A person who studies a lot, and he gets straight As in tests or exams, but he has no idea what the hell is he doing! A 21st century typical student who only focuses on grades or degrees, and he cares little to zero about the material he is learning, or the outcome of his studies in terms of knowledge and real life applications. Someone who is in school with the main focus of making more money or following the crowd and listening to what others told him, so he tries to do well just to embarrass them. The good student with no qualifications who sums up our educational systems today.
This engineer I work with must have been a studying donkey! He has a PHD, but he cannot answer a single question I ask him at my job.
by Zizou1990 March 9, 2024
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Get the Group Study mug.Grace Navigation is the Best Merchant Navy Institute in Rajasthan, India Which Helps Students to make their Carrier bright in Maritime Studies. beneficial if you are looking for a lucrative job
Grace Navigation is the Best Merchant Navy Institute in Rajasthan, India Which Helps Students to make their Carrier bright in Maritime Studies. beneficial if you are looking for a lucrative job
by Apip1 June 21, 2022
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Get the Study mug.The problem of external validity (the "lab vs. world" gap). Controlled studies, especially randomized controlled trials (RCTs), are the gold standard for establishing causality. But to achieve control, you must isolate variables in an artificial, simplified environment. The hard problem is that this very act of control often strips away the real-world context, complexity, and interactions that determine how a treatment or phenomenon actually functions in the wild. What works perfectly in a double-blind RCT might fail or cause harm in a messy society because people aren't lab rats and the world isn't a sterile cage.
Example: A prestigious RCT proves a new antidepressant is highly effective. But the study excluded people with substance abuse issues, chronic pain, or more than two other medications—a large portion of real-world patients. When prescribed widely, the drug shows severe side effects and lower efficacy because it interacts with dozens of variables absent from the lab. The hard problem: The more perfectly you control a study to prove internal causality, the less it can tell you about external applicability. The quest for purity in evidence can render the evidence irrelevant to complex reality. Hard Problem of Controlled Studies.
by Enkigal January 24, 2026
Get the Hard Problem of Controlled Studies mug.The inherent and often crippling limitation of the gold-standard scientific method—the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial—when applied to phenomena that are deeply subjective, context-dependent, or allegedly non-physical. The "hard problem" is that the very act of imposing strict laboratory controls can destroy or mask the effect being studied. For instance, the healing intention in energy work may require practitioner-patient rapport, or a psychic's ability might rely on a specific, non-reproducible emotional state. Insisting on sterile, repeatable conditions for everything creates a methodological catch-22: if it can't be measured under our controls, we declare it doesn't exist, but the controls themselves may be the reason it vanishes. This problem exposes the boundary of where the scientific method, brilliant for studying objective, repeatable processes, may become a Procrustean bed for studying consciousness, meaning, or anomalous human experience.
Example: "The university's parapsychology lab kept getting null results for remote viewing. The Hard Problem of Controlled Studies hit when a gifted subject quit, saying, 'You've turned a spiritual connection into a boring spreadsheet task. My 'talent' requires mystery and meaning, not you staring at a clock in a beige room.' The control was the killer."
by AbzuInExile January 31, 2026
Get the Hard Problem of Controlled Studies mug.The inherent distortion that occurs when the artificial, sanitized environment of a controlled laboratory setting becomes the only valid source of knowledge. This bias privileges data gathered in unnatural conditions over real-world observation, assuming that controlling variables reveals "pure" truth, even if it strips away the essential context that makes a phenomenon meaningful.
Example: Dismissing decades of ethnographic research on community resilience because "it wasn't a controlled study." The controlled study bias assumes that only knowledge produced in a lab-like setting—removed from the messiness of actual human life—counts as rigorous, rendering most real-world understanding "anecdotal."
by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026
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