While bustling through the office this afternoon, I happened to hear someone say, “If you get hungry later on, you can suck the macaroni off your pants.” This, of course, got me thinking about what situation had to have occurred in order for macaroni to be on someone’s pants. There must be thousands of creative answers to this question, neither of which are necessary to list here nor ? and more importantly ? more correct than any other answer. The only way to disqualify an answer as outright absurd is that it doesn’t posit how macaroni ended up on someone’s pants.
This situation is not unlike the mainstream media’s coverage of scientific research. It seems scientific articles are released daily proclaiming all sorts of things, from global warming, to the benefits of obesity on human health, to aspirin’s affect on breast cancer. Aspirin’s affect on breast cancer? Yes, you might recall a study released by The Journal of the American Medical Association a year ago suggesting that aspirin might lower breast cancer risk. The study itself was a survey study, focusing on women between a certain age range in a certain area. The participants were asked if they had breast cancer and how often they used aspirin.
Based on this pool, there was a correlation between aspirin use and breast cancer risk. Women who used aspirin had a lower percentage or risk to get breast cancer. Indeed, there was a correlation between women who took aspirin and breast cancer risk, but the percentage of women who did not have breast cancer and took aspirin was small when extrapolated beyond the extent of the surveyed pool. Further, there was no causation, only correlation between aspirin users and women who had breast cancer. The actual affect of aspirin on cancer of the breast was nil.
The media, however, hammed it up. In this great article by the Washington Post, the inflammatory verbiage of the MSM, is credited with blowing the significance of the story out of proportion. The best paragraph in the story:
The difference between “cause” and “association” may seem subtle, but it is actually profound. Even so, people — like the headline writers in this case — often go beyond the evidence at hand and assume that an association is causal. Readers should know that many associations do not reflect cause and effect.
This conclusion applies to almost any media’s coverage of a new scientific study. Taking correlation to be causation, each headline tries to outdo a rival instead of covering the news. Catching someone’s eye is more important than telling the truth. To bring this all back, headline writing and inaccurate coverage in scientific research of any topic will qualify you for absurdity sooner-or-later, leaving you with no logical conclusion to how the macaroni got on the pants to begin with.
