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> And I do mind when laypersons are taught by mainstream media that this is science. What is your definition for "science"? To me, this is very much science.

> And I do mind when laypersons are taught by mainstream media that this is science. What is your definition for "science"? To me, this is very much science. Starting off with a hypothesis, gathering/analyzing data, controlling for what you can, and concluding your findings with a number of caveats detailing the limitations of your research. Unfortunately, not everything is a hard science, and even those sciences we consider hard sciences break down when you get deep enough. I think your suggestion is rather dangerous and implies some arbitrary threshold where we become capable of studying something. A simple example would by psychology. Whenever a psychology study comes out, people are quick to yell that it is useless, that there are flaws, etc. However, without these psychology studies, where would we begin when studying mental health issues? How many people would be left to suffer untreated if we were to wait for the biology, chemistry, neurology, etc. fields to become advanced enough for us to detect with certainty the presence of a mental illness? It's easy to belittle an study that turns up nothing or belongs to a soft science, but as the saying goes, "all models are wrong, but some models are useful."

bigfudge 7y ago
Worth remembering that astronomy is largely an Observational science. It doesn’t make it less interesting or ‘hard’
littlestymaar 7y ago
> I think your suggestion is rather dangerous and implies some arbitrary threshold where we become capable of studying something. The threshold isn't so much about when we become capable of "studying something" but more about when we become capable of claiming something. In that particular case, we have so many things at stakes, it becomes really tough to find anything useful. How can you know you're not measuring the correlation between weather and crime? Day of the week and crime? Season and crime? Because season and weather are related, you can't just “control for both” (unfortunately, many people will do it no matter what…). What if air pressure had an impact on crime? It's somehow correlated to air pollution so you could mistake it for an influence of pollution itself. When just asking the question reveals that the answer would need fancy statistics (some not being invented yet, AFAIK, or at least not mainstream). If you realize that, you should just find another problem, or maybe rescope your problem. If you don't realize that, and still go on with your regular methodology, your results are doomed from the start, and you aren't really doing more science than youtubers attempting to find the recipe for perpetual motion. [I'm not talking about this specific paper here, just answering about your remarks about threshold]. When it comes to this paper, I would say that the level of accuracy of their published result (“0.14% increase”) is dubious. In a lab with controlled conditions, such figures aren't that easy to get, in a real world observation of human behavior, it's looks fishy.
- yearofthespider 7y ago
  You've already made clear that you feel that only things with extremely huge effects (ones noticeable by you, in particular) should be studied and all other research should be defunded. So who gives a shit what you have to say about this study? Save everybody time and shut the fuck up.

bigfudge 7y ago

Worth remembering that astronomy is largely an Observational science. It doesn’t make it less interesting or ‘hard’

littlestymaar 7y ago

> I think your suggestion is rather dangerous and implies some arbitrary threshold where we become capable of studying something. The threshold isn't so much about when we become capable of "studying something" but more about when we become capable of claiming something. In that particular case, we have so many things at stakes, it becomes really tough to find anything useful. How can you know you're not measuring the correlation between weather and crime? Day of the week and crime? Season and crime? Because season and weather are related, you can't just “control for both” (unfortunately, many people will do it no matter what…). What if air pressure had an impact on crime? It's somehow correlated to air pollution so you could mistake it for an influence of pollution itself. When just asking the question reveals that the answer would need fancy statistics (some not being invented yet, AFAIK, or at least not mainstream). If you realize that, you should just find another problem, or maybe rescope your problem. If you don't realize that, and still go on with your regular methodology, your results are doomed from the start, and you aren't really doing more science than youtubers attempting to find the recipe for perpetual motion. [I'm not talking about this specific paper here, just answering about your remarks about threshold]. When it comes to this paper, I would say that the level of accuracy of their published result (“0.14% increase”) is dubious. In a lab with controlled conditions, such figures aren't that easy to get, in a real world observation of human behavior, it's looks fishy.

yearofthespider 7y ago
You've already made clear that you feel that only things with extremely huge effects (ones noticeable by you, in particular) should be studied and all other research should be defunded. So who gives a shit what you have to say about this study? Save everybody time and shut the fuck up.