This is so delicious. I’m glad that someone took the time to point out the absurdity of this class of study [1]…though nobody will ever listen.

The kind of crap “research” being criticized here makes me almost irrationally angry, because these people are at Harvard, and getting tons of international press for this slop - which they can crank out, precisely because they skip the hard parts that slow real researchers down. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of good researchers languish in anonymity, because it’s incredibly rare to find a high profile result using good methodology, and worse, it takes time.

In a just world, the people who get caught doing this stuff would be drummed out of academia.

[1] uncontrolled observational research