Bad Reporting, Not Email, Worse Than Marijuana 290
MoNickels writes "Turns out, those endless news reports and blog entries in April about "texting makes you stupid" were inaccurate. As linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog now reports by way of apologizing to Wilson, it wasn't Wilson's fault, but that of "rotten science journalism." Psychologist Glenn Wilson was reported to have done a study said that chat and email, as the Guardian put it, "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis." But Wilson says, "This...is a temporary distraction effect—not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 [subjects] somehow became '80 clinical trials.'" The original Slashdot story was covered back in April."
Finally... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Why report good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Media don't sell news, they sell eyeballs. When you buy a paper, you're the product and not the client.
The real problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as money is the motivation for making and reporting discoveries, we will have skewed results (actual and/or reported) and our efforts may, more often than not, be focused in the wrong directions.
Are the days of curiosity forcing advances in science and eagerness to discover and learn promoting good journalism and sharing over with?
Email vs. Marijuana (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wow... just Wow [audiworld.com]
Re:really that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
shouldn't that be (Score:3, Insightful)
er..
toast! I want toast!
Sounds like... (Score:2, Insightful)
[rimshot]
Oh come on! For once, it's ontopic!
Re:What's wrong with Pot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Holy crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:really that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
Freshmen year she was on the all Honors / A.P. course track, and by senior year she was in all the "Basic Remedial XYZ for dummies" courses. She talked a bunch of people out of smoking pot after she stopped.
I try not to judge people, but it wasn't worth risking to me.
Re:really that bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
probally close to 300+
but then again I'm in the miltary
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only Carl Sagan (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the burn out down the street who does nothing with his life except collect welfare is also an out user of marijuana. Bottom line? Everyone's different. Bottomer line? The burnout down the street might not want to do anything with his life, whereas Richard Feynman dug physics and math. Pot tends to lead you to do what you want, as opposed to what you should. Maybe if he didn't smoke, Feynman would have been some kind of accountant helping people get rich instead of contributing to the world of physics. Which would have been better? Who knows.
Anyone who's ever gone to a scientific conference can tell you that marijuana might not actually have any effect on IQ. Many, many scientists are pot heads, especially the especially bright ones.
Re:What's wrong with Pot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tobacco was introduced to Europeans via Native Americans and then brought back to Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco#History [wikipedia.org]), and alcohol originated in ancient Sumeria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer#History [wikipedia.org]). There goes your theory about it being racist.
The difference is that alcohol and tobacco are very old, socially accepted institutions, whereas crack cocaine and the like are relatively new to society at large. It's reasonable to assume that after enough time, these drugs may be socially acceptable as well.
"Thanks to crack, I can get a blowjob for a buck!" -S.O.D.
Re:really that bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
Evidence Please? (Score:3, Insightful)
Empirical evidence please? It seems to me that, as you put out, we're actually talking about "proof by the exception" (look! I can point out a few famous people who used pot!) rather than "proof by the rule" (the majority of pot users are non-famous random joes, and it seems to have a very small, temporary impact on their ability to judge the world in a reasonable matter).
"Many, many scientists are pot heads, especially the especially bright ones."
And many more scientists, the bright ones, aren't. Promise. Although I'm not accusing you of it, this is, essentially, the fallacy of ignoring base rates.
Re:The real problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as money is the motivation for making and reporting discoveries, we will have skewed results (actual and/or reported) and our efforts may, more often than not, be focused in the wrong directions.
I think you're got it a bit wrong. The problem isn't that money is the object, the problem is that the way to get that money (at least for mainstream media) is to get eyes and ears of consumers reading/watching/listening. The facts don't matter to that end, and are hard to discover when they're wrong. There's little motivation to get the story right because the market for science reporting is small. Stories aren't corrected tommorow, tommorow there's another story. Hell, a lot of the time even the mainstream stories are dead wrong, just look at what happened to Dan Rather. Even when the media reports that it's dead wrong, the motivation is still finding eyeballs and ears, not fixing mistakes.
Re:Worse than this? The horror.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I also trust cigarette companies to tell me all the negative side effects of smoking tobacco.
Do you really want to know? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the scientific studies show this same thing. All the studies showing that marijuana use does permanant damage always turn out to be bullshit. OK, saying "all the studies" might sound like a generalization--but actually try to find one that uses any kind of scientific method and shows that marijuana is bad for you. It's suprisingly hard considering what a great evil people claim it to be. It's truly evil that very sick people aren't allowed to use this cheap, easily produced drug to help them through their illnesses. It's illegal for no good reason.
BTW, if you sit around the house and smoke pot incessantly, it's true that you're probably not going to accomplish much with your life. Don't think that just because pot isn't inherently bad for you that you can't abuse it.
Re:The Reason (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, what we really need to be able to fix is ignorant journalists who think they know everything. Which is about 99% of them.
Re:Worse than this? The horror.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Evidence Please? (Score:5, Insightful)
the majority of pot users are non-famous random joes
s/pot users/people/
Re:Worse than this? The horror.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:really that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with Pot? (Score:2, Insightful)
More likely drugs other than tobacco and alcohol were banned because they come primarily from outside the US. I don't quite know the economic incentive for doing this but I'm sure there's a good one related possibly to mercantilism. Also you need to remember how much lobbying the tobacco industry does and how much of a hit their profits would take if pot was legalized.
You seem to forget something... (Score:3, Insightful)
A VERY DIFFERENT thing is whether the drugs effectively are harmful or not.
Just because there are interests in keeping the drugs illegal, doesn't mean they're harmless. After all, if people with power don't care about suing 13yo's and single mothers, and tobacco companies don't care about lying and making addictive stuff, do you think druglords will care if their drugs are harmful or not? No, they just want the money.
And this is another reason to make MORE studies about the effects of marijuana. So we can know the TRUTH even if people from both sides oppose it. If some components of pot are good as medicine, let the people know it. If some other components are lethal, let also the people know it.
The point is not going to the extremes of saying "anything related to pot is poison!" and "pot is not harmful at all!"
Re:really that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
drug use of any kind is often associated with depression. It is
likely that she is using marijuana as a scapegoat, people love
blaming their problems on drugs.
Re:Email vs. Marijuana (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Email vs. Marijuana (Score:3, Insightful)
Marijuana isn't addictive.
Between the two, marijuana actually modifies the brain negatively while email only distracts.
Marijuana does not modify the brain. It affects it yes, but once it's gone the brain
is the same. Also, an adverse effect on attention does not preclude other positive
effects. For instance it has positive effects on mood and creativity. Also, distraction has physical effects on your brain. Every thought you have corresponds to physical activity in the brain.
Re:really that bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree 100% with this statement. Lester Grinspoon MD, a former Harvard professor and all-around genius, has some things to say about his first experiences with marijuana, when he was in his 40s [marijuana-uses.com]. He came to the conclusion that everything should be thought about both stoned and straight, in order to gain a great deal of perspective on any matter.
Marijuana effects everyone differently. Take into consideration as well that genetically, there are many different types ("strains") of Marijuana, which carry effects related to their genetic disposition. There are two main families of marijuana, Sativa and Indica. Sativa varieties are native to the equatorial regions in what would largely be considered tropical climates. North Africa, Vietnam, Thailand. Sativa varieties provide what is often called a "mental" high, a very uplifting and energetic feeling combined with inspirations and new ideas. Sativa varieties tend to be very tall and branchy with limited flower (bud, marijuana) production, which dramatically affects yields. Sativa connoisseurs however are always willing to sacrifice quantity for quality. Indica varieties are from places like Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, more mountainous regions with higher elevations. Indica varieties tend to grow short and fat, shaped like a christmas tree. Indica varieties produce more flowers than Sativa varieties. Indica varieties provide a "body" high, with amplification of physical sensation, it makes you sleepy, it makes you just want to sit still. Most commercial marijuana is hybridized between these two main types of Marijauna, optimized for high and yield.
The point I'm getting at with the above paragraph is that commercial pot is sometimes a crap shoot when it comes to the effect, and since the effect generated is one generated through hybridization, the mix of cannabinoids may (and often does) affect different people differently. I know people who can't think straight ("maintain") while influenced by marijuana, and then there's people like me who don't even miss a beat.
I find marijuana carries one detriment that I must acknowledge: my short-term memory does suffer in terms of capacity and recollection ability, but I have a voice recorder to compensate for that, leaving me with oodles of insight and perspective with few recognizable detrimental side-effects.
Re:Do you really want to know? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:really that bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not least of which because drugs' very illegality makes studying the users and effects massively harder.
And the fact that, since the 1950s at least, the US government has spent billions telling people pot (for example) provably leads to everything from rape to murder to psychosis to funding terrorism. To now publically back down and actually scientifically examine if they were baselessly bullshitting the populace for the last half-century (in fact, initally for purely [viperrecords.com] economic [cannabis.com] reasons [wikipedia.org]) would be a credibility and PR catastrophe, not least of which because of the millions who've grown up in the mean-time believing every word they were told on the subject.
Re:The Reason (Score:2, Insightful)