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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Scientific Method: how not to do it right

My thanks to Stan H. for pointing me to this post on Tom Wark's Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog. Tom does a brilliant job pointing out the way anti-alcohol types do science: conclusions first, research second...and a poor second at that. But there are always researchers lined up, willing to take the bucks of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

I don't see anything I could add. Go read the post, and think -- think!! -- the next time you read about New Dry statistics and studies in the newspaper. They're coming out of "science" like this.

4 comments:

MatthewShaw said...

Absolutely absurd. Lew, maybe you can answer this -- did public schools stop teaching the scientific method sometime shortly before I enrolled in high school? And since when were 18-year olds credible sources on anything other than pop music, cell phones, and whorish attire?

Chibe said...

Matt- The irony here is that 18-year-olds should be a credible source of one thing: WHERE TO SCORE BOOZE WHEN YOU'RE UNDERAGE! And unless things have really, REALLY changed in the last decade, I've got to think it's still easier to convince somebody's older sister to buy you a bottle of Boones Farm than it is to order it online (in which case your $3 bottle of hooch is now $17 after shipping).

Lew Bryson said...

Indeed, Russ, and as the jump link in Tom's points out, the question is not whether under-agers can ORDER booze on-line, it's whether they can get it delivered. It's much more likely that mom or dad or big sister will order the booze for themselves...and then the underager will sneak some. And is that a question of how the booze got in the house in the first place? Not at all.

Booze wholesalers don't like hearing it, but the claim that they are better at stopping underage drinking than on-line ordering is pure-D bullshit. Most underage drinkers -- it's been proven over and over -- get their booze at the closest source: their home fridge/wine cabinet/liquor shelf. How the booze got there has nothing to do with it.

Chuck Cowdery said...

This also shows what happens when so-called journalists just retype press releases under their own byline. Of course, you wouldn't expect someone who doesn't know what science is to know what journalism is either.