Comment Re: Tldr (Score 1) 269
This is called brand extension - people that know marketing (say proctor and gamble) know better than to do it. It reduces the value of the brand. Much better to create new brands..
This is called brand extension - people that know marketing (say proctor and gamble) know better than to do it. It reduces the value of the brand. Much better to create new brands..
The signal to noise in the research field varies a bit - but over all it is so bad that most medical and nutritional work is best ignored until replicated.
The norm is there are a few teams doing good work - but most of the papers are grant money prostitution. This muddies the waters for people trying to learn about some topic - reinforcing the accepted narrative in order to keep the grant gravy-train flowing.
A couple of examples:
There is a long list of rodent papers with titles such as "High fat diet causes x-y or z bad things" But when one digs into the paper, the contents of the diet are not specified. Digging further one finds the supplementary information - where only a part number is listed. Pulling up the part number revels that the so-called high fat diet has no fat - instead is loaded with sugar and hydrogenated vegetable oil. (If this was real science the diets would come from one lot (or at least one company and only the single variable would be changed and they would run an independent analysis on the diet contents.) The truth of the matter is the outcome was decided before the research began.
Even in engineering I've talked with students that were told not to write up disturbing results as it would embarrass other researchers. One student was blackmailed with losing his Phd if he didn't leave out the failure of a 'student-T test'( a statistical test that looks at distribution validity).
Academia - even in engineering has become ever more politicized and is about supporting narratives of the biggest ego on the faculty rather than finding truth.
Be skeptical - most of what we know is not from theory but form endless trial and error.
Yes - the 'other guy' should walk or bike... that is why we have cities full of empty buses driving in circles and traffic squeezed to provide unused bike lanes...
What is really strange is a lot of sidewalks are not used - yet they ban bikes. Mixing bikes and cars is just stupid.
Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.