On Researcher Fatigue.

I was reading a day or two ago that researchers in the UK and US have discovered that alcohol consumption rises in the winter. They conclude that it has something to do with adverse mental factors attaching to the cold and low light levels, and they are now insisting that alcohol advertising be greatly reduced during the winter months.

The first thing that needs to be said about this is that if people perceive a need to drink alcohol in order to get them through the depressing season, they will do it whether alcohol is advertised or not. But I think there’s a bigger issue here.

I’m growing ever more troubled by the fact that western culture is becoming increasingly oppressed by researchers and their demands for remedial action. Research is a fact of modern life and much of it is genuinely useful, but I think we’ve reached a point where overkill is becoming a serious problem. It seems that hardly a day passes when there isn’t some body of researchers somewhere demanding prohibitions and the living of life by numbers. It’s stifling and unwelcome, and it’s also probably counter-productive because people grow tired of the pressures and confused by the messages, and then fatigue sets in. You encounter a headline which says ‘Researchers discover that…’ and don’t bother to read any further. I suspect it even exacerbates the level of increased stress which is becoming a major issue of modern times.

I think we need to lighten up. In fact, I’m sure we do. I might even go so far as to suggest that a substantial proportion of the academics working in research need to be taken out of their laboratories and given something more useful to do.

So who decides which research should be wound down and which shouldn’t. That’s the difficult part. Couldn’t we somehow learn to rely on common sense? Or maybe we could simply limit research to a defined number of factors which are undoubtedly of paramount importance, like climate change, cures for major killer diseases, the fostering of humanitarian values, and how to get Donald Trump speedily committed to a maximum security asylum.