Sunday, December 6, 2009

Money equals Truth

In psychology this appears to be an unavoidable fact.  The more research you put into a specific topic the higher the power, the more positive results you get, and your experiments are of a higher quality.  Surprisingly, the more money you put into research, the more research you get.  So with this little logic:

Premise:
1.  Additional money put into research will increase the quantity and quality of research experiments.
2.  With higher quality and higher quantity of research, results will appear more valid as more evidence will point in that direction.

Conclusion:
If you put money into research you will get better results!

This by itself is fine except that there is a nasty feeback loop: we invest in research of programs that we think are going to do the best.  And which ones are those?  The ones with the most money!

I'd really like to create a Motion Graph where the two axis are amount of money invested and "effect size" on the other side.  I imagine we can see many of the major treatment's effectiveness sky rocket up with more investment.

This graph would help show that arguing "It isn't a randomized control trial" is not proof the intervention doesn't work.  And I don't think scientists claim this, but I feel that argument is used often for why more time and effort should not be invested in that model (which would keep it from ever getting a RCT).

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