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Tag: evidence

If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Blog Post

I don’t know why, but even as a young person I never could make sense of the saying, “seeing is believing”. Seeing, vision, is nothing more than a data collection instrument, not an arbiter of insight. I saw my wife frown at me the other day, for example, after I claimed to have washed the dishes so thoroughly that no spot of grease could be left behind. I have made this claim before and been incorrect, so the frown, the data, triggered an anticipation of being rebuffed. However, nothing of that sort followed. I asked, Why the frown?” She responded, “I just cut my finger”. The frown was obvious, the cause unclear. I believed I was about to be reprimanded and missed the chance to notice her accident.  This story suggests that a truer aphorism might be, instead, then, that “believing is seeing”.

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Less Research Is Needed

The most over-used and under-analyzed statement in the academic vocabulary is surely “more research is needed”.

These four words, occasionally justified when they appear as the last sentence in a Masters dissertation, are as often to be found as the coda for a mega-trial that consumed the lion’s share of a national research budget, or that of a Cochrane review which began with dozens or even hundreds of primary studies and progressively excluded most of them on the grounds that they were “methodologically flawed”.

Yet however large the trial or however comprehensive the review, the answer always seems to lie just around the next empirical corner.

With due respect to all those who have used “more research is needed” to sum up months or years of their own work on a topic, this ultimate academic cliché is usually an indicator that serious scholarly thinking on the topic has ceased. It is almost never the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from a set of negative, ambiguous, incomplete or contradictory data.

Recall the classic cartoon sketch from your childhood. Kitty-cat, who seeks to trap little bird Tweety Pie, tries to fly through the air.  After a pregnant mid-air pause reflecting the cartoon laws of physics, he falls to the ground and lies with eyes askew and stars circling round his silly head, to the evident amusement of his prey. But next frame, we see Kitty-cat launching himself into the air from an even greater height.  “More attempts at flight are needed”, he implicitly concludes.

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