[RyanZAG]

With one of the major contributors to the paper being 'Committee on the Impacts of Sexual Harassment in Academic Science, Engineering, and Medicine'[1] who only get paid because sexual harassment exists surely can never have an agenda in proving such a thing exists.

In a follow up study, we could go and ask the labour unions how much benefit they give to the average worker. Surprise finding! Labour unions benefit all workers immensely, and they benefit workers who pay the most in membership fees. And then we can follow up with a study by dentists on how regularly you should visit your dentist (hint: it's more often than you think!)

[1] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24994/sexual-harassment-of-women...

[rayiner]

That’s a completely absurd argument. By that reasoning nothing can be done to study any problem.

[RyanZAG]

We should probably keep doing studies to check how dentists think we should brush our teeth. We just shouldn't have dentists do a study on a variable that directly harms their income as we would already know the results they would give before the study is even done.

If you wanted a study on that variable, you'd likely need to at least get input from someone who says going to dentists is a bad idea - but at that point, you're just going to have a shouting match and a statistics measuring contest between the dentists and the guy who doesn't think anybody should see dentists. Your results would likely be contradictory and fairly useless.

We haven't yet found a way to do such studies in a useful manner, and it's an ongoing problem in politics that has yet to have a solution. And may never have a solution. And it's very important to be able to determine when such study variables align with the financial and ideological requirements of the researcher.

If you can tell without doubt what the result of a study by a certain group will be before the study takes place, it's usually a red flag.

[kj01a]

Or... you could not pay your committee so they're not incentivized to find positive results.

[ythn]

Yes but must we always have Big Tobacco funding tobacco studies, Big Beer funding alcohol studies, etc.? It makes your publication reek of bias.