[ordu]

> It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.

I once read a paper complaining that the most of psychology experiments are trivial in the sense that their results are predictable in advance. It is like all people know that angry people tend to make other people angry and so if angry person try to communicate then oftentimes communications ends with a conflict. What the point of making an experiment from this?

I'm not sure how much of a psychology fall victim of this, but sometimes I read a paper and think that I've found one more example of this. I personally get nothing from reading such a paper. I can get some ideas while reading about methods researchers used, but it means that the paper is not about how human mind works, but about how to measure psychological phenomena, or how to conduct an experiment. I bet that the most interesting part of the hypothetical paper with angry communicating people would be the trick researchers used to make people angry without violating ethics.

There is some value in experiments that try to prove something that everyone knows already, but not much of a value. So the question is: is it ok to spend $10G to conduct such an experiment?