--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > The thing I'm parodying is True Believers Doing > "Research." In many if not most cases they "know" > what they're going to "find" before they ever start, > because they've been *told* what they'll find by > their traditions or their teachers. In many if not > most cases they are doing this "research" with the > full knowledge and/or support of the tradition or > the teacher they represent, and so they are under > pressure to "perform," to find the "right" results. > > The whole concept is bogus, in my opinion. The only > way I would expect meaningful research ever to be > done on meditation is if *none* of the researchers > involved were involved or had *ever* been involved > with the tradition representing the meditation tech- > niques they are studying. Otherwise, IMO the tendency > is going to be to "shape" the research to "fit" what > they expect the "results" to be.
Obviously, the ideal is for all scientific research to be done by completely objective scientists who have no personal interest whatsoever in the results. Unfortunately, that's very rarely the case (perhaps never, if you interpret "completely objective" literally). And it's even less likely when it comes to something like meditation research, at least in its initial stages (which is where we still are now), for the simple reason that only those researchers who have a personal interest in meditation are going to be motivated to *do* any research. Plus which, there's the matter of funding. Most researchers aren't independently wealthy, so if they want to do research on meditation, they have to find an institution that will be willing to pay for it. And until fairly recently, science considered meditation to be in the woo-woo realm, not something there was any point to studying in the first place. Many scientists still feel that way. There aren't all that many independent studies on any kind of meditation even now. But how many would there have been were it not for Wallace's publication of the very first studies on TM in Science and Scientific American back in the early '70s? Whatever their flaws, they established that there was a basis for studying meditation, that it actually had effects that could be measured, and that TM was a particularly good type of meditation to study because it was so highly systematized that the variables were easier to control. Bottom line, to get the ball rolling on any research on a topic that's outside the mainstream requires researchers with a personal interest in studying it, and in the case of meditation, those researchers are most likely to be meditators themselves, who would have a personal stake in demonstrating that their meditation had positive effects (otherwise why would they be practicing it?). And of course the TM researchers had access to funding via the TMO, which shared that stake. You may disdain the TM research because of its inherent bias, but there wouldn't *be* any independent research on it were it not for the TM-funded studies. Once there is published research that at least appears to meet basic scientific standards, with protocols that can be followed by others, then independent researchers may begin to take an interest in attempting to replicate the results, the first step in establishing a scientific consensus, either positive or negative. Ironically, the first nonmeditating researchers to take a stab at replication are likely to be those with an interest in disconfirming the results of the initial studies, so you're still quite a ways from real objectivity. When the Journal of Conflict Resolution published the Jerusalem study on the Maharishi Effect, it did so with considerable trepidation, knowing it would be criticized for giving space to such an outlandish hypothesis. Editor Bruce Russell attempted to justify his decision to publish in an editorial comment; the observations in the following quote apply to TM research generally: "Most research--at least the presentation of new findings--is performed by scholars who begin with the belief that their hypotheses are plausible. Who else would spend the effort? Those who doubt the plausibility can try to replicate the original findings, and if they cannot do so they cast new doubt on the plausibility. This adversarial process must be conducted according to scientific norms and standards for evidence. Eventually the dialectic begins to produce something like a consensus. "It is possible to 'cook the data,' in ways from wishful thinking and marginal adjustment to massive fraud....The procedures for detecting error are cumbersome, and most of the time we must rely on the scientist's own honesty. But the costs of being caught cheating are severe--few people lose status faster than a scientist so apprehended. All in all, it is an imperfect process....[But] what really is the alternative?" > The parallel to tobacco research funded by the tobacco > companies -- as much as you'd like to deny it -- is > apt. Unlike with TM, the tobacco companies were motivated by claims that smoking was harmful and research that appeared to confirm this; their interest was in refuting the existing research. But the same principle applies: who else would be motivated to *do* such research but those with a stake in positive (i.e., no-harm) results? Their research, bias and all, furthered the dialectic by giving more-objective researchers, or at least researchers whose bias was in the other direction, something to disconfirm; and now we have a very solid consensus that smoking is indeed harmful. The point is that the idea that research done by scientists and funded by institutions with an interest in the outcome is worthless and shouldn't be done in the first place is simply ignorant. And the larger point is that there is no such thing as research entirely free from bias of one kind or another. The dialectic between opposing biases, not the production of unbiased research, is the foundation of the modern scientific method.
