• XxFemboy_Stalin_420_69xX [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    16 hours ago
    tinfoil hat ass take

    i feel like headlines that take the form of “study: obvious thing everyone knows” are a kind of psy-op to get people to disregard the importance of science and think of it as a waste of money/resources

    • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      15 hours ago

      When I was studying torture at Mossad University as a part of my dream of working at Langley, I remember reading scientific articles and their critiques. A common thread was things like “you should use more than 1 cell line to see that it isn’t a quirk of that particular line.” So you’d get these articles that are like Hormone Promoter AFHKJLSJHDKJ-1 Upregulation Due to AOSIDJA-234Benzyne-1-S Not Significantly Different in OIUREWYIUWBVW Cell Line and AOSIDJ-324 Cell Line that no sane person would ever read for entertainment. If you were, in particular, a grad student/PhD hopeful/actively researching that field you would need that as a reference that you dissect for methods, hypothesis formation, etc.

      Which is to say that it was pretty safe to assume that the OIUREWYIUWBVW Cell Line was representative, but a scientific inquiry is an endeavor to isolate variables and rid your work of assumptions, so sometimes you do have to do the painstaking work of retracing your steps with more study into teasing apart variables you didn’t think of previously. So when your work is something salacious and attention grabbing you’ll find that obvious thing in that test that isolates it so that it can be used as a citation. Not because the work was trying to be groundbreaking, but because in peer review, if your abstract says “it’s common knowledge that AFHKJLSJHDKJ-1 Upregulation Due to AOSIDJA-234Benzyne-1-S is common throughout humans.” you’re going to get lit up with everyone saying “well, you don’t know that…” But if you can cite PhD Student et. al. 2025 and the exacting method of asserting the obvious, it becomes more rigorous.

      Consider the lengths you have to go to in order to create a proof that 2 + 2 = 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-pL2J0ZB8g

      So if you want to do the immortal science of Sociology, the study of Socialism I assume, they’re going to want you to apply the same rigorous standard to how your studies are presented.