The Impatience of the Google Generation 366
profBill writes "As a fifty-something professor who teaches introductory computer science, I am very aware that the twenty-somethings in my class are much more at ease with computers than any other generation. However, does that mean they are more adept at using those computers? Apparently not, according to the researchers at University College London. Their research indicates that while more adept at conducting searches, younger users also show 'impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs'. Moreover, these traits 'are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors'. The panel makes two conclusions: That libraries (and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway) will have to adapt, and that the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking. Why are those skills lacking and, if they are, what can be done about it?"
Apples & Oranges (Score:2, Insightful)
Academic Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
In contrast, academic articles are usually much narrower in scope than your average webpage and require much more reading and time before an understanding of the subject can be cultivated. Of course, the benefit of using academic articles is that after having read a dozen of them, a student will have a much better and more balanced understanding of a subject than they would have if they'd just gone to Crazy Bob's Information Hut.
When I peer-review papers (I'm currently in law school), it's very obvious which students started their research with academic sources, and which started on Google. The problem can be quickly solved by professors taking the approach seen at my institution: students failing to have in-depth research on the topic get poor marks.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.
Facebook Generation, Google Generation,... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't we just use the technology available to us, without being branded with the [Insert Keyword] Generation tag?
knowledge but not understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when we relied more on books, you'd often go through several books and many pages looking for something and along the way see all manner of peripheral information on the subject which over time builds in to a much broader grasp of the subject and a better basis for joining the dots and developing understanding.
I suspect that in the unlikely event that the web disappeared overnight, we'd have a whole generation or two of apparantly 'smart' people floundering badly.
Misconception (Score:5, Insightful)
They like using computers, they're certainly not afraid of computers (like some people are), but they don't have any desire to learn how to use a computer beyond simple tasks (and they certainly don't have the patience to most of the time).
Is this the byproduct of a decreasing SNR? (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, ease of searching is just one of the many reasons why libraries should be digitizing their collections. How many times have you found a book that looked absolutely perfect for what you're doing, only to find that it's loaned out, damaged or defaced, returned but not reshelved, lost, etc.. Also, it's just plain more convenient to be able to pull up some text from the comfort of your couch rather than trekking into the library. That convenience adds up if it's something you access regularly. e.g. Who goes to the library to read paper journals these days?
libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably they will change into (back into) the original model provided by the great library of Alexandria. That institution held books (ok, scrolls), but was primarily a place of teaching, effectively its role was what we now see as the role of a university.
Libraries only became dull(yes, dull) with the advent of the new breed of privately funded library in the eighteenth century (I omit centuries of Islamic libraries, I know little of them, other then they were active and very full). Certainly this was the case in England, and I'm pretty sure the US has its share of privately initiated libraries. Those libraries were focused heavily on the collection of knowledge, and did indeed help many people learn new things, but the visitor was expected to remain solemnly quiet, to absorb the information and depart, not disturbing others engaged in the ritual of learning.
Pretty boring stuff for a great proportion of the population (not me, I like libraries, but I'm not talking about myself). Information does not do well sat in books, it needs to be experienced, talked about, it should 'live'. That was Micheal Faraday's idea, and he gave weekly science lectures as well as doing science, inspiring many to seek further knowledge. The Internet brings us some measure of liveness for our information as well, which stimulates interest, but for the most part its short term. You find what you want, or don't, and move on fast.
A library should include the Internet, and books, but also staff who teach, providing some means of focusing people on the knowledge that they have become however fleetingly interested in. Without that you're unlikely to have a library that does anything but collect dust and books.
Research Methods (Score:2, Insightful)
Find your chosen subject in wikipedia, open all of the sources and briefly scan them while following links to their sources. Within minutes you have a plethora of information at your fingertips. For many students this is enough to provide all they need on their chosen topic. For the more dedicated few it will provide references to books which they will go to the library to browse.
The benefit of this is that assignments take much less time and a wider range of information is available, however there are many disadvantages. Patience is a valuable skill which is being eroded and much less is learned by just searching through a page for relevant words. When having to trawl through books or interviewing people there is much deeper context that it is almost impossible to ignore.
When someone can easily write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of in one night and still get an A, there is a big problem.
Cat did get my tongue. Waa. (Score:3, Insightful)
Old profs that have taken a long degree, where half the time it wasn't really the understanding of the subject that made it hard - but simply gathering the information in the first place and then processing it; aren't too keen about all of it suddenly being as common knowledge as anything else.
A lot of people love (as an example) wikipedia. A lot of profs love wikipedia. Quite a few hate the fact that it's making knowledge less restricted, and less potentially "streamlined" into one 'channel' that everyone has to go through to get it.
It isn't really an issue.
People aren't learning less, they're learning more. They're not anymore impatient about it than any other generation that was faced with unecessarily increased "downtime" of any sort.
This, what we're seeing now, is essentially an evolutionary step in knowledge, learning and sharing.
The new generation simply isn't stuck with the same crap the elder generations were, and they're gonna be damned if they'll be forced to "slow down" when there is no need to.
Kids today, growing up, can learn pretty much anything about everything without ever having to expend a resource other than their time and their minds attention.
Re:Misconception (Score:4, Insightful)
A note, and the main point: (Score:3, Insightful)
The main point is, I think that students naturally become impatient when dealing with data, because there is so much out there. I certainly do. But there is a big difference between how data and knowledge are gained. If I am dealing, say, with a glossy pdf full of buzzwords and generalities, I will gloss over it impatiently. If I find something that is full of actual knowledge, and concepts that aren't described in bullet points, I can be very patient while reading it.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:3, Insightful)
The next generation is still people, at least until the biochemists succeed in making substantial tweaks to the DNA.
OK, they're impatient. OK, they have some motor skill advantage from years of video games. Whoopee. Reality will temper the new generation far more than the generation tempers reality.
Two conclusions (Score:2, Insightful)
2) The acceptable delay depends on expectations, which again depends on what the norm is.
When access to information becomes faster, people also expect access to information to be faster (duh!), and are thus less tolerant of delays, even if the delays are within what used to be the norm.
These changing norms affects younger people faster than older people, as younger people have less mental baggage to carry around.
Oh, and bonus point:
3) Books are technically obsolete for looking stuff up. They are still excellent for a more in depth study of a subject.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries (or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries) are essential. If you want to understand why things happened instead of establishing a simple chronology, you have to read Kissinger's books and memoirs, you have to read public records, you have to read contemporary journalism. It is also very helpful to read other scholars' interpretations, both in their books and journals.
Obviously, there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet, but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem here.
The problem this professor is pointing out is that people lack the ability to do this second part and go beyond the superficial because the nature of those works means that interpreting them is long and tedious and requires an attention span longer than 3 seconds. Even if digitized, you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
So, the GP is right, IMHO, we need both theses skill sets.
Re:Research Methods (Score:3, Insightful)
That's no different from the way it used to be: any reasonably smart person trying to figure out a new domain would first go to simple, easy-to-understand survey articles.
One of the most important resources for serious science used to be Scientific American.
Re:knowledge but not understanding (Score:3, Insightful)
It is probably true that many people nowadays are much less tolerant to waiting for information, as compared to a decade ago. But that is not an indication that people now don't want understanding. Instead it is because there are now a lot of different choices, and of course any individual will try to maximize return when making choices. If going to a library let him find a result he needs in a morning, while just searching on Google get him to the same information (or perhaps more) in just 10 minutes, it won't be difficult to see which is the winner.
More and more I see library as something to hold history rather than to hold knowledge (both facts and understanding). The web is being changed in every instant, the search result of Google change every day. In contrast, the collection of books in a library hardly change in a year, much less in a month. The content of any individual book never change, except for the damages by other users. While any particular piece of knowledge doesn't really change, the collection of knowledge the community knows change every minute, something previously unknown is now known, something previously thought to be true is now invalidated. So if you want to know what people think about the world now, it is probably more appropriate to search on the web than in the library, at least to get you started by having the facts and the pointers.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Academic Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
More than likely, all the students that you peer reviewed started their research with Google. The more intelligent among them however, went the extra mile and found good sources when they wrote their papers. This is not new. Intelligent people will always write good papers by doing the research that is necessary. In our generation however, we have access to more sophisticated tools than previous generations for finding information. We have Google search and the Internet as well as online libraries. The previous generation had references, the Dewey Decimal System and card catalogs.
I am glad though, that your university fails students that don't do in-depth research. I would be quite surprised otherwise.
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:5, Insightful)
There are areas where you can get a reasonable overview -- namely those areas where we know next to nothing or that interest nobody (or both!), but that is by nessecity niche.
You can't collect, read, assess and synthesise "all available information" on Computer-Science, so you migth go more narrow and do Cryptography, but that's equally impossible. So you might go more narrow and do Diffie-Hellman. Even then you could only be certain you've found the most well-known articles and research on it, there's always going to be a risk that some student in India (say) has published a paper that includes information not found anywhere else. There's no way to tell.
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:knowledge but not understanding (Score:2, Insightful)
You might be able to lookup the value of e on the Internet. You might be able to immediately lookup what the derivative is for a given function. But, regardless of what generation you belong to, knowing the value of e, or knowing that the derivative of x^2 is 2x doesn't change the fact that that doesn't necessarily imply that you know calculus.
However, if you search for the derivative of x^2 on Google and end up on Wikipedia or MathWorks and start reading about what differentiation is, then you will learn how to calculate the derivative of a function. The fact you used a search engine to find that information is irrelevant.
I do not believe that people who lookup facts on the Internet are smart. All intelligent people whom I have had the honor to meet understand what they talk about and don't need access to a computer when I talk to them. Are you impressed when someone can recite some random trivia to you? Do you ever phone them up and ask them for help with something? Probably not - you're smarter than that. But then, why do you consider them smart in the first place?
Re:Academic Sources (Score:4, Insightful)
Of my peers at the time, I was one of the few who utilised the internet as much as possible (admittedly there were far fewer legal resources online back then), but again I would use it to lead me down different avenues of research, to give me a much broader understanding of the subject at hand. I saw it as one more source to add to books, case reports, articles, etc. Now, of course, a lot of the information from those other sources is available online - this is merely a more convenient format to allow research, it doesn't prevent the more studious from doing extensive research.
At the end of the day, if a lazy student only has the option of reading books and articles, he will read the bare minimum he needs. If we give him the option of the internet, he will visit the bare minimum of sites he needs to get the same information. The issue here is with motivating students to _want_ to do the additional research, not with criticising the tools of said research.
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong about that. The academic indexes are good enough that you can be certain enough not to have missed anything important. If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed. I'm not saying it's easy, and it can take months to do right. I know the model for publication in Computer Science is different to all other academic subjects so maybe it wouldn't work there, I don't really know.
Well obviously. You only need to do this where there is a significant conflict of evidence and opinion (so you can identify where the conflicts arise), or where there isn't much evidence and it's never been collated. Otherwise Googling will work just fine.
Of course you can't review 'computer science' or 'medicine'. You have to be very specific about the question you are trying to answer. For example, you might look for information on the pattern of occurrence of a particular disease, or the effect of a particular social intervention on crime rates, or the most efficient implemenation of some algorithm. You'd maybe have to read the titles of 10000 articles, the abstracts of 1000, and the text of a hundred just to get to the four or five that will provide the important information.
Extraneous Information (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're looking to learn all encompassingly about a subject then a book is a great way to do so. However if instead you're looking to research just one particular topic within a subject or get a refresher a book is rather inefficient. Targetting allows very quick knowledge acquisition which allows us to become more efficient to focus on other tasks. Researching being faster just means you can get more work done, in essence.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:3, Insightful)
> and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
> I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my
> research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
"Doing your PhD" is still school, which is an artificially protected environment for the student in some ways. In school, the problems you are asked to solve in your classes are almost always problems someone else has solved, and you can -research- the solution.
In the larger scope of the working world, many people find themselves tasked with solving real problems, that -no one has ever solved before-. You find yourself dealing with frustrating unknowns that cannot be dealt with using search engines in 10 minutes, or -ever-. The solutions are not there to find.
Many of us in the working world deal with people who -can't- do anything other than "look it up on Google". Junior programmers, especially, who can't solve a problem unless they can swipe a code snippet from the web. Some of these eventually learn to poke randomly at the code till they find something that "sorta works".
But they lack the patience and the mental disciplines needed to sit down and really work out a problem. And this isn't just in the computer tech fields. It's at all levels of business, management, and science.
I've spoken to nurses and doctors who say the same things about some younger medical professionals; many of them lack the mential disciplines to diagnose problems. They're reduced to trying to look things up on Google and Wikipedia, and eventually give drugs randomly to trusting human patients.
> I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.
Fine; but what do you do when the information -needs- to be found; not by searching musty stacks of books, but by dissection of the problem and analysis of the elements that compose it?
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knew?
Let me get my permanent marker. I have to right that one down for posterity.
I bet, if enough research was done, we'd find out they're horny, too.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
By that standard, then we should also throw out the card catalog, because it might be too efficient at helping me find what I'm looking for. Let's go back to the old system I call "throw all the books on the floor and pick one at random". I bet you find all kinds of interesting information you don't need.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat it: there's a difference between the skill of searching and the search medium. Google (or another more field-apropriate search engine), used well, is a starting point - it will be much better than non-online searches. Once you find something promising, following references in the article you're reading will probably be more fruitful. Just like in the old times.
If the cranky old farts who are complaining had bothered to ask younger but somewhat accomplished researchers how they work, I bet that would be the usual system. It's what I do. I'm 30 and am in the age group that spanned the digitization of search - I'm familiar with traditional search methods. For the most part, they suck. I also have pretty good Google-fu skills, and I know that playing keyword soup all day only gets you so far. I use search engines to find a useful paper, and then use its references to find others. This method did just fine for my Ph.D. research, and now it's working for me as a professional.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
What needs to be taught is good research skills. Google is a good first step in well-researching something, and dependent upon someone's needs it may be the only step required.
In some ways google makes things harder to teach good research skills because google really is that good. Thus a teacher wanting to make a student do hard research must give that student a more difficult assignment to make them go off of google.
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Throw some curveballs that require deeper research than just a precursory Google search, and maybe we'll get somewhere. This is a wonderful time to be training a young researcher -- because of the wealth of information out there, and how quickly so much of it can be acquired, the bar can be raised higher than ever before. Weren't computers supposed to be making us smarter, anyway? For me, at least, most of my college papers could be written with Google Scholar, except for one particular professor I had, who made his assignments so damn hard I actually had to Google and (GASP!) read some books. For that, I'm eternally grateful.
Also, I'm mad as hell someone already took my "tldr" line.
Re:As a 21 year old... (Score:2, Insightful)
As a 34 year old, I feel like you're attention span has been affected by the availability of large amounts of information from diverse sources. This is driven mostly by the ability to absorb all information instead of putting the effort into filtering it for just the important stuff. It has the end effect of making you knowledgeable but not wise; there is almost no context to your knowledge that gives you a focused way of applying it.
That doesn't mean you're not smart or capable, but it makes it a challenge for my generation to communicate about very specific things with your generation. You may think I'm limited... I may think you're scatter-brained.
What we REALLY need to do, however, is find a way to join forces and topple the 50+ year olds who own all the CXO jobs.
The problem with this approach... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with this approach is that you can't predict the future. You don't know if some piece of your education could come in handy in the future, and by the time realization hits it could be far too late. Having a narrow understanding of the topics you're interested in makes you 1) very reliant on your source of information, 2) unable to solve permutations of problems that you've solved before. The good side of this is that you're able to pick up new things quickly.
That 1% of the time when you *do* need to know? That's when natural selection really kicks in. That 40 year old guy that you make fun of for writing checks instead of using a debit card? He's going to outperform you 10 to 1 in an unpredictable environment, because he's self reliant. He'll get paid more, have better sex, and survive more tough situations because he can adapt to what life throws at him.
Re:As a 21 year old... (Score:5, Insightful)
That feeling comes from your inexperience. Your generation is no different than mine was when I was your age, and mine is no different from Ben Franklin's generation. The world has changed much, but people have changed little. Why did my grandfather's generation (he was born in 1896) call young folks "whippersnappers?" Because the young generation was always impatient. Back in the horse and buggy days, the way to get speed out of your transportation was to snap a whip, making the horse run faster.
Every generation of 21 year olds think its generation is different from the previous one. Every generation of 21 year olds is wrong.
-mcgrew
(PS- your generation is lousy in bed) [slashdot.org]
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there is the cross-discipline problem. In a field such as cognitive psych, useful material can be squirreled away in pretty much any journal from the sciences or the humanities. How good is that index, really?
The more original your thesis, the less likely your useful sources are the top scoop in the peer review catalog system. The "peer review" bucket is a form of insularity, but somehow most scholars within the system manage to convince themselves that nothing from the barbarian sphere is much worthy of consideration.
This distinction would be much clearer if the world had adopted the practice that all peer review articles are published in Latin. And then when some stooped-backed doctoral acolyte pops his badly shaven head out of an ivory tower and proclaims (in Latin) that every road leads to Rome, it would be plainly evident what kind of world that person is living in.
You misrepresent my argument. (Score:4, Insightful)
-
You are taking my statement out of context [fallacyfiles.org].
-
You are using that misquote to build a straw man [fallacyfiles.org] argument.
Allow me to explain:The words those three dots replace entirely change the meaning of that sentence. Look at what those three dots replace:
You then use that misquote to suggest that my argument is that all digital sources are superficial, which is obviously an untenable position (the straw man). That is not my argument, which is clear from the rest of the post. I mentioned later regarding digitizing information:
...you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
Anyway, have a good one.
-mat
Re:Theyre kids of the new generation - deal with i (Score:5, Insightful)
A little bit of knowledge can be worse than none (Score:3, Insightful)
There are 4 stages to understanding something:
If you're at stage 2-4, then it can be extremely frustring to run into someone at stage 1, because usually such people are like a cup that's completely full. No room for anything.
Do you really think a prof (probably at stage 2-4) is afraid that they'll be made redundent by google, or is more like they're annoyed by idiots at stage 1 who think they've got everything worked out already.
Re:Extraneous Information (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the thing about that - I'm always reading something (it's getting harder these days to cram in "reading time" now that I have a wife and a couple of kids, but I manage to find some time to do it anyway). I read about topics I'm interested in, such as programming (right now, I'm working my way through the behemoth "Programming Python"); not necessarily to discover a specific fact or solution, but to gain general knowledge.
The result? Because I know what's going on behind the scenes, and the theory behind it all, I can usually figure out why something's gone wrong immediately, without having to flail around doing random google searches as my, um, "contemporaries" tend to do (at least as they do right before they beg me to figure it out for them).
This wouldn't bother me quite so much if it wasn't for the fact that the people who expect me to do their jobs for them regard reading books as a "waste of time". The problem with the "precise targeting", "gotta have it now, no time to research because we have to hurry up and wait" attitude is that somebody has to write the answers to those "precise target" searches. And how do you suppose they figured out how to do that?
Wait a second... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me get this straight. Imagine someone looking for specific documented information regarding their . They search google. They visit a site. They quickly scan the site. They don't see clues that specific information is located on that site (for right now, assume it is). The user leaves the site, goes back to google, and looks at the next promising linked site.
So explain to me why is this the fault of the user for abandoning the site? Sounds to me like the kids have it right on. Don't make excuses for websites. Not for their navigation, taxonomy, folksonomy, whatever. Especially so when there are millions of other sites trying to serve me that same content.
Note: Bonus points goes to people that understands that not making excuses for systems is the meta answer
Why is this a problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Systematic literature review (Score:3, Insightful)
True; they will contain everything that is -ALREADY- recognized as being important. But that doesn't help you much; that just tells you the stuff that the scientific community already agrees is important.
Much more interesting is the stuff that -IS- important, but which isn't recognized as such yet. That can be so for a multitude of reasons ranging from plain misunderstanding and to the work not yet being read by anyone with enough expertise to recognize the importance. Notice: *before* the importance is recognized, the experts have no reason to read the work, much less if reading it would require getting it translated first.
You'll get *most* of the important stuff *most* of the time.
But that's a VERY different statement from: Being *CERTAIN* that you've got *EVERYTHING* important.
Re:meritopolian cliquetops (3rd self reply) (Score:4, Insightful)
Your opinions are based on an expertly demonstrated misunderstanding (or possibly outdated understanding) of the system as it current stands. I cannot sufficiently communicate how distressed I am that the public perception of the academic system is the way it is. My comments on here have generally been replied to by people with only a peripheral understanding of how academic publication works, and with a lot of hostility, possibly fuelled by a single unfortunate encounter with a journal editor at some point in the past. I don't know where the suspicion for academics comes from. We're not in it for the money, I could earn three times as much as I do working for a pharmaceutical company somewhere. Most of us never get any public recognition. Most of us do what we do because it's interesting, and we like finding out stuff, and sharing our findings with the world. The ultimate reward in my group is some kind of public dissemination of our findings, or a positive policy change that comes out of something we do.
The very fact that my comments, coming from a position of actual knowledge and experience can be refuted with, and I chose the word carefully, lies, and those lies be highly rated by people who want to believe them and don't know any better, confirms my view that a more rigorous system of arbitration needs to be in place in this world where anybody can post anything and the layman in his ignorance is expected to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I include myself as an ignorant layman when it comes to any area outside of my expertise. I want to be able to find information that has been vetted by people who know what's what, not stuff that's highly ranked because it's good emotive rhetoric (see the parent post - paedophile priests, good analogy), or is confirming somebody else's prejudices.
For example, despite all our efforts, and the mountain of evidence to the contrary, there are still people who write that MMR causes autism, or that smoking prevents AD (recently modded 5 informative on Slashdot no less). Neither of these things is true. But of course nobody listens to us, because we're boring, and are cautious not sensationalist.
Peer review has far more to do with the arbitration of career advancement than quality control over factual content. Much like the Vatican, which can't even toss out a pedophile from among the shepherdship, at least not until their coffers were crucified by rattus legalis.
Not when I do it, it isn't. I'm personally offended by that statement. I review a lot of things, and 90% of the time I don't know and cannot guess who has written them. I judge articles for quality and for relevance. Badly executed research I send back, badly written or badly interpreted research I try to help with.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
Your right, the system is crumbling - and we'll be much poorer for it. For example the vast amounts of unsupported gibberish being published by political groups in the UK and the US is leading to policy shifts in favour of screening for many diseases, despite a medical consensus that it is not needed and is potentially harmful. None of this crap has gone through peer review by epidemiologists or research clinicians, but the press love it, and the politicians see votes, and the mob demand it on radio phone in shows, so it is done. Research clinicians can only look on and weep as the carefully collected and controlled evidence is tossed aside in favour of some fervent blogger who dem