Generally, in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. It never is a rocking chair, park bench, hammock, or divan. It is an armchair, the sort of chair one finds in venerable, wood-paneled clubs where stodgy old men opine about the world’s events more from preconceived opinions than from any well-grounded knowledge. An armchair represents both laziness and privilege, a luxurious class of opinion-mongers who simply will not bother themselves with actual empirical research – the original La-Z-Boys, as they might be called.

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