Comments on: Beware Neuroscience Stories

By: Azar Gat needs to read Judith Harris « Entitled to an Opinion

Azar Gat needs to read Judith Harris « Entitled to an Opinion — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 20:16:17 +0000

[...] violent; beaten children becoming beating parents; and so on” It’s preceded by some stuff about developing brain plasticity which doesn’t suffice to show anything about behavioral [...]

By: Stuart Armstrong

Stuart Armstrong — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:03:11 +0000

Actually, I’d come down on the side of the normal people who get tricked by fake neuroscience. If they’re presented with irrelevant neuroscience facts, it may make them feel that they’re not fully understanding the logic. Hence, in ignorance, they rate the explanation more highly – “I can’t say it’s wrong, can’t say it’s right”. So they honestly, and rationally, give it a middling score.

We want the man on the street to defer to those experts and explanations that we know are accurate – in science, economics and such. To do so, he has to trust scientific authority without understanding it. That means he’ll also trust it when it’s not justified (running this experiment on fundamentalist religious types would be interesting). To us, the difference between the logical flow of a text and the scientific statements in it is evident – but that’s because we have the training.

Less excuses for the students, though.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:27:49 +0000

Perhaps this bias could come to popular attention and reduced if we did some studies using functional brain scans of people reading about studies using functional brain scans.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 22:49:51 +0000

Eliezer, give your co-authors my deepest sympathies for their unfortunate names.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:40:18 +0000

TGGP: The oddness of referring to oneself in the third person in blog comments was investigated by Thnortwhistle, Bladderbock, and me (2008). The me et. al. paper found that it didn’t look anywhere near as odd as the alternative.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 02:50:32 +0000

In scholarly papers it is normal to refer to yourself (or, more accurately, your authorship of other papers) in the third person, but it seems odd in a blog comment.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:09:13 +0000

Bruce, congrats on helping to start this research area.

By: Bruce Britton

Bruce Britton — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 00:53:02 +0000

The seductive details effect was originally demonstrated in a paper by Britton, van Dusen, Gulgoz and Glynn in the Journal of Educational Psychology, from which Garner and Gillingham acknowledge they took off. The Britton et al paper found that the seductive details decreased understanding of a text written by Time-Life writers. The seductive details were inserted because of insistent demands by the next level of Time-Life editors for colorful ‘nuggets’ of information — mostly man-bites-dog anecdotes on the topic of the text — which because they were only tangentially related to the point of the text, served to distract the reader from the actual point of the text, thus decreasing understanding of that point.

Such insistent demands usually need not be made of journalists, because they are trained and shaped to include such ‘nuggets’ as a matter of course, for which one can find evidence on virtually any page of any newspaper, and television is even more suseptible — ‘if it bleeds it leads’, etc. Commentators point out that economics writing has its own seductive details dangers, but we should realize that so do all other fields, especially when journalists are let loose upon them.

Journalists do it because it sells soap.

By: EconLog

EconLog — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:40:42 +0000

Neuroscience: Don’t Be Intimidated

These days, psychiatrists favorite fig leaf for counter-intuitive claims is to hide behind neuroscience. “You think that serial killers are…

By: Anders Sandberg

Anders Sandberg — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:39:39 +0000

The colors! I feel I must believe it!

Another neuroimaging paper that caught my eye today thanks to colors was “Increased structural connectivity in grapheme-color synesthesia”:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n6/abs/nn1906.html
Here I think the paper actually contributes something (yes, there is a slight anatomical difference between synesthetes and normals, and “inner” and “outer” synesthetes). But otherwise diffusion tensor imaging produces the most information-dense and wonderous pictures you can wish for, yet they seldom seem to actually tell you anything new:
http://bmia.bmt.tue.nl/Research/MVIAV/DTI/20020501-DTI/BER03_DTI.htm
http://noodle.med.yale.edu/~mjack/images/parcel.jpg
http://www.math-inf.uni-greifswald.de/~linsen/research/DTI.jpg
http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/Publications/GPUTensor/images/coronal_slice.jpg
OK, sometimes they help surgery:
http://www.brainlab.com/download/pic/iPlanFiberTracking.jpg