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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?
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We have too much Duh the population.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Of course. Scientist are positively rolling in cash. That's after all the whole reason why they are doing science. They could do an honest job for less money and go into banking. But no, it is all about the grants.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
Thats only because all the ones they built in the swamps sank.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Well, the third castle fell over, burned down, and sank into the swamp.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
Probably by too many posts here lately that stated that scientist would fake anything just to keep the funding up - see the climate discussions. The "they do it all for the funding" - meme is an insult to every scientist in my opinion. Not sure about the OP - my sarcasm detector might need recalibration, I grant you that.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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
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's always the problem -- being outstanding enough to make a difference and not so extremist to still go along. No person on earth is able to correctly access all scientific papers affecting the own persuasions and beliefs, not even the most of it. Every single person on earth, as smart and educated she might be, is still completely ignorant and uneducated about most topics of science, and thus prone to act stupid on things she could know better. There are two ways to cope with it: one is to adhere to the opinion that gets voiced most often and loudly and take this for a majority opinion, or to just follow the own gut feeling and hope not to be wrong too often and about too dangerous things.
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.