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Spurning Beer's avatar

In the medical community, surgeons are regarded as the "dumb jocks" of physicians. I've known some lovely surgeons, but a disproportionate number of turds as well. The classic joke on the subject is about a doctor whose head gets slammed repeatedly by an elevator door, but the other doctors in the elevator are not alarmed because the guy is a surgeon, and his hands are uninjured.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Lefty Mark's avatar

That's true. Fieldwork is all about data collection. Beginning the analysis while still in the midst of performing observations (i.e., before all of the data is in) at the very least can result in embarrassment as premature announcements are walked back later. At worst it is a perversion of the scientific method. In the case of ongoing investigations such as Jane Goodall's studies of chimpanzees or say, climate studies (both of which employ ongoing data collection without a set end point) a researcher who makes announcements based on only a small number of observations (prior to or instead of collecting a more valid and logically defensible number) would be guilty of this error. With reference to climate studies, this means that data representing one or two or even ten years' worth of observations (as climate change critics sometimes employ in their arguments) isn't sufficient to support any valid conclusions.

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