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
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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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*gives you two thumbs up*
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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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