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A comment on Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam. Parent comment

Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by denzil_correa on Sunday December 24, 2017 @11:14AM (#16000067)
> It's not quite that medicine is more complex, it's that Medicine is practical and accepts not understanding the details. If drug X works then that's enough we will use it even if we don't understand exactly why it works.

I'm always baffled by this. I can understand why we should move these drugs into practice. But, if the way you conduct research stops at X works - you should have a good look at the way you conduct research. I can completely understand short term gains but ignoring long term gains is very unscientific and immature.

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Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by zdragnar on Sunday December 24, 2017 @11:42AM (#16000185)
I'm afflicted by three chronic conditions which have no known causes. All of them are treatable; there are guesses as to why the treatments work, there isn't really a good way to establish a sound reason for them working.

You can't just take a person apart to study them while they're alive, and you can't easily reconfigure them to account for variables either.

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Re:Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam by sliverstorm on Sunday December 24, 2017 @12:13PM (#16000305)
They'd love to understand why X works, but a whole lot of people could be treated by X while they spend all that time and money figuring it out.

Besides, there's plenty of Y where they were sure it was going to work, it fit all the models and theories, it did the right thing in mice, and then in a trial Y fails catastrophically.

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