🗑️ Useless [Neurosurgery Wiki]

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====== 🗑️ Useless ======

> “Not everything that is published deserves to be read — or done.”

===== 🧾 Definition =====
**Useless** refers to any academic or clinical content that **fails to offer applicable knowledge, actionable insight, or meaningful contribution** to understanding, decision-making, or patient care.

In essence: **it fills pages, not minds**.

===== 🔍 Hallmarks =====
  * 🪞 **Theory without practice** – Elaborate models or reviews with no real-world implications
  * 🔁 **Repetition of known facts** – Adds nothing new to the field; rewords the obvious
  * 💭 **Abstract admiration** – Describes a promising idea with no mechanism, data, or plan
  * 🧻 **Unreadable or inapplicable** – So dense, vague, or narrow it becomes irrelevant even to specialists

===== 🧪 In Scientific Literature =====
A **useless paper** may:
  * Conclude with “further studies are needed” without specifying what, why, or how
  * Present a “review” that is neither critical nor focused
  * Discuss hypothetical technologies not yet validated in any model
  * Be published only to increase the author’s h-index, not the reader’s understanding

===== 🧠 In Neurosurgery =====
Examples include:
  * Reviews on brain tumors that never mention surgical indications
  * Articles on AI tools that were never tested on clinical datasets
  * Protocols so idealized they collapse in real-world settings

===== ⚠️ Consequences =====
  * Wastes clinician time and journal space
  * Pollutes literature with noise over signal
  * Inflates CVs but not patient outcomes
  * Contributes to academic theater, not evidence-based medicine

===== ✅ How to Detect It =====
Ask:
  * “Does this change anything I do, understand, or teach?”
  * “Is there any result or framework I could actually use?”
  * “Would anything be lost if this article had never been published?”

If the answer is **no** — it's **useless**.

===== 🔎 Related Concepts =====
  * [[epistemological_fluff]]
  * [[uncritical]]
  * [[academic_theater]]