The fine line between science and the seven liberal arts

Heard a story on the radio this morning that watching television is harmful to children. TV must be regarded as a national health problem, says British psychologist Aric Sigman to BBC News. According to Sigman, children who watch too much television get sleeping disorders, behavioral problems and weight issues. The latter comes from a tendency to snack while watching TV. Hence, he wants to outlaw TV for children under three years of age. he's also come up with specific timelimits for different age groups.

Way back in 1995, I took a "diversity" course dealing with - among other things - the history of science and how the human sciences used to be referred to as "liberal arts" rather than science due to their complete lack of scientific method. Statements and studies such as these make me wonder whether the inclusion of the "seven liberal arts" into the "science" concept needs some rethinking. By the way; the only useful thing I gathered from this course was the historical-biographical method, which I apply liberally whenever some douche with a ~50 year filter in their history knowledge tries to argue that communism works in real life, and that it's misunderstood due to bad PR. But that's a story for another time.

Conventional wisdom would agree with the conclusion that watching too much TV can't be all that good, because given the limited number of hours in a day, the more time you spend in front of the TV, the less you have available for other stuff which might be much better for you, like being physically active, developing social skills, playing some kind of sport, or reading. But the same argument would hold for computer games, reading comics and time spent online as well, so I hardly see how the TV can be accurately pinpointed as the culprit here. And by the way; if it took some story from a psychologist for you to figure out that spending seven hours every day in front of the television watching reality shows and eating potato chips might not be beneficial for your kid, then I propose that whatever problems your kid might have in the future are gonna be caused BOTH by environmental and genetic factors.

Also; isn't blaming television for children becoming overweight by chewing their way through an evening of reality shows and music videos kind of ...backward? It's like saying "On the basis of my observations, wearing huge pants makes you overweight" (I might have gotten that from Scott Adams, but I can't be bothered to do a proper literature search to find out for sure).

Still; what really makes me cringe about this is the complete breakdown of scientific method. I know; I haven't actually read his study, but riddle me this: How is it possible to reach a conclusion where one factor is singularly identified on a data set consisting of not just human subjects, but children. AND; not only would he need to have a statistically valid sample of all age brackets, but for each age segment he would also need several statistically valid control groups (i.e. one group with no access to TV but access to computer games, one with absolutely no access to anything, etc) in order to be able to draw any conclusion that does not include cross-correlated variables. If anyone can tell me how it was possible for this psychologist to reach this conclusion using proper scientific method without being in violation of just about every human right imaginable AND without just making stuff up, I'll buy you a beer.