« The Power of Framing & Optimism | Main | Quote du Jour »
Latest Stories
- Excel Wankers and Recession Averages
- Sorry, New York is Closed. Check Back Later.
- Catching Falling 2009 Earnings Estimate Knife
- Survivorship Bias in Global Markets
- Talking Positions on a Lazy-ish Retirement Portfolio
April 26, 2006
Scientists Are Clueless
Scientists are apparently clueless, or at least that's the message from some fun journal analysis done by a Polish business professor. After all, look at how much more often they're surprised by their results than are their colleages in social sciences:- The word 'surprising' appears 12 times more frequently in the natural sciences than in standard English and 1.3 times more frequently than in social sciences, arts and humanities.
- The word 'unexpected' appears 39 times and 2.2 times more frequently in the natural sciences than, respectively, in standard English and in non-science academic writing.
- Words such as 'happy', 'unhappy' or 'ugly' occur at lower frequencies in the natural sciences than elsewhere
Sphere It
| 
Digg it
| 
Bookmark it
| 
Stumble it
| 
Facebook it
As far as articles being replete w/ adjectives like 'surprising' and 'unexpected,' I'll make the trivial point that there's a selection bias in what gets published ... And in addition to words such as 'happy' and 'ugly,' I'd also bet that a word such as 'salmagundi' occurs at a lower frequency in the natural sciences than elswhere.
John -- You're right, of course, and there is no point in reading overly much into something clearly intended as a bit of whimsy. Nevertheless, it is interesting that words like "surprising" show up so much more often in the science literature than in the non-science lit.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that scientists actually test things and social scientists merely confirm their own biases :)
One can imagine the scientific community's response, natch: "The surprisingly ugly interpretations of this study have made us unexpectedly unhappy."