Why Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam Are Phrenologists

Sep 02, 2009 14:29

Why Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam Are Phrenologists

Although I believe it would be edifying for our two favorite 'cognitive neuroscientists' to read this essay, they are not my audience. Rather, I write to fandom, to hopefully shed some light on why these two wankers think they have scientific validity, and why they in fact do not.

sabrina_il wrote a Read more... )

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waverly September 3 2009, 04:55:11 UTC
I am working on an fMRI study as a grad student, and I thank you for writing this pithy explanation of all that we don't yet know.

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neededalj September 3 2009, 05:58:41 UTC
Thanks! I found fMRI incredibly frustrating when I was working with it, but it's still a pretty incredible technological advance from what came before. I wish you the best of luck with your research.

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Could you elaborate? nvidia99999 September 5 2009, 23:12:50 UTC
You have to admit that finding "something frustrating" can mean more than one thing. For instance, I was very frustrated when I was trying to learn to play the violin. Does that mean the violin is a flawed instrument? No, it means I'm not that talented with violins. At least elaborate.

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Re: Could you elaborate? neededalj September 8 2009, 02:08:46 UTC
I believe I did, in both this post and my other. fMRI lets us look inside the brain in ways that we never could before; but there are still strict and very limiting boundaries placed on research that uses fMRI because of the machine's built in limitations.

There is amazingly high-quality research done with fMRI with tight experimental designs and a high level of skill in the processing of the data. There is also an awful lot of junk research that gets published because fMRI is the current shiny toy in the field. In the end the quality of the conclusions depends on the knowledge and skill of the researchers, and not upon any one tool that they use.

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fallingtowers September 3 2009, 05:27:46 UTC
Thank you very much for this informative (and scathing) criticism from a scientific perspective. I, for one, would be highly interested in learning more about the complexities of cognitive neuroscience and where those so-called 'researchers' exhibit a piss-poor understanding of their own field.

*gives you two thumbs up*

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neededalj September 3 2009, 06:00:51 UTC
Thank you! If I have time I may write more about their modeling, how it works, and why the idea that vision modeling can be applied to social behavior is SO NOT TRUE, but I may have to bow to the realities of RL.

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Models such as ART... nvidia99999 September 5 2009, 23:14:27 UTC
Could be applied to any phenomena, really. The problem is that computational vision people don't have a clue about social phenomena, what aspects are important about them, and how to even begin to study them.

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sollersuk September 3 2009, 07:10:05 UTC
Thank you for your beautiful exposition - and the comparison with phrenology absolutely hits the nail on the head (sorry!).

May I in return offer you a very useful concept?

The UK Armed Forces have the concept of "appreciating the situation". This means examining what is going on and, from the facts garnered, building up a picture of what is happening. Not a million miles from scientific method.

They have also developed a term for the converse, because it happens so often: "situating the appreciation". This is deciding what is happening and seeing only the facts that support it. The real danger in this is that it doesn't only entail looking for supporting facts - this is very clearly bad, and what these insults-to-the-term-"scientist" are doing, but can be more subtle: one only perceives the supporting facts - anything that might contradict the hypothesis simply does not get registered. It happens in science as well as the Armed Forces; the big difference is that it's less likely to get you killed when you do it in, say, geology ( ( ... )

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slashpine September 3 2009, 07:13:09 UTC
Wow. Love the phrase! *glomps it*

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jonquil September 3 2009, 14:16:28 UTC
Oh, I love that phrase. Thank you.

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ciaan September 3 2009, 21:10:29 UTC
I would like to point everyone toward Genesis And Development Of A Scientific Fact by Ludwik Fleck. (Though I no longer recommend actually buying it off Amazon, but it's still the easiest place to link to to give people an overview of a book.) (Also pretend here that I included my rant about how Thomas Kuhn got famous by copying Fleck and is nowhere near as cool grr argh.)

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slashpine September 3 2009, 07:12:21 UTC
Thank you for this, and your anonymouse comments to their claims in Shaggirl's LJ. I do some science studies as part of my own interdisciplinary research on human "values" and perceptions of the environment. The fMRI work is indeed fascinating in its potential, and a bit scary in how heavily it is, or has to be, manipulated ( ... )

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neededalj September 3 2009, 07:37:34 UTC
....fuck, I did it. New post. Insomnia is good for some things.

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aubergineautumn September 3 2009, 09:42:57 UTC
Well. If I were them, and did what they did, the modeling problem I would be testing would be how information is shared and distributed through a closed system (lj), w/reverb/response/amplification effect. Really, it seems like the only legitimate testing that could be derived....and if this is what they were testing, they couldn't come out & say it...otherwise, FAIL.

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msilverstar September 3 2009, 15:55:46 UTC
the sad thing is, it's taking us away from the lovely PORN

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