{"id":731,"date":"2008-05-23T06:42:39","date_gmt":"2008-05-23T05:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/?p=731"},"modified":"2008-05-23T06:42:39","modified_gmt":"2008-05-23T05:42:39","slug":"dont-belive-the-neurohype-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2008\/05\/23\/dont-belive-the-neurohype-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t belive the neurohype (excerpt)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Vaughan is so spot on over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mindhacks.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/dont_believe_the_ne.html\">mindhacks.com<\/a> that I&#8217;m going to excerpt him here:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i><br \/>\nFor example, an experiment might find that fear is associated with amygdala activation. But it&#8217;s impossible to say the reverse, that every time the amygdala is activated, the person is fearful.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an analogy. On average, people from New York may be more impatient than people from other cities.<\/p>\n<p>If you predicted that all people from New York were impatient on the basis of this, you&#8217;d be grossly mistaken so many times that it would make your prediction invalid.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, taking the average attributes of populations and applying them to individuals is stereotyping, and we avoid it because it is so often wrong as to cause us to misjudge people.<\/p>\n<p>Alternatively, if you met an impatient person and therefore concluded that they must live in New York, you&#8217;d be equally inaccurate.<br \/>\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vaughan is so spot on over at mindhacks.com that I&#8217;m going to excerpt him here: For example, an experiment might find that fear is associated with amygdala activation. But it&#8217;s impossible to say the reverse, that every time the amygdala is activated, the person is fearful. Here&#8217;s an analogy. On average, people from New York [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectual-self-deference","category-psychology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-bN","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}