It seems to me that a large number of statistical surveys and studies are self-evident… but I guess nothing is above scientific validization. That, to me, is the crux of the problem, and it leads not only to a waste of time and effort in performance of actual tests, but it undermines our own sense of ourselves, in our ability to judge without needing or feeling the need to be super-cautious. “Before I order from the menu, let me quickly survey 5 years of customers and deduce what is the best choice.” Where’s the adventure? Our vitality? Life didn’t evolve scientifically, it evolved vitally, intuitively, and now with a great invention of ours—science—we whore it out and let it replace our imagination. It must be very enervating when one wants to just write an opinionated paper, but s/he gets bogged down in finding sources to cite, must read articles, when the subject area is very far from the hard sciences.
You may be thinking I created this post just to give some validity to the title. The title may stand on its own, but with a fair amount of linguistic ambiguity.
Examples (I will edit and add examples as they are produced for me):
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/08/08/psychologist-facebook-can-turn-kids-into-narcissists/ – though I don’t know if Larry Rosen did an intensive study or just is using his experience base to make this claim… hopefully the latter!
