Re: Re: Compelled to beat the dead horse...
T'ai Chi said:
I agree. However, I think things like "the experiment must be interesting enough to hold the public's attention" is a completely different constraint than "politics" or "budget fights".
To do science, you must publish and make everything available to scrutinize. [/B]
Speaking based on my own experience, in my own field, grant applications get rejected all the time for not being interesting enough, or for researching topics that are considered too obvious. Proposals have to be interesting enough to hold the granting commitees attention, which can often be much more difficult than you think. Particularly if you happen to be a social psychologist (ie we use lots of experiments) and your application is being reviewed by English and Philosophy professors. You get one committee member who doesn't like research using human participants, or who doesn't like the idea of deceiving said subjects about the true purposes of the experiments* and your grant application goes straight down the toilet.
Anyway, my point is, being interesting enought to hold the public's attention is not all that different from being interesting enough to hold a granting committee's attention. 'Science' is very constrained, and I really don't think that TV is any more or less constrained than lab work. My research is severely constrained, for example, because my participant population is almost entirely university undergraduates. I simply don't have the funds available to take a representative sample.
There are also some flaws in the publication process - for example, it's very difficult in my field to publish negative results. Negative results just aren't very interesting. So people can often chase after a theory for years, never getting anywhere, not knowing that someone over at University X also spent years chasing that theory and never getting anywhere. If journals were more willing to publish negative results, maybe we wouldn't have that sort of thing happen. (This may be unique to psychology, I'm not certain).
Finally, I would suggest that nothing is more open to scrutiny than something broadcast on TV! How many people read journals? Not a whole lot. But loads of people watch TV. By 'publishing' on TV, you might actually get really interesting feedback from a much broader audience. And any flaws in your research will probably be mercilessly exposed by people like the ones who post here!
*we always debrief our participants about the true purposes of the research after they participate.
