Facebook have announced their first share offer. There was a fairly nuanced discussion on the BBC’s Today programme, which contained the useful maxim: if the service is free then you are the product. We pour personal information about ourselves – our locations, likes, friends and activities – into Facebook and Facebook sells that bit of us to advertisers. John Humphrys managed a grumble about whether we could trust a corporation with all that personal information, but nobody in the discussion seems to be able to raise much by way of concrete reasons not to give Facebook that information about yourself, they just had vague worries. Elsewhere, Cory has talked about the privacy bargain we make with corporations, and the dangers of making that bargain unknowingly or carelessly, but I want to leave that aside for a moment. Imagine a world where everyone was aware of exactly what Facebook were doing – ie selling information about our desires to advertiser. In this case, the vague worry about Facebook crystalises around a psychological question – can we be manipulated by corporations that know our desires? Imagine, if you will, that Facebook is the equivalent of the malevolent demon of Cartesian philosophy, still absolutely evil in intent, but different in that it can only control you through precisely targeted marketing messages, not through direct control of yours senses. Would you still sign up for a Facebook account? Say the Facebook Demon finds out you like lemons. Lemon Products Inc advertise you Lemon Perfume, LemonTech advertise you a lemon squeezer and Just Lemons Inc. offer you 10% off the price of lemons in their stores. Is this a bad world? The answer is only yes if you believe in the power of advertisers to make us do things we don’t want.
Author: tom
Whether in schools or in other public spheres, public intellectuals must struggle to create the conditions that enable students and others to become cultural producers who can rewrite their own experiences and perceptions by engaging with various texts, ideological positions, and theories. They must construct pedagogical relations in which students learn from each other, learn to theorize rather than simply ingest theories, and begin to address how to decenter the authoritarian power of the classroom. Students must also be given the opportunity to challenge disciplinary borders, create pluralized spaces from which hybridised identities might emerge, take up critically the relationship between language and experience, and appropriate knowledge as part of a broader effort at self-definition and ethical responsibility. What I am suggesting here is that public intellectuals move away from the rigid, ideological parameters of the debate about the curriculum or canon. What is needed is a new language for discussing knowledge and authority and the possibility of giving the students a role in deciding what is taught and how it is taught under specific circumstances. The question is not merely, who speaks and under what conditions? It is also about how to see universities (and public schools) as important sites of struggle over what is taught and for control of the conditions of knowledge production itself.
Giroux, H. A. (1997). Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory, culture, and schooling: a critical reader. WestviewPress (Boulder, Colo.), p263.
Previously I blogged about an experiment which used the time it takes people to make decisions to try and elucidate something about the underlying mechanisms of information processing (Stafford, Ingram & Gurney, 2011) . This post is about the companion paper to that experiment, reporting some computational modelling inspired by the experiment (Stafford & Gurney, 2011).
The experiment contained a surprising result, or at least a result that I claim should surprise some decision theorists. We has asked people to make a simple judgement – to name out loud the ink colour of a word stimulus, the famous Stroop Task (Stroop, 1935). We found that two factors which affected the decision time had independent effects – the size of the effect of each factors was not effected by the other factor. (The factors were the strength of the colour, in terms of how pale vs deep it was, and how the word was related to the colour, matching it, contradicting it or being irrelevant). This type of result is known as “additive factors” (because they add independently of each other. On a graph of results this looks like parallel lines).
There’s a long tradition in psychology of making an inference from this pattern of experimental results to saying something about the underlying information processing that must be going on. Known as the additive factors methodology (Donders, 1868–1869/1969; Sternberg, 1998), the logic is this: if we systematically vary two things about a decision and they have independent effects on response times, then the two things are operating on separate loci in the decision making architecture – thus proving that there are separate loci in the decision making architecture. Therefore, we can use experiments which measure only outcomes – the time it takes to respond – to ask questions about cognitive architecture; i.e. questions about how information is transformed and combined as it travels between input and output.
The problem with this approach is that it commits a logical fallacy. True separate information processing modules can produce additive factors in response data (A -> B), but that doesn’t mean that additive factors in response time data imply separate information processing modules (B -> A). My work involved taking a widely used model of information processing in the Stroop task (Cohen et al, 1990) and altering it so it contained discrete processing stages, or not. This allowed me to simulate response times in a situation where I knew for certain the architecture – because I’d built the information processing system. The result was surprising. Yes, a system of discrete stages could generate the pattern of data I’d observed experimentally and reported in Stafford, Ingram & Gurney (2011), but so could a single stage system in which all information was continuously processed in parallel, with no discrete information processing modules. Even stranger, both of these kind of systems could be made to produce either additive or non-additive factors without changing their underlying architecture.
The conclusion is straightforward. Although inferring different processing stages (or ‘modules’) from additive factors in data is a venerable tradition in psychology, and one that remains popular (Sternberg, 2011), it is a mistake. As Henson (2011) points out, there’s too much non-linearity in cognitive processing, so that you need additional constraints if you want to make inferences about cognitive modules.
Thanks to Jon Simons for spotting the Sternberg and Henson papers, and so inadvertantly promting this bit of research blogging
References
Cohen, J. D., Dunbar, K., and McClelland, J. L. (1990). On the control of automatic processes – a parallel distributed-processing account of the Stroop effect. Psychol. Rev. 97, 332–361.
Donders, F. (1868–1869/1969). “Over de snelheid van psychische processen. onderzoekingen gedann in het physiologish laboratorium der utrechtsche hoogeshool,” in Attention and Performance, Vol. II, ed. W. G. Koster (Amsterdam: North-Holland).
Henson, R. N. (2011). How to discover modules in mind and brain: The curse of nonlinearity, and blessing of neuroimaging. A comment on Sternberg (2011). Cognitive Neuropsychology, 28(3-4), 209-223. doi:10.1080/02643294.2011.561305
Stafford, T. and Gurney, K. N.(2011), Additive factors do not imply discrete processing stages: a worked example using models of the Stroop task, Frontiers in Psychology, 2:287.
Stafford, T., Ingram, L., and Gurney, K. N. (2011), Pieron’s Law holds during Stroop conflict: insights into the architecture of decision making, Cognitive Science 35, 1553–1566.
Sternberg, S. (1998). “Discovering mental processing stages: the method of additive factors,” in An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues, 2nd Edn, eds D. Scarborough, and S. Sternberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 702–863.
Sternberg, S. (2011). Modular processes in mind and brain. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 28(3-4), 156-208. doi:10.1080/02643294.2011.557231
Stroop, J. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. J. Exp. Psychol. 18, 643–662.
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A National Eccentricity Index
I’ve been wondering if it would be remotely possible to measure the amount of eccentricity in a culture. In particular, I’m wondering about the historical trend in number of people who are “characters” – ie the distinctly usual. Anecdotally, I’ve been told that 60 years ago there were more people who marched to the beat of a different drum, and it isn’t hard to imagine a story about the homogenising influence of modern and commercial culture. It also isn’t hard to imagine that all sorts of selection biases and preconceptions are at work, so that there really hasn’t been any change in this over recent history. So – could it be measured?
I was doing some research the other day, on what questions people ask about psychology. This tends to overlap, but not by much, with the questions that we as professional psychology researchers invesitgate. If you’re interested you can look for yourself:
Very common, it seems, is the question “Am I normal?” or “is this normal?”. Did people always ask this question, or is it particularly modern? If you do a google ngram search for the words “strange” and “normal” you get an interesting pattern:
More normal (in red), and less strange (in blue) over the last two centuries. They even appear inversely related at points – notice the damping of ‘strangeness’ around WWI and WWII and a surge in ‘normality’.
I’ve had a pair of papers published recently and I thought I’d have a go at putting simply what the research reported in them shows.
The first is called ‘Pieron’s Law holds during Stroop conflict: insights into the architecture of decision making‘. It reports a variation on the famous Stroop task. The Stroop task involves naming the ink colour of various words, words which can themselves be the name of colours. So you find yourself looking at the word GREEN in red ink and your job is to say “red”. If the word matches the ink colour people respond faster and more accurately; if the word doesn’t match, they are slower and less accurate. What we did was vary the strength of the colour component of the stimilus – e.g. we used more and less intense red ‘ink’ (actually we presented the stimuli on a computer screen, so the ink was pixel values). There’s a well established relationship between stimulus strength and responding – the ‘Pieron’s Law’ of the title – showing how response speed decreases with increasing stimulus strength.
So our experiment simply took two well know psychological findings and combined them in a single experiment. The result is interesting because it can help us arbitrate between different theories of how decisions are made. One popular theory of decision making is that all the information relevant to the decision is optimally combined to produce the swiftest and most accuracte response (Bogacz, 2007). There’s lots of support for this theory, including evidence from looking at responses of humans making simple judgements, recordings from the brain cells of monkeys and deep connections to statistical theory. It’s without doubt that the brain can and does integrate information optimally in some circumstances. What is interesting to me is that this optimal information integration perspective is completely at odds with the most successful research programme in post-war psychology: the heuristics and biases approach. This body of evidence suggest that human decision making is very non-optimal, with all sorts of systemmatic errors creeping into the way people combine information to make a decision. The explanation for these errors is that we process information using heuristics, mental shortcuts which give a good answer most of the time and cut down on the amount of effort which have to expend in deciding (“do what you did last time” is probably the most common decision heuristic).
My experiment connects to these ideas because it asked people to make a simple judgement (the colour of the ink), like the experiments supporting an optimal information integration perspective on decision making, but the judgement requested was just marginally more complex because we manipulate both Stroop condition (whether the word and ink matched) and colour strength. If you are a straight-down-the-line optimal information decision theorists then you must believe that evidence about the decision based on the word is combined with evidence about the decision based on the colour to make a single ‘amount of evidence’ variable which drives the decision. In the paper I call this the ‘common metric’ hypothesis. The logic is a bit involved (see the paper), but a consequence of this hypothesis is that the size of the effect of the word condition should vary across the colour strength condition, and vice versa. In other words, you should see an interaction. Visually, the lines on the graph of results would be non-parallel.
Here’s what we found:
What you’re looking at is a graph of response times (the y-axis) for different colour strengths (the x-axis). The three lines are the three Stroop conditions: when the word matches the colour (‘congruent’), when it doesn’t match (‘conflict’) and when there is no word (‘control’). The result: there is no interaction between these two factors – the lines are parallel.
The implication is that you don’t need to move very far from simple perceptual decision making before human decision making starts to look non-optimal – or at least non optimal in the sense of combining information from different sources. This is important because of the widespread celebration of decision making as informationally optimal. Reconciling this research programme with the wider heuristics and biases approach is important work, and fits more generally with an honourable tradition in science of finding “boundary conditions” where one way the world works gives way to another way.
Coming up next: Infering from behavioural results to underlying cognitive architecture – its not as simple as we were told (Stafford & Gurney, 2011).
References:
Bogacz, R. (2007). Optimal decision-making theories: linking neurobiology with behaviour. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(3), 118–125.
Stafford, T., Ingram, L. and Gurney, K.N.(2011), Pieron’s Law holds during Stroop conflict: insights into the architecture of decision making, Cognitive Science 35, 1553–1566.
Tom Stafford and Kevin N. Gurney (2011), Additive factors do not imply discrete processing stages: a worked example using models of the Stroop task, Frontiers in Psychology, 2:287.
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Tweets for 2012-01-26
- Loving this series from @niemanstory where journalists talk about stories that have really stuck with them http://t.co/3UlrBOHv #
- Some comment and debate on yesterday's stereotype threat story here http://t.co/L5ZQ5uqL via @JulesHolroyd #
- Nice morning surprise: got a first review for our free ebook on lucid dreaming – five stars! https://t.co/LH4WFI3h #
- About my recent free ebooks RT @mindhacksblog A treasure hunt for the mysteries of mind and brain http://t.co/fuRISwGI #
- Thank you kind stranger for my first review of the Explore Your Blind Spot free ebook – five stars! https://t.co/Llf7tab8 #
- Typing skill is based on interactions with the environment, not on internal schemas: Logan & Crump (2010) http://t.co/MB69KJIp #
- Favour: could someone try downloading my Control Your Dreams ebook (for $0) https://t.co/LH4WFI3h I'm having trouble debugging the site #
- Okay, so it is still broke 🙁 #
- The mystery of our shrinking brains. Why have modern humans got less grey matter? http://t.co/Ikv9ZbD4 #
- First mention of lucid dreaming? St Augustine of Hippo in 415 AD http://t.co/yfdfGdXN Get our free how-to ebook here http://t.co/KLzuPn8b #
- Tentative evidence that lucid dreamers may cope better with trauma http://t.co/QpvWQrPo Ebook on how to lucid dream http://t.co/KLzuPn8b #
- Yes, that's a roomba with whiskers, that's how @mathewe and @ShefRobotics roll http://t.co/OW5NfnJ5 #
- .@mathewe the cost of the science doesn't always correlate with the value. fMRI, I am looking at you #
- BPS Undergraduate RA scheme http://t.co/ouDjwu7a #
- "The Marilyn Meme" at Sociological Images http://t.co/7B2lHtcQ via @Erica_Jane_MP #
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(Local news warning: just details of a talk I’m giving)
Psychology in the Pub is a Sheffield event which happens in the Showroom Cinema Bar. I’m giving a talk there on the 15th of March and I’ve just written the blurb. Here it is for your enjoyment
Thinking Meat: Understanding brain and mind
You’re brain weighs the same as half a brick and has the consistency of warm butter. Yet such a mundane object allows you to have every thought you’ve ever had, every feeling, dream or hope. This talk will be an introduction to what I view as the central puzzle of psychology: how the brain creates the mind. I’ll discuss fundamental insights from the study of perception and action and suggest how these provide important clues for understanding all of human psychology. The talk will feature: Lego Robots! ‘Subliminal messages’! Britney Spears! Pirates! And a no-holds-bared personal revelation from the speaker
The content will be similar to the talk I gave in Manchester recently, which you can hear here
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Quote #282
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
The Savage to Mustapha Mond, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), p187
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Tweets for 2012-01-19
- Today: to the @royalsociety for an update on the parliamentary pairing scheme I am part of. #
- Is Terry Eagleton a national treasure yet? RT @stevenpoole: Eagleton reads de Botton so you don't have to: http://t.co/h2fGmxse #
- Neat 2009 study "The role of sleep in false memory formation" showing that sleep selectively increased false memories http://t.co/bl4oTQyM #
- has anyone ever estimated the economic contribution made by Wikipedia? I'm guessing billions of $ worldwide #
- Scan of 70 year old triathlete's muscles give graphic illustration that age related muscle loss is not inevitable http://t.co/7nJxUB3y #
- From Brad Duchaine (2010) "Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable" http://t.co/XTJmhOmx #
- Case study of a developmentally prosopagnosic family http://t.co/VDZwKDke (also from Duchaine, 2010) #
- Detecting tetrachromacy in human subjects http://t.co/MKH6CeVJ cc @Harpsicordian #
- Rosenthal & Fode (1963) Classic study on the role of experimenter expectations in psy research http://t.co/hOtIBs5C PDF http://t.co/7FdWNRk2 #
- RT @FriedaKlotz In a weird way this is quite inspiring. Clay Shirky's rant about women: http://t.co/xszAJobW #
- Gendered descriptors in references prejudice academic hiring decisions http://t.co/uNn0ciUg via @AtheneDonald in @timeshighered #
- Frustrating @BBCr4today piece about doubts over the veracity of stereotype threat. #
- No evidence for stereotype threat isn't the same as "there's no discrimination" @BBCr4today #
- Scientific savantism: psychologist reviews lit on stereotype threat and then given platform to pronounce on origin of gender differences #
- .@dantekgeek and here's the Uni of Leeds press release about the stereotype threat work http://t.co/vFJatS4A #
- Wooah! Juggling quadrocopter robots http://t.co/WEF78evE #
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Tweets for 2012-01-12
- Compare: cortical topographic maps http://t.co/sbHJrJJt penguins http://t.co/3tvDHKoj #
- RT @bakadesuyo: What's the best way to learn faster? http://t.co/r4ZQaQA0 #
- "Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience" (O'Reilly & Munakata, 2000) is now available free & online http://t.co/pmy2Z8t8 #
- verisimilitude is a massive attractor when doing computational modelling work. Unfortunately it is also only a local minimum 😉 #
- Trends in Neurosciences "The neurobiology of anhedonia and other reward-related deficits" http://t.co/BEiMwmJa #
- Legend RT @totalshowman I'm so pleased this guy didn't give the RI Christmas Lectures when I was a boy: http://t.co/a4VAnRxa #
- Dreams content is weird, but the cognitive processes are common to waking http://t.co/jy3Hul1 more in our free ebook http://t.co/bBs4IiYm #
- RT @timd Slightly inebriated older gent gets on bus, greets similarly inebriated older acquaintances: "Din't forget nah, stay above graand" #
- Very important! Blanton & Jaccard (2006). Arbitrary metrics in psychology. http://t.co/XLbiflya #
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Quote #281
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
Matsuo Basho (attrib.)
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Tweets for 2012-01-05
- The Sliver of Perception http://t.co/OkwOa4Kk "in the grand scheme of things we're all pretty much blind and deaf" #
- New ebook "Control your dreams" http://t.co/xirdYr40 it's a DIY guide for lucid dreaming, at a "pay what you want" price (inc. £0) #
- Let me know if you spot any formatting errors in your e-book format of choice #
- Gamers have more lucid dreams http://t.co/CM4O4Q7D via @vaughanbell #
- Great endorsement for our book on lucid dreaming "after a quick read I scored 2 lucid events in one nights sleep" http://t.co/PSqyVhw5 #
- RT @Neuro_Skeptic: New post http://t.co/34NbQvwY Do rapid eye movements during sleep mean that we're watching things in our dreams? #
- How to understand debt (aka why those overmortgaged family analogies are wrong) : @nytimeskrugman on debt http://t.co/vqDSG08T #
- .@GeorgeMonbiot is excoriating on matt ridley's libertarianism http://t.co/Q52DcaVD #
- .@Erica_Jane_MP so is there a way you can search your favourites on twitter? Seems like a useful thing for someone to make #
- Great article on the cognitive skills of elite footballers in Jan's psychologist magazine http://t.co/8kEC5vnj shame it's closed access 🙁 #
- So what's a good book to buy someone who has just started a PhD (in the arts and humanities)? #
- Lucid Dreaming as Metacognition: Implications for Cognitive Science http://t.co/bgeZn0p discussed in our free ebook https://t.co/LH4WFI3h #
- Lucid dreamers better at Iowa gambling task http://t.co/26JSDrS this, and more, discussed in our free ebook https://t.co/LH4WFI3h #
- Archive classic: "Why not be a writer?" http://t.co/jZ6WTI2h #
- From the archive "Trust in Science" http://t.co/5P1ydg6u now available in Romanian http://t.co/V8bQQ1Su thanks to http://t.co/UUyv2Lnh #
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Quote #280: Butterfly dreams
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.
Master Chuang (c. 369 BC – c. 286 BC)
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Control your dreams (ebook)
Anyone can learn to have lucid dreams, and this ebook tells you how. Lucid dreams are those dreams where you become aware you are dreaming, and can even begin to control the reality of the dream. Adventure, problem-solving and consequence-free indulgence await! And for those interested in the mind, lucid dreams are a great place to explore the nature of their own consciousness. The ebook is written as a sort of travel guide, telling you what you need to take on your journey and what to expect when you start to lucid dream. It finishes off with a quick review of the scientific literature on lucid dreaming and links and references for further reading if you want to continue your exploration of lucid dreaming.
I wrote this with friend, and lucid dreamer, Cat Bardsley. My wife Harriet Cameron provided some beautiful illustrations which you can find throughout the book (and on the cover you can see here). The book is Creative Commons licensed so you can copy it and share it as you will, and even modify and improve (as long as you keep the CC licensing). It’s available on smashwords on a pay-what-you-want-basis (and that includes nothing, so it is yours for free if you’d like).
“Control your dreams” is my second self-published ebook. You can also get “Explore your blindspot” from smashwords (which is completely free, and also CC licensed). The wonderful folk at 40k books published my essay The Narrative Escape last year (and after doing all the formatting and admin associated with these two new ebooks I am more and more in awe of what they did).
Sweet Dreams!
(Cross-posted at mindhacks.com)
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G. A. Cohen’s “Freedom and Money” (2001)
In which Cohen argues that lack of money is a lack of political freedom, and that the issue of private property (which is axiomatic to libertarians) cannot be determined independently of issues of political freedom. In other words, you can’t reasonably set aside the issue of distribution of property (i.e. wealth) from your consideration of freedom. This pervasive confusion, Cohen argues, arises because of a misperception of the nature of money, which appears as a real thing, like rocks or even like physical strength, but is actually “social power in the form of a thing” (Marx).
Anyway, it is a great read, lucid and mind expanding, and a great example of political philosophy . I can’t find a journal reference for it, but it is – apparently – reprinted in On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy (2011)
Link to PDF (thanks Josie!)
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Tweets for 2011-12-29
- Dinosaur Comics tackles the "hundred words for snow" fallacy http://t.co/DiYPYLNE #
- RT @bakadesuyo: What's the most important lesson for improving your writing skills? http://t.co/T6btmnax #
- My free ebook is Xmas fun for all the family https://t.co/Llf7tab8 if your family is well geeky and into quirks of visual consciousness #
- More information doesn't get you out of telling stories @jonahlehrer on causation, correlation & the scientific method http://t.co/b9q4qqOB #
- Coaching psychologist, based in London: "Realizing your potential from an evidence-based perspective Dr. Anne Hsu" http://t.co/phAJ5jks #
- RT @mindhacksblog Translated post: Insegnare ed apprendere in modo efficace http://t.co/0kC6cEYp (thanks Giuliana!) #
- Original: "Make study more effective, the easy way" http://t.co/cGh4pBij #
- Team Syneseizure! Cyborg gimp mask lets you feel how things look http://t.co/Vn2nsjwJ #
- Exploring the future: Tools for strategic thinking http://t.co/Ft8MkmwL #
- Welcome to the Sigma Scan – a searchable repository for horizon scanning papers, designed for government users. http://t.co/m5tjfdBU #
- Dennett on Julian Jaynes "Julian Jaynes' Software Archeology" http://t.co/3tQiWv6H (via @frabcus) #
- Onset asymmetry in Parkinsons effects sensitivity to different kinds of religious thinking http://t.co/bKZmSZJq #
- The Portland Works project wants to ensure the survival of one of Sheffield's great buildings http://t.co/yZhe5oIQ also http://t.co/Ip44xJFp #
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links for December 2012
- Tom Slee on the contradiction at the heart of Tim Harford’s Adapt
- Jerry Seinfeld (channelling George Ainslie) offers productivity advice for writers
- Coaching psychologist, based in London: Realizing your potential from an evidence-based perspective Dr. Anne Hsu, PhD
- Shilzi offers a thought experiment on economic efficiency: ‘The larger point is that while what is technologically efficient depends on facts of nature, what is economically efficient is a function of our social arrangements, of who owns how much of what. Economic efficiency may be a good tool, but it is perverse to serve your own tools, and monstrous to be ruled by them’
- Ian Martin missed “project US”
- Welcome to the Sigma Scan – a searchable repository for horizon scanning papers, designed for government users>
- Foresight’s Horizon Scanning Centre has built this toolkit: Exploring the future: Tools for strategic thinking
- Award winning radio documentary by Dan Box following the soldiers, and the families, of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment over their seven-month deployment to Afghanistan.
- Colman, R. J., Anderson, R. M., Johnson, S. C., Kastman, E. K., Kosmatka, K. J., Beasley, T. M., Allison, D. B., et al. (2009). Caloric Restriction Delays Disease Onset and Mortality in Rhesus Monkeys Science, 325(5937), 201 -204. doi:10.1126/science.1173635
- The End of Evil? Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing. Are they right?
- News summary by Christian Jarrett of a new article by Scott Lilienfeld about the public’s scepticism of psychology
- Jonah Lehrer The Advantages of Tourette’s Studies of those with tourettes offer further evidence that self control can be trained
- Charles Fernyhough on The nature of thought, language, inner speech and Vygotsky
- ‘More and more, I’m finding myself inclined to think that philosophical reflection about ethical issues is, on average, morally useless’
- ‘Anthropology knows that what currently exists does not have to be. Anthropology knows more about capitalism than any other academic discipline.’
Categories
Quote #279
Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be
Ophelia, in Hamlet,Act 4, Scene 5, by William Shakespeare (1599-1602 ish)
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Tweets for 2011-12-22
- Trusty et al (2004) Practical Guide for Reporting Effect Sizes http://t.co/roLkRECL reassuring name #
- Trivia stats: we have 354 female undergraduates in my department. Of these, only 19 (5%) choose to be referrred to as Ms rather than Miss #
- We have 75 male undergraduates, none of whom have to make a choice and are all on the system as "mr" #
- Trying to explain to my mum about the peer review process. Any links more useful than this, the Downfall spoof? http://t.co/iZw9kisj #
- Tweenbots are human-dependent cardboard robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. http://t.co/KDfn5gkI #
- Nice design "Spaghetti measuring tool. Small, adult and family portion." http://t.co/2ERQWKak #
- Next semester I run a module about controversies in cognitive neuroscience. We need a new controversy to consider. Any suggestions? #
- Good suggestion @alexfradera @tomstafford voodoo correlations? <— phrased as Q: "Does fMRI analysis produce spurious results?" #
- Suggested controversies for my cog neuro class: voodoo correlations/publication bias in fMRI, mirror neurons, fMRI evidence in court. (1/2) #
- (2/2) plus effects of meditation. Any more? #
- APA manuscript formatting guide from Purdue Owl http://t.co/4Vf9BfA6 #
- Sheffield Psychology department spring seminar series now online http://t.co/J5fqmfdw #
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Tweets for 2011-12-15
- I cut the freewill stuff from my talk 2nite RT @sciammind: most popular on the site now: "Is Free Will an Illusion?" http://t.co/6Uq043mk #
- RT @alokjha: the Guardian: Results of publicly funded research will be open access – science minister http://t.co/aIm2cr1P #
- Selling traditionally feminine products to men, drawing on ridiculous stereotypes of masculinity http://t.co/Q9O7D1eg via @frankieroberto #
- "Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy."
Joseph Campbell – via @DigiWorldSheff # - RT @bakadesuyo: What's an excellent productivity secret we can learn from Jerry Seinfeld? http://t.co/C04WMvgZ #
- I wrote this free ebook about your visual blindspot. It's creative commons licensed, and a scientific adventure http://t.co/1jnp6XoI #
- "learning by reviewing" students who mark peer's papers improve in writing more than if they just read peer's papers http://t.co/BKjWNhJO #
- HI afternoon people – I've released a free ebook http://t.co/Llf7tab8 it's a scientific travel guide. And the cover is a picture of my eye #
- Nearly 1000 downloads today of my new free ebook about the visual blind spot http://t.co/Llf7tab8 #
- This is approximately 999 more readers than for any scientific paper I've written #
- Congratulations to @totalshowman for passing his PhD viva with minor corrections (my 1st supervisee to write up). Well done Tom! #
- Great interactive map from the Australian showing global student migration patterns: sources and destinations http://t.co/S8aTpwRj #
- Gone to dance with Aunty – RIP Russell Hoban http://t.co/UO9b4cGh #
- Neurocognitive literature digest. Banana domestication to the dreams of the deaf. A cornucopia of awesome links http://t.co/izK5OsC4 #
- Mediators vs Moderators – finally had to get this distinction clear in my head. This helped: http://t.co/JoPpz3X2 #
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Tweets for 2011-12-08
- RT @bengoldacre A job for a very nerdy person who knows about stats and writing. http://t.co/940jZjIF #
- Here's a nice natural illusion which shows the power of shadow to influence perception of depth http://t.co/Tf4MnvWL #
- . @thundercauldron and here's that great Gladwell / New Yorker article about where ideas come from http://t.co/DSO2xMzH #
- I have just donated money for the UK Uncut legal action to force HMRC to collect unpaid tax. http://t.co/eWxu2EDn #
- Late to the party, but here is a great critique of @TimHarford's Adapt by @whimsley http://t.co/uoMDPYh2 was there ever a riposte I wonder? #
- Talking in #manchester tomorrow eve http://t.co/2p1KlyWM minds, brains, perception, free will, lego robots and subliminal messages! #
- It's going to be a rollercoaster ride though cognitive science. If I fit it all in #
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Tweets for 2011-12-01
- That neat evolutionary psychology waist to hip ratio story about female attractiveness? More complicated than that http://t.co/jDOFjtnL #
- Last link from and via @PsychScientists – thanks guys! #
- up to 10 fully funded PhD studentships to start in 2012 offered in Dept of Psychology at @sheffielduni http://t.co/D23CpBFO #
- And in other news, the University of Sheffield has been named "University of the Year" http://t.co/YJsFUwOT #
- "We don't need to understand engines to drive a car, why do we need to understand code to use a computer?" says interviewer #
- Correct analogy is "read maps". Without code you just drive your computer around your home town, never able to go anywhere new #radio4 #
- Convinced that queues are the ideal experimental paradigm to investigate the construction and maintainence of social norms #
- Senior Lectureship in Cognitive Science and Decision Making, University of Manchester http://t.co/3fvRGcmP #
- Shalizi: "what is economically efficient is a function of our social arrangements, of who owns how much of what" http://t.co/PFf5pafg #
- From: the shire, To:Mordor. Via the M6 http://t.co/kEVDLXzj #
- +1 day! Vaughan is the http://t.co/85Rwnq1n 99% RT @vaughanbell Just noticed that Mind Hacks blog is 7 years old today http://t.co/NDVd9w39 #
- Giving a 'psychology for non-psychologists' talk next Thursday in Manchester. In a bar. Title "thinking meat" http://t.co/xlnlKulN #
- I'll be talking mind, brain and how to understand the self in an age of neuroscience http://t.co/xlnlKulN #
- RT @mariapage: Oh no… It's true… 🙁 Sad day for neuroscience "Obituary: Professor Jon Driver" – http://t.co/932yCxnt #
- Great 2008 paper from @sianbeilock : When does haste make waste? http://t.co/y4NsEMiH Skilled motor perf. enhanced by prioritising speed #
- Richard Shiffrin runs an annual Cognitive Science Conference, ASIC, held at different outdoor adventure sites http://t.co/UqZTeTZ4 #
- RT @Psych_Writer Dodgy research practices are rife in psychology. Details of an alarming new survey: http://t.co/oWzYElVs #
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Tweets for 2011-11-24
- Creationist slams "research" from @sheffielduni Psychology department http://t.co/rIA2FEfC #
- Ouch! Why is U2 popular? http://t.co/zpMy0XYw "The nostalgia is so thick you have to wipe it from your face. " via @rellimluap #
- Economist debate from Dec 2010 "Language Shapes How We Think". http://t.co/9Wa5zsY4 Boroditsky vs Liberman (of Language Log), round one! #
- Round Two! http://t.co/Kus1D5x4 #
- Just found my opening music for today's lecture http://t.co/pfQ7XHiM #
- "modelling natural action selection" book just out (and in my sweaty paw) http://t.co/O3JWKSRW #
- .@tom_hartley and it is interesting – a proper evolutionary & computational treatment of decision making! #
- Gladstone was prime minister 4 times in the 19C, AND he found time to dabble in linguistic anthropology http://t.co/LAzWO5zQ #
- Your source for that is, of course, Gladstone, W. E. (1858). Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. London: Oxford University Press #
- Winston Churchill said "They told me how Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right." #
- Birth of a myth: Whorf (1940) makes the claim that the Eskimos have many words for snow http://t.co/84OzD3Fe #
- What's the collective noun for professors? One correspondent suggested "an absence" http://t.co/FusFgzE4 in @timeshighered #
- Love the straight dope: "Could early man only see three colours?" http://t.co/LAzWO5zQ (quick answer: no) #
- a solution if you don't like using a passive author voice, though not a recommended one http://t.co/avpD3oIU via @mathewe #
- RT @PhEMH @tomstafford although really this is just another "Polly Matzinger rocks" story … which she does <– True! http://t.co/txFVggYw #
- The more I read of the new Whorfianism the less impressed I am; Lera Boroditsky in Scientific American http://t.co/XgsMqBef #
- Preparing for lectures on language and cognition. Do the words we use matter? This complaint to the BBC assumes they do http://t.co/aoOUKra5 #
- "Viagra for engagement dysfunction" RT @tombennett71: Gamification is bullsh*t http://t.co/2dLN4pVa #
- Fantastic paper from Flaherty & Senghas (2011) showing how language supportings thinking (about numbers in this case) http://t.co/DO5SeiPB #
- "Language as a Cognitive Technology: English-Speakers Match Like Piraha When You Don’t Let Them Count" http://t.co/EpNFjaxC #
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The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.…
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so.
George Orwell, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’,
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Tweets for 2011-11-17
- Possibly my most eloquent blog post ever RT @mindhacksblog
Neuro ears: http://t.co/CiBRO09O # - From @timeshighered Israeli scholar-activist teaches teachers to critically analyse textbooks http://t.co/yJQvcqhR #
- PsychoPy = very impressive. My students got their expt working in just 2 hours, from never having seen the software b4! http://t.co/3Nh8feHC #
- Fun times talking psychology of programming with @yaxu #
- Anyone who read the Yorkshire Post article about our bit.ly collaboration: more info here http://t.co/qmNJXu8a #
- .@EuphoricBuffoon article on the psychology of conspiracy theories, from our own @psychmag http://t.co/uijv1jwX (post by @vaughanbell) #
- Computational sound art, http://t.co/UhzaQajN. Lovely. via @yaxu #
- "Training Attentional Control in Infancy" : early evidence of distal transfer http://t.co/fPnES932 #
- Article in Frontiers in Cognitive Science just published "Additive factors do not imply discrete processing stages" http://t.co/Y9PEW2G0 #
- Ironically, this is a follow-up to an (accepted) paper in Cognitive Science, which hasn't been published yet #academicpublishing #
- RT (myself) @tomstafford Anyone who read the Yorkshire Post article about our bit.ly collaboration: more info here http://t.co/qmNJXu8a #
- Nice to be a highlight! RT @ResearchDigest Psychology to the Rescue highlights, in Italian http://t.co/1DBe3UaB
english http://t.co/iMRkwPlx # - What's the use of powerpoint if it won't let me embed this Tim Minchin video in Friday's lecture? http://t.co/CIiWUsGa #
- Here's the Yorkshire Post article on our hack day with bit.ly data http://t.co/nzLNwjzk is that a pun I don't get or a typo in the title? #
- A few clicks from you can help #Sheffield Renewables get £100,000 to generate hydro-electricity from the Don. DO IT http://t.co/1DeCYs70 #
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Quote #277
At the base of the modern state there is the professor, not the executioner… for the monopoly of legitimate education is more important than the monopoly of legitimate violence.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, reported here
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Tweets for 2011-11-10
- My entry features in @Psych_Writer's compilation of answers to "one time Psychology to the Rescue" http://t.co/bCP5H93t #
- .@cfernyhough Out of interest, can you give me some examples of your favourite popular science books? #
- RT @oliverburkeman: This week's column is about the amazing power of automaticity, habit chains, and Ifttt. Yes, Ifttt. http://t.co/hVzGDw4J #
- I am giving a seminar at Birkbeck on Wednesday at 1pm "Beyond reinforcement learning in action acquisition" http://t.co/qzeV67P8 #
- Today @sheffielduni Psychology Dept : hack day on bit.ly data with Dr @mikedewar. It's behaviour Jim, but not as we know it #
- Hack day in effect – @mikedewar presides http://t.co/7Q3yIDYi #
- Hackday update: Technical hitches abound. @mikedewar looks like he is enjoying these most. Next, a true essential of hackdays: takeaway! #
- Hackday drink of choice – Ubuntu Cola http://t.co/CDP1m2S6 #
- My colleague Tom Webb is looking for 2 post docs, to work with him, in Sheffield, on goal monitoring http://t.co/zj8GdF30 #
- Today: giving a seminar at Birkbeck at 1pm "Beyond reinforcement learning in action acquisition" http://t.co/qzeV67P8 #
- What Sheffield's sharing (bit.ly hack day report) http://t.co/qmNJXu8a thx to @mikedewar @totalshowman @djyates @thundercauldron @mariapage #
- …And @CigirKalfaoglu and Stuart Wilson #
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Yesterday was my research group’s first hackday. It’s a concept I borrowed from the software geeks, but which I thought we could use a bit of in psychological science. The plan was for the whole lab to get together and spend the day working on the same dataset, to see what we could come up with after a day of intense work.
Inspiration was provided by visiting data wizard Mike Dewar, who works with the link shortening service bit.ly. Mike was able to give us a slice of bit.ly data – all the shared links which the people of Sheffield had clicked on in a week. The leap from tech/internet business to psychology department isn’t so weird when you think about it. We’re both interested in taking high volume measurements of behaviour and trying to understand what is really going on (for us, inside the mind, for bit.ly, with the users behind the clicks).
We got together in one room and Mike guided us though some of the nuances of analysing the data. After a few busy hours, and along with those essential hackday accompaniments – takeaway food and cola (open source of course) – we had a snapshot of the kind of sites that people in Sheffield shared with each other.
This plot shows the trend of the weeks’ clicks for the top ten shared sites for Sheffield (with total click rate on the y-axis, and time on the x-axis). The scale is a bit small (click to expand), so here in a list is Sheffield’s top ten shared links for the analysed week:
1. Facebook (of course)
2. BBC (public service broadcasting FTW)
3. YouTube
4. GiveMeFootball
5. Celebuzz
6. Guardian
7. Google
8. Linksynergy
9. southyorkshire
10. swfc
Perhaps not a surprise, but we can see that people are sharing information on facebook, on news sites and about celebrities and football. And I note that the Owls win the Sheffield link-sharing derby! You can also see the daily peaks in click activity (at lunchtime? Or just after lunch perhaps!). With a bit more time we could delve into what times people preferred to click on different types of links (news vs business vs gossip would be an interesting comparison), and how the activity of a particular links changes over time, as it spreads out along social networks, passing from person to person, and a thousand other things. So think of this as a work in progress report. I’ll come back to you if we generate anything else.
Thanks to Mike and bit.ly for allowing us to play with their data, and to C, Maria, Donny, Tom, Martin and Stu for taking part.
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Links for October (ish) 2011
- Teenage soviet maths olympians in clandestine operation to fight racist University admissions procedures
- Think about your online security like a professional
- ‘the real task of jurors in criminal trials is to compose a story’
- Kendler, K. S. (2005). Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry. Am J Psychiatry, 162(3), 433-440. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.162.3.433
- Interview with editor of Nature about how the journal makes decisions on which papers to accept
- Atul Gawande in the New Yorker: ‘Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?’
- Update on the Zeigarnik Effect from the Baumeister lab: ‘How to Avoid Being Distracted From Your Goals. Making specific plans creates mental space’
- Brendan Stone at TEDx Sheffield about Storying Sheffield
- Shalizi critiques experiments on ‘Baysian cognition’
- Making Ubuntu talk to the iPhone
There’s a nice paragraph in Camilla Power’s book review in the time Times Higher Ed:
While there are interesting ideas here in a random scatter of cases and anecdotes, the trouble is that it makes the reader feel equally random: scatterbrained, as if you’ve been doing idle searches on Google or browsing Wikipedia all day. The kind of theoretical coherence found in the elegant, simple propositions of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene or Amotz and Avishag Zahavi’s The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle – books that made you feel like a genius, armed with a new perspective on the world – is not evident.
Power has captured what is wrong with so much popular science writing, and what is right with those books I really value