or crack. Kids are not idiot. Especially when they can nowaday read article on the net on the effect of MJ.
Given the the total failure of the War On Drugs, why would anyone assume that any component of it, including DARE, is a success?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You do know that the exact same scientists that the Tobacco Institute hired to prove smoking was good for you are now working to discredit the science of pollution control, right?
They call it "Global Warming" instead of "pollution" now, and they've already managed to convince nearly two-thirds of the US population that environmentalism is evil and bad for business (it's actually incredibly good for business, of course, just bad for oil companies).
You can pretty much assume anything Fred Singer is involved in is pure politics, and has nothing to do with science. But he's the Wall Street Journal's favorite scientist, and no stranger to the pages of the New York Times, either! He's far more influential in the White House than any real scientist will ever be.
/. is just as guilty as the duh studies, and TFA
If they have gotten rich because of it, that's the only rational reason to consider DARE a success. Maybe the people who made DARE are less stupid than it seems, and it was an undercover thing to get people to do more drugs - by insulting their intelligence and then telling them not to. More drug use, more prisoners, more cops / guards, ... $$$. I don't think it was really a conspiracy, but mostly because people intelligent enough to think of that would have made better ads.
"Many have taken the value of popular programs like DARE — in which police warn kids about the dangers of drug use — as an article of faith,' writes Brown. 'But Dennis Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago and other researchers have shown that the program has been ineffective and may even increase drug use in some cases"
Anyone who has actually sat through one of these would not be surprised that they increase drug use.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
See Ayn Rand as a prime example for a person who didn't believe into the scientific studies until she developed cancer from too much smoking.
In a country where 40% of the population still doesn't accept the theory of evolution, there is no such thing as "duh" science.
Fortunately, I expect that their inability to also grasp the reality of AGW will eventually remedy the situation in a manner suitable to please this childless, atheist misanthrope.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
think what you will about animal research, i have no desire to argue the topic right now, but there are constant studies at universities testing drug addiction (ucla a major offender) and the affects on primates. in simple terms, "i want a grant to test psychological affects of meth on a primate."
what do you *think* is going to happen? we already *know* ffs! ask a fucking tweeker to come in and lets have a chat. whats the point of all this and why are these people still getting money to document behaviours of drug addicted animals??? drives me insane
hundreds of studies to show that cell phones don't cause cancer... duh! It is non-ionizing radiation. That doesn't stop the media from reporting on a couple of bad studies that show there might be some small correlation... now even more money will be wasted on this nonsense.
A thousand years ago christians knew the world was flat and the sun/planets revolved around us. If we take anything on faith then we're no better than the religious extremists that plan their lives based on the written works of dead men that acted crazy by our standards.
Most such "Cons" are made by 100% sincere people, who delude themselves into believing their simplistic solutions have value in addressing big and complex problems.
The money can be a factor. But much less than you might think. Lucrative foolishness just happens to be guaranteed to spawn many, many imitators. That is not necessarily a sign of greed. It is at least as much a symptom of people who are often loathe to ever question apparent material success.
that the tobacco lobby spent millions in their own studies if they didn't think that people would believe them?
seeing someone who hasn't already shown themselves to be an opportunistic nut job.
Well, and it's worse. D.A.R.E. in particular is a rather cogent example, because it's an instance of the government pushing a particular policy opinion on children at a very young age in a focused program, something that they already have a vested interest in doing.
Normally, I don't think we'd be inclined to allow the government to influence our children's ethics quite so blatantly; we allow the government to enforce law based on what we think now, but generally frown on it telling us what to think later (current terrorist bullshit being a notable exception). When I was growing up, seems like that was the subject of a half-dozen Cold War era made-for-TV movies, most of which starred Robert Urich.
But that's ignored because of the supposed sure benefit of such programs. And the truth is, everyone more or less agrees that it's effective at doing *something*, whether for better or for worse. That means they agree the government is, in fact, directly influencing (a.k.a indoctrinating, by definition) children, so it can only really be that supposed tradeoff that makes it OK.
Point is that once you believe in a fallacious problem, any number of solutions can be raised to "fix" it. Unless you've actually established that the problem exists and that the fix is appropriate, the fix that gets pushed the hardest is likely going to be the one that most benefits the fixer. It's rather unlikely you'll come out on top in that deal.
I considered working on automatic speech recognition in grad school, so I took a few courses in it. It drove me crazy for a lot of reasons. First, what they do isn't very linguistically sound because they throw away way too much of the original signal and use what I think are overly-simplistic statistical methods. But what REALLY drove me crazy was the impenetrable resistance to trying anything new. In computer vision, they do all kinda of cool new stuff all the time. But in ASR, it's all cepstral coefficients and Markov random fields. The reason for the stagnation is that you can't get funding for anything more ambitious. The NSA will fund a 1 year project that is likely to get increase recognition rate from 95% to 96% (which is actually quite hard) using existing methods, but turn their nose up at an experimental 10 year project that should bring the recognition rate to 99% but with a lower probability of success. If you look at the economics, it makes sense. But it isn't very interesting science.
those are totally "duh" as well
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
TFA is not being truthful about what the research is about. For example, the question of when to take the car keys away from an Alzheimer's patient is very critically important if you are a family member. Such research is attempting to find simple tests to determine if a neurologically impaired person is still fit to drive or not. It is not simply trying to find out if Alzheimer's patients drive worse than the general population.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Science is about not taking anything for granted or assuming what may seem obvious is correct. We test and try to falsify everything. Duh Science is an oxymoron. What a useless fecking article.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Most studies are worthless anyways. Well, most studies involving people as the subject of study. We are overconfident in our own abilities to control, and account for, all of the variables. This is why you find so many studies in the "duh" category. If you pick a topic that is not in the "duh" category it is too easy to poke holes and say "but you didn't account for x, y, and z".
The point on epidurals seems out of place. I've never heard of anyone disputing that epidurals reduce pain. I do hear of people that don't want to pump that much drugs into a baby and choose to use other pain management techniques instead. Sounds reasonable to me.
But don't mind an agenda from others?
Probably only if they're liberal, right?
If we discover A is poisonous, then it is a good thing to report that to the government.
If we are trying to convince people A is poisonous, then our science is suspect because we have a big incentive to make sure the conclusion is what we desired.
"so that what is good is pushed forward and what is not is forbidden"
That is a VERY scary authoritarian attitude. Science doesn't make the value judgment of "good" or "bad." Second, it's not the government's place to forbid "bad" things to me, Mr. Orwell.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
Sherlock Holmes in
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
A. C. Doyle
Strand Magazine, October 1891
Historically, things that "everyone already knew" have been wrong enough of the time to warrant testing.
Also, things that have been shown one way with several experiments could either really be that way, or the methodology in all of the experiments could have been wrong.
It's not about demonstrating the obvious, but about demonstrating it in such a way as to reduce external noise from the system to make sure that the premise is actually sound.
People will always do things that they know to be bad for them. Smoking, drinking, fattening foods, etc. There might have been some issue as to exactly WHY they are bad, and the exact factors that cause them to be bad, but that has very little effect on someone's willingness to partake in such activities. Denis Leary was spot on when he said that you could put cigarettes into a black box with a skull and crossbones on the front, call them Tumors, and smokers would be lining up around the block to get their hands on it. We know what is bad for us. We don't need studies to tell us.
Take global warming. Maybe it's really happening as some of the conflicting studies claim it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe it might actually be good for us, maybe it won't. We don't really know for sure, but far more importantly, hardly anyone really cares. At least, most people don't care enough to make the necessary sacrifices to change and/or prevent what might or might not be happening, even if the likely result is reduced life expectancy or a depreciated lifestyle down the road. None of that is as important as today. That might be shortsighted, but it's the truth, and no matter how many billions of dollars are spent on studies and research, it's at best a lot of hot air (no pun intended).
So what if you're content with the results of a minimal amount of research in the issue and you want to solve that particular "problem". Very well, the solution may not be to conduct study after study and cram the results of that down everyone's throat. Perhaps you should just provide them with a better alternative. People, contrary to popular belief, are not addicted to carbon based fuels, they are addicted to what those fuels provide for them. The simplistic solution is to find a way to provide all those same things for just slightly less expense, and the problem will be solved in less than a decade. Instead of pouring money into studies and lobbying, spend it instead on research into reducing the cost of products that will solve the problem, and profit from the experience. That would actually be a worthwhile endevour, and more people would discover that a science education would have worthwhile benefits as a result. It doesn't help if someone thinks their science education would go toward attempting to prove that fish survive best in water.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The scientist need to be able to delude himself into believing it's still science. That's why it can't happen overnight to an entire school or branch of science, but it can happen over centuries to once respectable faculties and it can happen pretty much overnight to those faculties which are newly created.
Yes, it's insulting, but yes, it's as necessary as Monty Python was necessary to the Catholic Church.
*If* the climatologists are self-decepted clerics, they *need* to be called that. It's important that one doesn't call them mistaken or imprecise as that would obfuscate the magnitute of the problem.
As for the OP, I go with sarcasm, although it wouldn't have been sarcasm had I wrote it myself. If it's not sarcasm, I second it.
Smoking itself isn't so bad, it's certain aspects of the modern world that make smoking such a killer:
2. micro filaments from cigarette filters enter the lungs
3. lipid-peroxidation-triggering polyunsaturated fats have replaced safer saturated fats (butter, lard, and coconut oil) in the western diet. These get incorporated into the lung tissue, and contributes in some significant matter to the lung cancer epidemic. Many cases of lung cancer happen in people who don't smoke, and polyunsaturated fatty acids are the cause.
I myself have spent quite a bit of time wondering who gets to decide what wisdom is "conventional". I bet it's another case of "follow the money". Thoughts?
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I guess this is a sign for me to start updating the old blog again.
Favorite posts (not that there were a lot):
It's Not Just Bad For the Children - It's Bad for Mother Earth Too!
Breaking News! Fat People Eat Bad Food!
Breaking News! Fat People Use More Gas!
I'm sensing a pattern here..
The problem with that is in pure scientific research you often can't tell what is waste until after the research is done. For example, how much money has been "wasted" on fusion research? Maybe they'll never come up with a workable solution for fusion and you might consider all of it to have been wasted but we still have much better knowledge of the subject. If they ever do come up with something that works will it change to not wasted?
Sometimes you just have to make investments that don't have assured payouts. If you don't make those kind of investments then nothing advances.
I think given the amount of attention the subject has received over the last 50+ years that it's damn near impossible that climatologists are deluded to any great degree. They may be wrong, missing some big factor, but they're still doing science honestly to the best of their ability and are not some clerics in some religious cult.
Research is research. Wasted research is wasted research. True scientists and engineers know the difference.
Is about proving that what we know is wrong... Tenure, however, has nothing in common with interesting science. It is about confirming what our colleagues KNOW to be right.
Study dated 1998. It's probably worth looking into given the minor changes in the world since then.
Personally I'd concentrate on the most serious drugs. Life doesn't look happy for the average crystal meth user.
Can you always tell if it's wasted before the research is done?
A lot of studies, including the one about smoking in cars being bad for children, and the WHO study announcing that there may be a link between cell phones and cancer, are not really studies. Instead, they have taken some of another studies findings and chosen to interpret them in a new way or even in the same way.
The WHO study about cell-phone cancer link takes a conclusion that the original study said was statistically unlikely and says it is more likely, but does not perform any additional research.
The children-car-smoking one uses a study saying that 90% of 1300 Australians think smoking in cars with children is bad to buttress their conclusion that people should not smoke in cars with children. This is not a study, nor is it really a new analysis. Just someone being paid to write a paper.
These "DUH" studies are not really studies, just pieces of propaganda to promote a conclusion.
There exists reasonable reasoning that can and does define worthy versus unworthy research efforts. Just watch some episodes of Myth Busters, they do a great job of conducting beneficial research without getting bogged down with unnecessary or wasted effort.
Drugs Are Real Exciting Obviously!
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
You're citing a show that does experiments with (almost always) known outcomes as your evidence of conducting beneficial research.
Over a hundred years ago many people might have found research about the Brocken spectre that forms around people in a fog useless.
> You're citing a show that does experiments with (almost always) known outcomes as
> your evidence of conducting beneficial research.
No, I cited a TV show as an example of making reasoned decisions about what to research and test in order to achieve a result. It's just an example, not a gold standard.
You think there is little or no waste on MythBusters? What they air is highly edited to be entertaining and fit the time constraints. I just watched the "Aftershow" on their site and they were talking about the "dodging a bullet" episode (missed that one, I'll catch it in reruns). Jamie related how he built this elaborate bullet shield with multiple panes of plexiglass with water between them to test dodging a real bullet rather than just a paintball but they never used it because they decided they didn't want to air a real gun shooting at a real person. How much waste was that? I'll bet if you asked Jamie and Adam would say there's plenty of wasted effort on the show, they just don't put most of it on the air unless it's particularly interesting.
Waste is an inescapable piece of the human condition. Perfection is something to strive for but will seldom if ever be achieved.
I really enjoy the prevalent assumption pervading duh science that all correlations are causal in nature. Perhaps 'journalism' plays a part in this, but all too often it is the core 'argument'.
Your example ("Aftershow", wrt Jamie's elaborate bullet shield) identifies some avoidable waste. Was the "real gun shooting at a real person" test necessary for the result (the show), no. Some up-front thought would have negated the need for that effort and cost, and I would bet that Jamie and Adam (along with their lawyers) would agree it was some money they could have saved their investors. Is all research waste avoidable, no. But clearly some of the "Duh" research, that consumes public funds, is.
I think in a lot of cases you have to look deeper than the duh results reported to the public. Maybe the work deepens our understanding of why and quantifies it so we can make reasonable predictions. Knowledge can be useful in ways that we don't know about until we attain the knowledge. Things that you might consider wasteful are often considered vital by someone else. Who's to judge? When I was younger I used to be idealistic like you but I came to realize that most people are just doing the best they can and that's all that can be expected of them.
You seem to be coming around to my original thoughts on this. Clearly you aren't advocating unfettered waste, and I have agreed all along that reasonable research should be funded. Knowledge can indeed have multiple benefits, and not everyone experiences each benefit.
BTW, I'm at least your age, and since you detected my idealism, I must ask: what happened to yours?
My idealism still exists. It's just tempered by pragmatism and realism.
One other thought I had is that if you don't have a certain amount of waste in scientific research you run the risk of missing important knowledge. Plenty of discoveries are accidental or serendipitous and are not the intention of the original research.
Born in 1952.
Time for bed.
The seemingly obvious has to be tested, human intuition and memory (which is unreliable) is not very useful to get facts straight about everything we think about.
I think the "duh" bit here is more what is being studied and that it is being studied again. Sure, anything (on some level) deserves studying times and again, but if we think about it, there must be so many things that would be very important to know, why study fairly irrelevant bits and pieces again first before getting to these?
Well, unfortunately, we have hordes of social scientists and other students that need to further their career with the next university degree, have so-and-so much time for it, and usually nearly no funds or cooperation by the government or companies. So the scope of these studies is often something that has been done before (more or less) and often not something anyone needed to know.
Did I just read that a scientist said: 'Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,' ?
I really don't think that the number of studies published is why people realize that smoking is bad. Politics doesn't work that way, and people certainly don't. I hope I do not need to explain this, but please let me know if you do not understand, and I'd be happy to do so.
Someone mod the parent up. That paper is really worth reading.
Many of your points are, in fact, very new additions to common sense, made possible only by scientific study. The two most glaring of these are the "don't shit where you eat" and "wash your hands after taking out the garbage." Up until about 150 years ago, people regularly shit in their drinking water. That is why the lifespan was so short in the 18th century and before. Washing your hands for health reasons has, as a concept, only been around since around the turn from the 19th to the 20th centuries. Image what would of happened if nobody had challenged these common sense arguments:
The Earth is flat.
The Earth is shaped like a tabernacle.
The Earth is the center of the universe.
Disease is sent by god.
Man cannot fly.
As my physics teacher said: if you know the result before you do it it's not an experiment - it's a demonstration.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Research is research. Wasted research is wasted research. True scientists and engineers know the difference.
It's always good to hear from a time traveler from the golden future who knows exactly how everything is going to turn out. I don't suppose you have any stock tips?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Waste is an inescapable piece of the human condition. Perfection is something to strive for but will seldom if ever be achieved.
Two words: Natalie Portman.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Is all research waste avoidable, no. But clearly some of the "Duh" research, that consumes public funds, is.
It's like they say about advertising: fifty per cent of it works, but no-one knows which fifty per cent.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Don't be stupid. Environmentalism has costs.
There exists reasonable reasoning that can and does define worthy versus unworthy research efforts. Just watch some episodes of Myth Busters, they do a great job of conducting beneficial research without getting bogged down with unnecessary or wasted effort.
"Reasonable reasoning"? Is that as opposed to unreasonable reasoning? Could you tell me the reason that some reasoning is reasonable and some reasoning is unreasonable? Or is that unreasonable of me to ask?
No left turn unstoned.
We knew smoking was bad for you when I was a little kid during World War II, and it was proven in my junior high science classes. So why did our doctor smoke and recommend that my mother not quit? I was at Vanderbilt when the famous Surgeon General's Report came out, and his daughter, a student there, was photographed smoking in public, below the age of 21 at which it was legal, after that.
Of course the "science" was rigged for years before and after that highly published scientific evidence. The tobacco, silicone breast implant, and other big companies later prevailed upon the Supreme Court to lay down threshold standards for both "scientific" and non-scientific "expert" evidence under Federal Rules of Evidence 701-704 under which nothing that hasn't been repeatedly "peer reviewed" can ever be told to a jury, which is fine for some things but how many studies get published or reviewed until somebody faces substantial liability for poisoning a lot of kids with neurotoxin pesticides or lead compounds from burning car batteries, and concentrations of serious brain damage where that happens are still not admissible in evidence. How many scientists are really going to publish and peer review something until it starts getting some big company sued, at which point the money's all on one side for years. Then we have drug after drug allegedly scientifically tested and approved by the FDA only to be discovered to have devastating side effects nobody told us about and pulled off the market, and other classified as "natural" and not even subject to the FDA that turn out to be dangerous, too, because pushing them without sufficient proper testing is profitable. Many, many real things that come in in litigation just don't happen enough or involve enough insured risk to get them studied enough to be considered "scientifically" or "statistically" significant, but it shouldn't take that to prove that the wheel should not fall off your new or five year old truck, or that a child too young to understand that or an oath has been molested or otherwise hideously abused, and I know some such cases well that the insurance companies got the courts to foul up for that and all future cases. Something happened in one of 212 identical simultaneous repetitions of a long-accepted chemistry experiment my first day in college lab, I didn't do anything, and neither the PH.D. department head present nor anyone else has ever been able to explain why mine exploded. Then, of course, there are the delightful discoveries that the long-accepted science of arson detection and bullet metallurgical identification, probably right much of the time, could go wildly wrong and this not be discovered until after the trial and execution. Never mind certain scientific, and certain religious, certainties either of which are impossible to about one over 1 followed by about twenty billion billion zeroes making both theories practically impossible and faith-based but only one admits it. .
Heh. Buy low, sell high.
An example of reasonable reasoning would be to fund a research effort because proven scientists and engineers think it is worthy, rather than to fund a research effort because a politician or a marketing guy says to do so.
to others. Not a personal act such as smoking or eating fatty, salty or sugary foods. There are many totalitarians who would like to ban those things. Funny, these same people probably protested against the PATRIOT Act, not seeing their own hypocrisy.
Even then, that's a government value judgment. Science can say "X has Y effect." It is the government's job to decide whether "Y effect" is a good or bad thing. Arctic ice is breaking up, is it good or bad? I'm being told it's bad. But will be the first time in modern history shipping will be able to go through there, saving time and energy. So maybe it's good. That's a value judgment, not for science to decide.
Well, they definitely did that when they denied all the tobacco industry studies showing smoking isn't bad for you. And why do they continue to deny all the "scientific" research done by the Intelligent Design crowd?
There is a difference here. One is science for the sake of science, which is then used by governments to set policy, and (even better) people to help them make better decisions. I think that's great.
Another is "science" for the goal of influencing policy in a certain direction, exactly as the tobacco industry did, exactly as the IDers do, and to a large extent the environmental movement is quite guilty. The person in the article flat-out admitted that he is of the latter type, believing in agenda-driven (and thus in my opinion biased) "science."
Just because something seems plausible doesn't mean it is true. You need to conduct a controlled experiment to measure if its true and if it is how true is it. So in the case study "that young men who are obese have lower odds of getting married than thinner peers" it isn't a slam dunk that its true. It certainly seems likely, but what if something interesting like all thin guys were deciding not to get married so they could party longer, and only decided to get married when they started to get fat. Or being thin made you more likely to be gay.
If you believe in DUH science, you don't really believe in science. If you haven't it tested it, you can't say its true.
Bo Derek. Maybe I'm a bit older than you.
Because it is proportionate to readership ?