What is Digg?83 Comments
- bhaelochon, on 02/02/2008, -7/+53Which means that this study sucks too? Does suckage invalidate the results of a study? Oh no, paradox!
- trogdor282, on 02/02/2008, -2/+21Luckily my head was built with paradox-absorbing crumple zones.
- wwwdot1jesdotus, on 02/02/2008, -1/+184 out of 5 people think the 5th one is an idiot.
- tdowling, on 02/02/2008, -0/+16It's not the studies that suck, but the media who report 15-page academic journal articles (which are rarely black-and-white and are there to spawn more research) in one or two sentences.
- Error601, on 02/02/2008, -0/+13Didn't Kirk use that to destroy an evil computer?
- BingoPower, on 02/02/2008, -1/+14I'm not against studies per se, but when the media reports them they can sometimes come across from nameless bodies of so-called experts. You know the kind "A recent study by scientists shows that x = y", or, "A think-tank has released a study showing that y = z". And that's about as far as we get.
More worrying is when money is provided to "experts" to produce a study on which biscuits are best for dunking in tea.
***** cancer and AIDS, we need to know REAL stuff!! - honus, on 02/02/2008, -0/+11And sometimes it's not even the reporter's fault, but instead the editor who writes the headline or byline to be more sexy and shocking.
- sgiffy, on 02/02/2008, -0/+11The problem isn't so much the studies, but the media's reporting of such studies. Science is often nitpicky, boring, and obsessive, but is from that that the really cool ***** gets discovered.
- phronko, on 02/02/2008, -2/+12This isn't a study. It's some guy rambling about how smart he is because he thinks he predicted the results of every study before they came out, so they're too obvious, and we're addicted to science.
Personally, I'd rather have "obvious" things verified by careful examination and logic, when possible, than go with a hunch and hope it's right. - hackiavelli, on 02/02/2008, -4/+13Even though I agree with him this guy seriously sucks at persuasive writing.
- jasondragon, on 02/02/2008, -1/+9Logical conclusion: Stop studying things?
/facepalm - pwallroth, on 02/02/2008, -1/+8One of my harvard professors dedicated a whole class to explaining that studies were to tell us what to think rather than gauge what the public is thinking. This is particularly true and important to keep in mind during presidential elections.
- cuoops, on 02/02/2008, -1/+6This guy must read Digg.
- Erich100, on 02/02/2008, -0/+5Studies just like the Nobel Prize can't be trusted because someone is paying and someone is making a profit.
You have to balance who is paying and what do they have to gain. - HairyFotr, on 02/02/2008, -0/+4You didn't know you had one because It's an easter egg in your brainware... but just you wait untill it hatches... My bet is that alien creatures will start crawling out your orifices or something equaly strange.
Quick! Think of enough crazy paradoxes to crack the egg before the aliens mature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes - Mr.Gone, on 02/02/2008, -4/+898% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
- HairyFotr, on 02/02/2008, -0/+4And 3 out of 4 people make 75% of the population
Also, 56.7% of all studies are made up on the spot - phronko, on 02/02/2008, -3/+6So out of thousands upon thousands of studies, you can come up with a handful that were poorly done or performed by fraudulent scientists. Therefore, all science is junk science.
Seems logical to me.
And who even brought up environmental science? - OneLess, on 02/02/2008, -1/+4Does the San Francisco Chronicle often contain articles that read like they were written by an 18 year old who was distracted by WoW at the time?
- TheTaoOfBill, on 02/02/2008, -0/+3Everything I tell you is a lie.
- uncertainty, on 02/02/2008, -0/+3I agree. And even when the media uses legitimate studies, they fail to understand how correlation does not imply causation.
- GalacticXenu, on 02/02/2008, -0/+2Because studies are based on research, not what the rabble thinks is true.
- joker10687, on 02/02/2008, -0/+2hey gosh what a cool article
- octophobic, on 02/03/2008, -0/+2Studies are OK but it's the people who report them that suck. When someone says that they found a "statistical significance" between X and Y they could be describing something that only occurs 1 out of 1000 times. The reporter isn't going to tell you that and they might not even understand it themselves.
- Sil369, on 02/02/2008, -0/+2True tdowling & honus. It's Entertainment Tonight for real world news.
- jeffsback2223, on 02/02/2008, -1/+3Not mine though. My head hurts!
- akatherder, on 02/02/2008, -1/+3It's not a paradox. The title of the article is that "many" studies suck. Not all studies suck.
- la7crosse11, on 02/02/2008, -1/+3Sorry to be a number 4 dick, but that's not irony. Reference this...
http://www.cracked.com/article_15664_9-words-that- ... - Archimboldo, on 02/02/2008, -0/+2It's not a study, but he does have a point. Studies only answer the questions you pose. All too often the questions aren't nuanced enough or do not account for the endless variables which affect the thing you are really interested in. _Good_ studies are stratified and are interpreted by people who know the limits of the study. As is often the case, more important than a good answer is a good question.
- Pinmonkey555, on 02/02/2008, -0/+2Best article ever. Greatest example of his point of is that retarded lolcats study, god that was dumb.
- akatherder, on 02/02/2008, -1/+3No that's not irony, that's referred to as "typical".
- drachasor, on 02/02/2008, -3/+5"If you're ignorant of the history of environmentalism in the USA, and you wonder why no one believes you "Global Warming" *****.....now you know why. Most "studies" don't prove jack ***** because they are done be people with an agenda."
Said by the guy who clearly has an anti-environmental science agenda. Please.
I trust the science over you, because scientific studies get replicated and if mistakes are found they get fixed. There's a large body of work out there that shows global warming is happening and that we are affecting our environment. We certainly are causing the extinction of many species as well (and forests are important for many reasons beyond the Spotted Owl). So even if what you said is all true, which I doubt, those are but the rare scientific studies that were done poorly or fraudulently, and they were found out to be such -- how? By science! - inactive, on 02/02/2008, -0/+1Do not forget wide-spread corruption plays its part here as well. Follow the trail and do your research.
- RobotBuddha, on 02/03/2008, -0/+1There's a lot that bugged me in his rant. The apparent inability to tell the difference between a study and a writer trying to dumb something down to the general level of public understanding was the most galling.
- Error601, on 02/02/2008, -0/+1My two favorite:
There's an "XXX every XXX minutes" as if the event in question is a random distribution in time and victim.
Percentages of small numbers. 1 event last year, two events this year, 100% INCREASE! - Sil369, on 02/02/2008, -0/+1Ya, too many run-on sentences.... paragraph long.
- AsSubtleAsABrik, on 02/02/2008, -0/+1I believe it's "paradoxen." Well, it's more fun to say at least.
- briguymaine, on 02/02/2008, -2/+3sounds like a news article from the Onion.
- RobotBuddha, on 02/03/2008, -0/+1Man, you should go tell scientists about this "peer review" and "reproducibility" idea. I'm sure they'll be shocked, instead of just telling you that's standard procedure and every now and then something slips through the cracks. Usually due to laymen freaking out before the scientists have had a chance to actually do their job.
- BigBill62629, on 02/03/2008, -0/+1You are correct sir!
- bruce86, on 02/03/2008, -0/+1Its called bean piling, you need to reaffirm the known common knowlege before you can discover new things. That is why there are so many innane studies. Because with science, you can't base science on non-science just because you think its obivious. Because what if the obvious is wrong? then all your result you based your study on would be invalid.
Just incase you haven't notice, common knowlege is sometimes wrong. Like to get accurate results, newtonian phsyics really just doesn't cut it. Additionally light is a wave AND a particle. If we didn't research the obivious we would still think newtonian physics apply unversially or that light is still only a particle.
It the scientific method *****, Know it. - ccrt6y, on 02/03/2008, -0/+1this is just a joke and an excellent way of spend 350000 dollars.
- 4d669, on 02/02/2008, -1/+2Someone had to snap sooner or later. I remember reading a study that said looking at boobs could expand your lifespan by 5 years.
- Jubilation43, on 02/02/2008, -1/+2someone probably already said this, but:
I would agree more wholeheartedly had he not been yelling at me the whole time. - RobotBuddha, on 02/03/2008, -0/+1Easier said than done. It's very rare for someone to graduate high school with the tools to do so. And it's not even that surprising to see someone get out of a university without any improvement to that state.
- montrealfilmguy, on 02/02/2008, -0/+1A guy is reading the newspaper on the bus
Front page says:Study shows a man gets hit by a car in New-york every half-hour.
The fellow next to him says "Poor guy "
Ba-doom-boom!
I've been saying this for quite some time now.On the same morning one time,two different papers here in Montreal showed complete opposite studies,one saying people in Quebec ate WAYYYY too much junk food,the other saying people in Quebec ate really good nutricious food.Michael Ironside showed up and my head exploded. - hackiavelli, on 02/02/2008, -4/+5The bald eagle coming back after DDT's ban is, what, a coincidence?
- clpo13, on 02/04/2008, -0/+1This sounds like the perfect research project. "Hey, let's do a study...about studies! Brilliant!"
- RobotBuddha, on 02/03/2008, -0/+1There was a good one not too long ago which looked at how unreliable meta-analysis was as a predictive tool. Nice information, but the popular press all picked it up as "OMG! Scientists admit they're frauds!"
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