Research of the Damned
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
Research has been much in the news lately. First Winona Ryder said she boosted some expensive clothes as research for a movie role, then Pete Townshend said he paid to download child pornography as research for his autobiography.
I don't know about you, but both these stories seem fishy to me. During my earlier life as an employed person, I worked in half a dozen research departments, and as I recall shoplifting and buying child pornography would have constituted firing offences in any of them.
And to consider a much more elevated plane of research than that at which I worked, there is no Nobel Prize for Shoplifting and none for Purchasing Child Pornography.
As I also recall, Ms Ryder's trial did not include any discussion of her research design – not even a specification of the dependent and independent variables! Mr. Townshend has been similarly unforthcoming about his research design.
And somehow I don't think either Ms Ryder or Mr. Townshend could provide a coherent explanation of how to partition variance, or an account of the uses of the non-central F distribution.
Of course, the crucial incongruity that neither "researcher" has bothered to explain is how two stars who are admired (or, if they're Mr. Townshend, idolized) by millions came to be mixed up with research at all. Research is not known as a glamorous occupation. I haven't seen any Jonas Salk T-shirts lately.
These days newspaper reports of research rarely even bother to name the researchers who performed it. It is usually attributed to "a team of researchers." Imagine where Ms Ryder and Mr. Townshend would be if every movie were credited to "a team of pretty people" and every pop song to "a team of unemployed teenagers."
People have been known to pay to see Ms Ryder and Mr. Townshend perform. Researchers they pay to work anonymously. People don't like to inquire about people who like to inquire.
Assessing the validity of one's ideas about the world is a useful enough undertaking, but most people find it distasteful. They would rather live in a world of Truth and Beauty than in one of Doubt and Disagreement. They find Truth and Beauty inspiring, while Doubt and Disagreement are just in bad taste.
And that is why Ms Ryder's and Mr. Townshend's explanations have fallen flat. Theft, child abuse, and research are all considered dangerously antisocial by the public. All things considered, Ms Ryder and Mr. Townshend would have been better off to claim they had been temporarily possessed by evil spirits. For one thing, they would have got book deals out of it.
Posted January 16, 2003
Research of the Damned © Coolth, 2003
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