Apparently, “Study shows …” is today’s equivalent of “The Bible says.” It allows you to frame an utterly ridiculous finding, such as “200 million people to be displaced by 2020 due to flooding caused by global warming” “steroids have no effect on baseball performance,” or as Drudge is broadcasting today, “1 in 4 American teen girls has sex transmitted disease” as reasonable and grounded in thorough, dispassionate analysis.
Of all girls ages 13 to 19, let’s assume the average age of loss of virginity to be at 16. That means that 50% of American teens have never had sex at all under a normal distribution. So this study is basically saying that half of all teen girls are STD-positive.
Ridiculous.
How much you want to bet that Trojan funded this ;-)
“steroids have no effect on baseball performance”
Steroids don’t have any effect on how the baseball performs. They might effect grammar though.
No effect on “baseball performance” as in “[players'] performance playing the sport of baseball.”
Nothing grammatically incorrect about that, and nothing a sentient reader would have any difficulty understanding.
Cartman is correct in that “studies” are taken with undue credibility by the general population. In the end, this is just a way to manipulate consumption or politics. The most common problem I find is with the conclusion that A causes B, when often B causes A, or is only tangentially related. These oversights go unchallenged for the same reason we can’t be bothered to challenge every television advertisement that claims their product is the “best”. And of course the journalists love the sensationalism too.
When I was in publishing the stats joke was about demographics that showed the average PLAYBOY reader was 30 years old.
Yes, but there were hardly any 30 year olds buying it! Half were around 15, the other half around 45.
MF