Give Up Blog

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Idiot science

I swear, every week we some some stupid shit like this.

Whether it's hip-hop, rap, pop or rock, much of popular music aimed at teens contains sexual overtones. Its influence on their behavior appears to depend on how the sex is portrayed, researchers found.

Songs depicting men as "sex-driven studs," women as sex objects and with explicit references to sex acts are more likely to trigger early sexual behavior than those where sexual references are more veiled and relationships appear more committed, the study found.

Teens who said they listened to lots of music with degrading sexual messages were almost twice as likely to start having intercourse or other sexual activities within the following two years as were teens who listened to little or no sexually degrading music.

Time to whip out the Give Up Blog patented Bad-Science Ass Whupping Stick.

For the last time. CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION.

How many different ways could this data be consistent with a non-causative theory? Let us count.

Parents who let their kids listen to this shit may be more permissive.
Kids who want to listen to this shit may be more interested in sex, hence their interest in the music.
This shit may instead identify a peer-group that is more sexually adventurous.

Can you think of any others? Despite these obvious flaws in this conclusion, the shit science writers at CNN and other news sources buy into this stupid nanny science like it's sweet sweet candy. They just love anything about sex, drugs, alcohol, whatever, that confirms their silly puritanical worldview. Video games cause violence, drinking in adolescences causes alcoholism, dirty music causes promiscuity, etc., same story, different day. And it's all obvious bullshit. Why do we put up with it?

6 Comments:

Another Anonymous Poster said...

My section of the wife's iPod is filled with the discographies of Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. Should she put me on 24-hour watch, lest I down a bottle of pills and stab myself in the chest?

7:52 AM, August 09, 2006

Another Anonymous Poster said...

Snarkiness aside, I have a couple of questions: Who are the reviewers that allow this crap to get published? And how can they be permanently removed from their positions of review? If my boss handed me a paper to review with such glaring examples of post hoc, I would be kicked out of grad school

2:06 PM, August 09, 2006

Rev. Dr. said...

Look at the journal. It's never Nature or Science letting this shit through. It's always some BS low-tier journal.

By the way, I fixed the link so it now actually points to the right damn article.

4:55 PM, August 09, 2006

minimalist said...

The longstanding rumor about Nature and Science is that sometimes they deliberately let some papers is that normally wouldn't meet their standards of quality, but if there was a good chance they'd make a big splash. (Or maybe that's just sour grapes from researchers who've been unsuccessful at getting into those journals.)

Anyway, I'd never heard of Pediatrics as being a particularly crappy journal; somewhere in the middle, at least going by impact factor. But I've no doubt that the potential to make headline-grabbing stories like this can be a powerful pull (consciously or unconsciously), especially for the lesser journals vying for attention.

Too bad the editors don't realize that oh, maybe high-quality science is the way to respectability in the scientific community, rather than fishing for fleeting media attention from Yahoo.

Then again it wouldn't surprise me if most of the editors and reviewers for Pediatrics are MD's. They just don't know any better.

11:35 PM, August 09, 2006

Rev. Dr. said...

You're right, that's too high a journal for this type of rubbish. Usually the journal for these things is some psych journal. But pediatrics? That makes me angry, it should never have gotten that high up.

5:38 PM, August 10, 2006

Another Anonymous Poster said...

I think you guys might be missing the point, or at least you're being a bit too generous. I've judged middle-school science fairs where the presenters had a better sense of correlation-causation. I don't care if a scientific journal has an impact factor of 1 or 30, or if the editorial and review staff are MDs, PhDs, or any combination thereof. The reviewer should laugh at this paper and mark 'Not acceptable for publication' without any further comment.

In other news, all the Decembrists on my wife's iPod has convinced her to become a singing minstrel. Damn you, Colin Maloy!

6:30 PM, August 10, 2006