No doubt. Especially in law schools. There is a bi-modal salary distribution, where less than 10% get big firm salaries, and the rest get far less. However, all the law schools charge the same tuition. And the job market for most lawyers is horrible.

Bad Market For Law Students

Obviously a lot of the research supporting drug efficacy (upon which the authors rely heavily in their latest study) in the USA is flawed and biased. But this is well known in the US epidemiological community and has resulted in several recent editorial board shakeups at the much ballyhooed New England Journal of Medicine for this very reason.

But to extrapolate from that limited sample set from a journal (and to a lesser extent JAMA) that has been distinctly tarnished to peer-reviewed research in general is quite a stretch. It is much more reflective of a decline in American standards.

Furthermore, their claim that a high proportion of widely cited articles were subsequently “refuted” is
quite a claim.

First, theirs is a meta-study, so they apparently assume all the various ANOVA assumptions, kappas and t-values in the underlying studies should be held constant, or perhaps “averaged” together, which is quite a dubious assumption.

Every study has its own degree of certainty about its results and its various confidence intervals ABOUT that level of certainty. To lump them all together is a NOTORIOUS difficultly with meta-analyses such as these, something which is COMPLETELY ignored in the article.

Secondly, precisely what does “refute” mean? Clarified? Amplified? Contradicted? Expanded? Distinguished? Certain narrow exceptions raised to the general rule in the original study?

“Refute” is an extremely broad term and I’m fully persuaded that even a cursory reading of the underlying studies would show that these “refutations” were not refutations at all but clarifications and amplifications of the original theses held with published degrees of certainty held with peer-reviewed confidence intervals.

Just more food for the illiterates to chow down as the anti-intellectual dumbed down lack of critical thinking becomes the norm rather than the exception in the Western world.

Heaven help us all.

Matt Dubuque

The growth rate of the past decade that has been extrapolated ad infinitum can’t be sustained, just like the credit that funded it.

But if performance reviews are so seriously dysfunctional, and I agree with him that they are, why do they grow year by year in pervasiveness? They are a paper trail liability shield for organizations against charges of bias, spreading pap and BS to allow management to do what they had already decided all along. If the paperwork is cut carefully, it’s hard to prove racism, sexism, ageism, or retaliation by management. For that reason, we will have performance reviews as long as we have bosses. *sigh* They may get a little better, but they aren’t going away.