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What is the value of such weak claims, other than possibly stimulating a research entity to execute a rigorous experiment? Or as marketing fluff for companies t
by 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
What is the value of such weak claims, other than possibly stimulating a research entity to execute a rigorous experiment? Or as marketing fluff for companies that would benefit from making such claims? Or confirmation bias for those of us who suspect we drink too much coffee?
Words like 'may be' (the information is not conclusive)
and 'linked' (we don't know if it's causal)
make this (in my view) un-newsworthy.
- throwaway894345 6y agoI agree, and that seems to be the majority of science-related content here on HN.
- totalZero 6y agoPublication, future citations, and career advancement.
- boplicity 6y agoThere is an important role for research that sets up further research. Without these exploratory studies, it is difficult to determine where to make a larger investment in a more rigorous study. You'll note that most papers are rather explicit about this, though this is often underplayed by journalists. The article does say this: > Further research is still warranted to explore the underlying mechanisms and active compounds in coffee. > If the association is further proved to be a causal effect, men might be encouraged to increase their coffee consumption to potentially decrease the risk of prostate cancer.”
- pxhb 6y agoExactly this. Science/research is largely incremental.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rand_r 6y agoDespite us knowing that correlation does not equal causation for forever, these weak studies keep getting funded and popping up. The only finding you could make with such a study is to disprove something. If the hypothesis was that coffee prevented cancer, and you found no correlation between coffee and cancer, then that would _disprove_ the claim. I understand the common person being sucked into these alluring study titles, but it's disappointing that scientists keep producing this kind of empty work.
- notJim 6y agoI would guess they crop up repeatedly because they are cheap to fund. Fewer funders who want to put a bunch of money and time into a long, expensive study that may produce nothing. Instead fund 10 cheap studies that might produce a headline :(
- Frost1x 6y agoI try not to shun incremental research because I understand there is value in it. Unfortunately, a large portion of it is frankly very uninteresting and these 'may be' sort of weak links are a necessity to continue research and progress by appeasing the purseholders. Often these sort of results are picked up by journalists and overemphasized but there are inherent pressures for researchers, their supervisors, and everything up the finance food chain to do the same sort of marketing as well. You have to make sure the people who pay the bills have some sort of progress report that shows improvement and ROI. The current way of coping with this pressure is showing small promising incremental updates on low risk studies regularly and then doing the interesting research with any slack time you have to hopefully discover the next real breakthrough or leap. Breakthroughs are often non-incremental and are the real allure of research and science, at least to me. Unfortunately, society doesn't like seeing big risks taken, resources spent, and little to show beyond the, still quite valuable, knowledge of "this didn't work." The vast majority of researchers hate small incremental research and much prefer to use their creativity to take larger incremental leaps or even paradigm/perspective shifting leaps. If we want to stay ahead of the world in terms of research we need to be willing to take bigger risks and accept failure on those risks. Scientific progress is largely at the mercy of the business and economic culture it's conducted within.
- breck 6y agoShut up and let me enjoy my sixth cup of coffee. ;) Sadly we have to suffer with articles like this until the coming paradigm shift to better publishers.