This made me laugh a lot. Unfortunately this is very true. What I would say to those who do research is to make C, D, and E more obvious in your work. I know it is nice and note worthy to say A -> B but there are a lot of people out there who don't actually read the entire article so the assumptions should be more obvious.
They did miss one step. It was someone becomes an experts in the problem and then University of Phoenix online will start offering a degree in it. :-)
Ha! I love PhD Comics so much. I think for grad students it's the equivalent of Dilbert for people stuck in an office (at least, that's what I've been hearing about those who have entered the "real world").
ReplyDeleteI think that one of the most frustrating things about reading science articles in the news media is that they rarely cite the original source, something that you'd think should be fundamental. But it makes me unable to quickly find the reference, as I'd usually have to look up the research group and then scroll through their recent work and blah blah blah for 30 minutes. You have to be pretty motivated to do that!