Re: Terrible threat to science - a Grim warning
- From: cd12dc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:20:49 -0700 (PDT)
On Feb 19, 6:28 am, Peter Brooks <Peter.H.M.Bro...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A warning from the Telegraph - also, it seems, a bit of nominative
determinism:
"
Why beer harms science
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Beer is bad for science, according to a pioneering study of the
effects of alcohol on creativity in research.
Although scientists spend much time agonising over how to measure
scientific productivity and revealing what influences it, none of them
have looked into the effects of social life.
A glass and bottle of Czech beer Pilsner Urquell
A glass and bottle of Czech beer Pilsner Urquell
One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking
alcohol - around two billion are thought to partake - and Dr Tomas
Grim, who is a behavioural ecologist at Palacky University, Czech
Republic, decided to investigate, reporting the discovery that it
harms science in the prestigious ecological journal Oikos.
In Europe, most alcohol is consumed as beer, according to the World
Health Organisation. "Based on well known negative effects of alcohol
consumption on cognitive performance, I predicted negative
correlations between beer consumption and several measures of
scientific performance," Dr Grim says.
Like his fellow ecologists, who tend to focus on a single species in a
single population, to eliminate non alcohol related confounding
factors, he focused on one particularly impressive country of beer
swillers.
Using a survey of the publications since 1980 of avian ecologists from
the Czech Republic, which has the highest per capita beer consumption
rate in the world (157 litres each year, or 176 pints), he discovered
"that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower
numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a
surrogate measure of paper quality)."
advertisement
He has confidence in the findings because nine in every 10 avian
ecologists he approached were happy to provide data. Whether the one
in 10 who declined to take part were too busy drinking in the local
pub is not known.
In addition Dr Grim found the same predicted trends in comparison of
two separate geographic areas within the Czech Republic that are also
known to differ in beer consumption rates.
"These correlations are consistent with the possibility that leisure
time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of
scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and
citation biases."
He tells The Daily Telegraph that he has received encouraging
reactions from 30 scientists around the world. "One of the letters
sums nicely what actually was my main aim: "I find your study
fascinating because it is so rare to see anyone willing to analyse
what probably has the greatest impact on research results: ourselves
and our own behaviour as researchers. I hope to see more studies like
this in the future."
Dr Grim calls on his peers to extend his pioneering work on the Czech
Republic to other alcohol drinking nations.
I think the underlying reason is that scientific thinking is based on
logic and falsifiability, while social thinking is based on norms and
easy defendability (usually by not offering any falsifiable aspects in
ones comments). So the more social one is, the less he or she is
usually into the basics of science. Also, beer is something one has to
get used to - if you have no reason to drink beer, because beer
drinkers will always criticise anything you say (falsifiable = easy
target) even if you drink it, thus excluding you, then you won't try
for long.
There are a few "universal geniuses", though, who apparently managed
to get both together - maybe by using the one kind of thinking in
their work and the other kind of thinking in social (and career)
functions.
.
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