New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Formal epistemology at its best

(Cross-posted at M-Phi.)

So far, I have not been following developments in formal epistemology very closely, even though the general project has always been in the back of my mind as a possible case-study for my ideas on the methodology of using formal tools in philosophy (and elsewhere). Well, last week I attended two terrific talks in formal epistemology, one by Branden Fitelson (joint work with Kenny Easwaran) in Munich, and one by Jeanne Peijnenburg (joint work with David Atkinson) in Amsterdam. (Full disclosure: Branden is a good friend, and Jeanne is my boss in Groningen! But I’m sure everybody will agree they are among the very best people working on formal epistemology these days.) These two talks illustrate two different ways in which the application of formal methods can be illuminating for the analysis of epistemological concepts and theories, and thus confirmed my hunch that formal epistemology can be a good case study for a more general reflection on formal methodology.

With friends like these

Toward the end of Alex Rosenberg's "Why I am a Naturalist" piece in the NYT, we find this line. 

If semiotics, existentialism, hermeneutics, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism transparently flout science’s standards of objectivity, or if they seek arbitrarily to limit the reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as knowledge.

Now I'm a minimal naturalist of the ontological monism / no supernatural entities type, which is a very low bar to clear, to be sure. But even if were a naturalist of the "only science gives us knowledge" school I don't think I'd be happy with Rosenberg's column, as my title indicates. Now usually I take a "Forget it, Jake, it's the blogosphere" line on these things -- is it really worth reading seriously or even semi-seriously a blog post? But what the hell, let's go through this sentence. 

First: what is the principle of unity of this list of bogeys? Elsewhere the post mentions "literary theory" or "literary criticism," but those two fields are by no means identical, nor do they provide a principle of unity for this list.

Second: is this list anything more than an intonation of shibboleths? Let's examine them one-by-one. I'm not going to claim inside knowledge, but I think any philosopher should know what I'm about to say about these names.

a. Semiotics, aka the study of signs. How could Peirce or Saussure "flout" that to which they aspired? 

b. Existentialism. Really? Let's be naturalists about this. What experimental / observational method would enable us to find flesh-and-blood existentialists walking the halls of American universities in 2011? 

Imagine! Then Take the Quiz

Imagine this lady and her unicorn. Furnish them with lots of visual detail. How big are they? How would they look from another angle? Put in some non-visual detail. Suppose our lady gave the little thing a good smack. What sound would it make? Suppose it chewed on some clover-like leaves: How would that sound? How would it smell? Does her perfume overwhelm the clover?

You are entertaining a sensory image. Much of our mental life is directed towards sensory images. Yet it is not well understood how and what they signify. I’ll pose three fundamental questions about imaging that bear on central issues in the philosophy of mind. It may seem obvious how they should be answered—but they mask the potential for sharp disagreement.  

1. Can your image of the unicorn be true?
2. Your image is as of a brown unicorn. Is it, similarly, of an existent one?
3. Are you (necessarily) imagining yourself observing the lady and her unicorn?

Dead Kennedys - I am the Owl

This song has a wonderful build, a great band at the height of their powers. The really insane thing about the lyrics is that the illegal acts Jello Biafra was singing about, including the stuff they got Nixon for, are all actually legal now.

Spreading the word on the "supplement" to JFP

I'm just going to cut and paste Mr. Zero's recent Philosophy Smoker post. I agree that Sula and Morrow's endeavor (following a suggestion made by redoubtable friend of the blog Spiros at Philosophers Anonymous) is super awesome, and will provide as much publicity as is practicable. Please cut and paste Mr. Zero's announcement to your own blogs!

David Morrow, who is awesome, writes:

Chris Sula and I have revamped the Phylo site to create an actual jobs board to (ahem) supplement the JFP. The URL is the same as the old wiki: http://phylo.info/jobs. As of today, we'll start accepting job postings in that space from departmental representatives only. Following Harry Brighouse's advice, we'll also require a link to an external site (e.g., an announcement on the department's web site) to verify each post's authenticity. We're moving the job wiki to http://phylo.info/jobs/wiki. People will still be able to post unofficial updates there. We're still in the process of updating the wiki software to play nicely with the jobs board, but it will be up well before anyone needs to post status updates. In the meantime, watch the main jobs board to find out about job openings..

This is super awesome. I'm sure I don't speak only for myself when I say how grateful I am to David and Chris for doing this. Thank you both.

It also seems to me that in order for this to work, it has to be well-publicized. So job-seekers everywhere would appreciate it if Smokers with blogs of their own, or who post to the various philosophy listserves, etc, would help spread the word.

--Mr. Zero

Book draft: Formal Languages in Logic

(Apologies for shameless self-promotion!)

In several of my posts, I mentioned the book on formal languages that I've been working on for the last few years. I now have a draft of the book ready for (moderate!) public consumption, which is now available here. The two final chapters are still missing, but the draft is already something of a coherent whole, or so I hope.

Many people have kindly expressed their interest in checking out the material, hence my decision to make it available online at this point, despite the fact that it is still a somewhat rough draft (references are still a mess). Needless to say, comments are always welcome :)

Possible Explanation of Inability to do Anything about Problems

One thing I'm kind of interested in is the decision theory of voting. For example, the real reason the Beatles broke up is that the person handling their money (Paul's girlfriend's Dad) paid Paul McCartney in Beatle's stock without telling the other Beatles. Paul only had something like 26% of the band, but with that extra percent it took all three other Beatles to outvote him.So his extra 1% was just as powerful as any of the other Beatles' 24 and 1/3%. The animosity and bad decisions that came out of that were the beginning of the end.

question about conceivability and possibility

I know that David Chalmers inspired and took part in a renaissance of thinking about whether conceivability entails possibility, and I taught some of that about five years ago.

But now I'm interested in what the best places to look are concerning the issue of whether possiblity entails conceivability. This is an incredibly important issue too, because the contrapositive is presupposed  by a lot of fundamental philosophy. For example, Donald Davidson goes from inability to conceive of a language not translated into English, to the impossibility of such a thing. Berkeley's "master argument" can also be presented as going from the inconceivability of an unconceived object to the impossibility of one (the issue of whether conception is a form of perception involving furthe inferences). And the issue is really important for evaluating Quentin Meillassoux's arguments. Perhaps less plausibly, Robert Brandom's writing on Hegelian sense dependency can be presented as using the inference.

Anyhow, does anyone reading this know of some papers or a book that presents a general treatment of the inference itself?

Annals of neoliberalism #5,241: attacks on the US Postal Service

  A fun movie of the 1980s, Hollywood Shuffle, skewers the blaxpoitation genre.

Rather than submit to playing playas and hustlers, the hero finally takes the advice of his aunt, who reminds him that "there's always work at the post office." Besides it being a genuinely funny and rather insightful movie, the tag line consoled me in some harrowing graduate school days! 

 But the post office has been targeted by the privatization goons. It's a classic ploy: find a government service that's doing well, place impossible demands upon it, declare it in crisis, then move in for the kill. A nice overview from Truth-out.org of the assault is here. Excerpts from the analysis: 

The Postal Service has been under constant, vicious assault for years from the right, who views this as an epic battle with the goal of finally taking down the strongest union in the country, the second largest employer in the United States (second only to Wal-Mart,) and a means to roll the country ever closer toward the abyss of privatization....

The Postal Service isn't paid for by taxpayer dollars, but rather fully funded by the sale of stamps.... It was only a few years ago that the USPS was considered not only stable, but thriving.... Perhaps it was its booming history that first drew Congress' attention to the Postal Service in 2006 when it passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which mandated that the Postal Service would have to fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees. That's right. Congress was demanding universal health care coverage.

But it even went beyond that. Congress was mandating coverage for future human beings.

"It's almost hard to comprehend what they're talking about, but basically they said that the Postal Service would have to fully fund future retirees' health benefits for the next 75 years and they would have to do it within a ten-year window," says Chuck Zlatkin, political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union....

Friday political music selection - alienation and escape

This is turning into fun for me because everyone is doing my work for me.  So once again, I'll throw out a few obvious choices on a theme that has a long deep tradition and leave it up to the rest of you to add more.

First, there's the obvious but still wonderful anthem by Bruce

And Tracy

Here's a rather rare explicitly political song from James McMurtry

I wanted to include Marc Cohn's "Saving The Best For Last" but couldn't find it online - except for a version with some random guy in a t-shirt doing a bad version while his kid runs through the room.  So despite the fact that this would nicely link up to last week, I'll just suggest you find it on itunes and give it a listen.  

And with Hazel I'm off to department meetings. (With any luck I won't come out of it as our next department chair.) 

Hiring Best Practices: The First Cut

Hiring season is upon us, and this is an opportune moment to discuss best practices. There is an excellent discussion of APA interviews on Leiter Reports, and as far as I can tell, there is an emerging consensus that these should be eliminated.

But let's go back a bit earlier in the process. You have advertised a position, you have somewhere between 200 and 500 applications, and your first task is to cut that list down to 20 or 25.

The continuity between Medieval and Early Modern...

For those exercised by my recent concerns about Classicists skipping Medieval philosophy, or my claims about the revival of Medieval...this looks like a fun conference!

Brazilian music on Fridays: Cássia Eller

Yet another busy week here, fortunately with no water-spilling accidents, but this time I was in Munich to attend a workshop organized by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. Among other things, in Munich I had the pleasure of meeting logician Jeff Horty, who, as it turns out, is a regular reader of this column! (I’m always surprised to find out that I have readers at all for Brazilian music on Fridays…) So again, this will be a bit of a short post, about a singer I was listening to a lot this week, sort of out of the blue.

Cássia Eller was the most ‘sex, drugs and rock & roll’ singer we’ve had in Brazil in a long time. Her music is a fusion of rock, blues and Brazilian folk music (MPB), propelled by her husky, powerful voice. She was also the most overtly lesbian singer we’ve ever had (which reminds me of a recent post by Mark on Ani DiFranco, to whom she is sometimes compared). Sadly, I’m forced to use the past tense here, as Cássia died under puzzling circumstances in December 2001, almost 10 years ago; I remember it very well, it was just before New Year’s Eve, and by chance I was in Rio (where she lived). It was a big blow, in particular as she was scheduled to perform at one of the many open air beach concerts taking place at New Year’s Eve (incidentally, let me add that New Year’s Eve in Rio is the coolest thing in the world).

Videos and more from the "Future of the Embodied Mind" summer school

A wonderful resource is being put together by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Xabier Barandiaran, and Thomas Bührmann at the website of the recently completed summer school on the "Future of the Embodied Mind." Marking the 20th year anniverary of The Embodied Mind, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, the summer school tackled all sorts of themes of the enactive approach to the cognitive sciences, to biology, to AI and robotics, and to phenomenological psychology. There are papers and Power Points available here, and videos of the talks here. Below is a video of interviews with many of the speakers: 

Interviews from eSMCs on Vimeo.

"philosophy, that noblest of intellectual pursuits,"--Moritz Schlick

As some loyal readers may recall, I have promoted Moritz Schlick (one of the great martyrs to philosophy) as the rightful father of analytic philosophy (against the misguided, partisan claims by those that point to Frege, who is often held up by those that wish to emphasize either the so-called linguistic turn or the significance of the developments in symbolic logic, or Sidgwick, who is often held up by those that wish to emphasize a number of intellectual virtues that are supposedly emblematic of analytic philosophy or who wish to promote the significance of particular set of questions in moral philosophy).

Now my advocacy of Schlick turns on four aspects of his thought. First, his recognition of coining concepts as a distinct philosophic activity within and outside the sciences. Second, when these concepts are quantitative they are part of a possible of science; when the concepts are qualitative they are part of a possible philosophy. (This is a view that he defended in 1910 and, perhaps, not later.) Third, Schlick's willingness throughout his life to embrace a vantage point for philosophy that while being scientifically very informed could reflect on science from without, without accepting its claims merely on authority. The mature Schlick did so as an “unrelenting” or “true” “empiricist.” In particular, he explicitly contrasted his “true” empiricism with the presumably false empiricists.(See See Moritz Schlick (1935) “Facts and Propositions” Analysis, 2(5): 65-70.) As I have argued on this blog, philosophic prophets tend to deploy a dialectic between true and false philosophies.

Overconfident? Hardly!

Addendum to Swagger!

The caption, Nature 15/09/11, p 282, says: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Muhammad Ali saw himself as “the king of the world”. His supreme confidence helped him to win many fights. Johnson and Fowler report that overconfidence can confer an evolutionary advantage."

Swagger!

A famous old bridge player—was it Charles Goren?—once said: if you always make your contracts, you’re underbidding. Actually what he said was a bit more technical: if you always defeat contracts you double, you're not doubling often enough. Slightly different, because when you double, you create a resource--a store of points that was hitherto not up for grabs--simply by claiming it. Boldness is creative.

This is the idea behind an interesting new analysis of “The evolution of overconfidence,” by Dominic Johnson and James Fowler in Nature today (doi:10.1038/nature10384).

Suppose you have a resource for which two players A and B are competing. If only one claims it, she gets it. If neither claims it, neither gets it. If both claim it, they compete for it. The question is whether to be prepared to compete.

You might think you should compete if and only if the cost of doing so is compensated by the reward of winning (all weighted by probability, of course). But when one doesn’t know exactly how strong her opponent is, how should she decide?

The parameters are: the value of the resource claimed, r, the cost of competing, c, and the perception error. Johnson and Fowler computer-simulated evolutionary outcomes—a method that has become familiar to philosophers thanks to Brian Skyrms’ work.

Here's what they found.

Beck - Pay No Mind Snoozer

I love how he introduces himself as Kim Deal with Thurston Moore standing right beside him. It's a beautiful song though, and time's patina has only rendered it more beautiful. This is a pre album version. On the album he wisely forgoes the Stagger Lee thingy on the opening D chord and the lyrics are slightly ammended- "get out your lead pipe pipe dreams // get out your ten foot flags // the insects are huge // and the poison's all been used // and the drugs won't kill your day job." Who among us has not felt that way?

Two philosophers on open relationships - Part II

This is the second and last part of the interview with Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa on the topic of open, non-monogamous relationships -- Part I is here.

___________________________________________________________________

CATARINA: For something else, some argue that there is a historical correlation between monogamy and democracy, simply because in a polygamous society some men will have more than one woman, while other men will have none (see here). Of course, the idea of a non-monogamous marriage has nothing to do with polygamy, but some people argue that, in an open relationship, being involved with other people may divert resources (emotional, material) from the main relationship, which can negatively affect the well-being of partners as well as of offspring (when there is offspring). What do you think about this?

On moments (or Cogburn's Irritation with Derrida)

A clever blog by Graham Harman prompted discussion on our blog. The appearance of Harman's post coincided with ten year anniversary of (the event) 9/11; this is not an insignificant fact when Harman's blog takes Derrida to task for his "compulsive unwillingness to stand anywhere" and sets up a philosophical opposition (and temporal succession) between Derrida and Žižek, who is said to be "such a perfect post-Derrida leading actor, I believe, is the compelling force of his dogmatic assertions and his willingness to take responsibility for the thing he says." Force, action, dogmatism, responsibility...are sometimes historically necessary (Tahrir Square) and sometimes historic blunders (GWB). But philosophy is not only a historical-theatrical morality play...

I am no expert on Harman at all, but his blog is not about Derrida. It is (rhetorically--and I mean this as a compliment) about promoting a certain philosophical-political agenda (Force, action, dogmatism, responsibility, etc). This lack of honest engagement with Derrida becomes clear by a momentary reflection on the quote that is exhibit A in Harman's (and Cogburn's) prosecution: “In what you call my books, what is first of all put into question is the unity of the book and the unity ‘book’ considered as a perfect totality, with all the implications of such a concept. And you know that these implications concern the totality of our culture, directly or indirectly. At the moment when such a closure demarcates itself, dare one maintain that one is the author of books, be they one, two, or three?”

First, the quote does not deny that one can take a stand. In fact, to my untrained eyes the surface meaning of Derrida is all about the courage/daring of taking a stand. (Echoes of Will to Power, no?) So, second, it is completely silly to use this as evidence for Derrida's unwillingness a) either to take a stand or b) to be held responsible for one's texts. Third, the quote is from AN INTERVIEW! (So, some allowance, if it were necessary, would have to be made for that; better think carefully or explore hesitantly before one asserts with over-confidence something that ought to be denied.) Fourth, in context the interview is discussing to what degree Derrida's books form a "system" (and "strange geometry") and how each individual book is organized. And Derrida goes on to assert all kinds of things about his system and individual books. In doing so, Derrida's language is demanding and technical, but (even to an outsider like myself) not un-intelligible.

So, Exhibit A is terrible evidence for the content of Harman's point. (This is why I call it rhetorical.) What about Cogburn's moments of irritation? Cogburn writes, "On the other hand, trying to read Derrida never, ever, ever ends well for me. One memorable evening I actually got hives. It's as bad as how Martin Amis describes the effects of the novels of Richard Tull, the protagonist of The Information. No one can finish his last modernist experiment before getting ill. At one point a case of the books almost causes a plane crash. That's exactly how Derrida's prose effects me." Wow! How awesome! Derrida is capable of causing powerful somatic effects -- of the sort that promote the start of inquiry -- in Cogburn's world. I prefer to treat Cogburn's attraction to Harman's proposed anesthetic as a momentary lapse in a philosophically fearless mind.

Political Physiology

Getting ready for this workshop, I'm struck by this passage by Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (103-104F, 161E), which lends a certain concreteness to the term "class war."

It is in this sense that Halbwachs deals with death as a social phenomenon, believing that the age at which death occurs results largely from working and hygienic conditions, attention paid to fatigue and diseases, in short, from social as much as physiological conditions. Everything happens as if a society had "the mortality that suits it," the number of the dead and their distribution into different age groups expressing the importance which the society does or does not give to the protraction of life.

In short, the techniques of collective hygiene which tend to prolong human life, or the habits of negligence which result in shortening it, depending on the value attached to life in a given society, are in the end a value judgment expressed in the abstract number which is the average life span. The average life span is not the biologically normal, but in a sense the socially normative, life span. Once more the norm is not deduced from, but rather expressed in the average. This would be clearer still if, instead of considering the average life span in a national society taken as a whole, we broke this society down into classes, occupations, etc. 

I finally realize what irritates me about Derrida

I'm in a really strange position vis-à-vis Derrida. On the one hand I love Samuel Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, Martin Hagglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, and Lee Braver's discussion of Derrida in A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. I mean, I've learned a lot from Derrida through Wheeler, Hagglund, and Braver. And have learned a lot talking about Derrida with my friend and oftimes co-writer Mark Silcox and with my colleague Francois Raffoul.

On the other hand, trying to read Derrida never, ever, ever ends well for me. One memorable evening I actually got hives. It's as bad as how Martin Amis describes the effects of the novels of Richard Tull, the protagonist of The Information. No one can finish his last modernist experiment before getting ill. At one point a case of the books almost causes a plane crash. That's exactly how Derrida's prose effects me.

And I never managed to figure out why this was the case until reading Graham Harman's blog today.

Do classicists skip the middle ages?

A recent, scholarly review of a translation of Seneca's De beneficiis comments on an introductory essay by Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood as follows: "The essay continues by stressing the importance of Roman Stoicism, and Seneca in particular, for early Christian thought and even for some modern thinkers up to Kant, the founders of the United States and nineteenth-century American thinkers. As is common among classicists, the introduction skips over the Middle Ages. However, it is well known that, together with Cicero's Stoic account in the De officiis, Seneca's De beneficiis was one of the most widely read and copied classical texts from the eleventh century onward, with nearly 300 extant MSS (cf. L.D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission)."

Oleg V. Bychkov's thought accords with my prejudice(s), but that doesn't make it true. (My revered teacher, Ian Mueller, certainly did not skip the middle ages, nor does his student Stephen Menn.) So, what do readers think, is such skipping common?

Why Can't They Just Get Along?

Sexual Conflict (Princeton 2005) is a mind-expanding book by Göran Arnqvist and Locke Rowe.

Arnqvist and Rowe begin by recounting blood-curdling examples of war between the sexes: female robber flies playing dead in order to avoid sex; female penduline tits hiding their eggs from their partners and attacking them violently to protect the hiding place; male funnel spiders anesthetizing their sexual partners in order to avoid being killed and cannibalized by them.

Why all this conflict?

Two philosophers on open relationships - Part I

Last April, Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa got married; last July, they published a co-authored piece (in Off Topic) on their experience as a non-monogamous married couple. They kindly agreed to be interviewed for NewAPPS on the concept of non-monogamous marriages – on the theory and also a bit on the practice.

Monogamy vs. non-monogamy in long-term committed relationships is a complex topic. From a biological point of view, human beings find themselves in a bit of a squeeze. On the one hand, our closest living ancestors, the great apes, are for the most part not in any way monogamous in their mating strategies; but on the other hand, the fact that human babies are born so immature (altriciality) creates evolutionary pressure towards monogamous patterns (across species, there is a correlation between altriciality and monogamy, with e.g. many bird species). This might explain why we have a tendency towards long term monogamous relationships and at the same time a tendency towards variation of sexual partners. In a sense, we are both chimpanzees and swans, hence the challenge. But it is not necessarily a no-win situation, as Carrie and Jonathan suggest here.

Set theory vs category theory and foundations of mathematics.

I have been mulling the following remarks in a critical and striking (because it ends with a series of quotes from Pierre Bourdieu) review by Mary Tiles of a recent book by Penelope Maddy, "The conclusion would seem thus to be that there are no philosophical foundations for set theory; its grounding lies in the mathematical practices for which it was once proposed as a foundation. And since presumably the same could be said for category theory there should be no question of which is the correct foundational theory, although Maddy makes no mention of category theory." (The thought is anticipated earlier in the review by a parenthetical remark: "in this mathematical sense set theory is not unique; category theory can also play that foundational-in-the-sense-of-unifying role.") Tiles' claim is not idiosyncratic because one can find it repeated in the Stanford Encyclopedia: "Category theory is an alternative to set theory as a foundation for mathematics." I find all of this a bit odd because according to the same textbook definition of a category seems to rely on sets, but compared to my fellow bloggers here at NEWAPPS I am terrible at math (and have not yet read Steve Awodey textbook on category theory!) so maybe others can enlighten me...

A comment on 9/11 (David Speetzen)

With his permission I am posting here a comment by David Speetzen on the events ten years ago and on the invocation never to forget them. David is a Wash U Ph. D. now teaching at Winona State. His recent work has dealt with war and humanitarian interventions. The link to the Raw Story article was added by me.

I was walking to campus my senior year when a friend, passing in her car, stopped and rolled down the window. She told me to get in, “They attacked the Pentagon.” I got to campus minutes after the towers fell. I remember my hands shaking when I went outside to light a cigarette. The conversation there had already turned to retaliation.

Rest assured, the shock and horror of that day are not lost on me. But frankly, our trauma, coupled with our arrogance, prompted a staggering overreaction the consequences of which have devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of other innocent people around the world.

What is it, I wonder, that we ought never to forget? Of course, there are things worth remembering: the lives lost, and the heroism displayed in the hours and days after the attack. That our guard was down, and that people hate us enough to exploit whatever weakness they find.

But to turn inward so instinctively, so easily, and to repeat vague slogans to ourselves on the anniversary of our nation’s longest step down a path of paranoia, aggression, and madness, suggests to me that it is not our pain, or our pride, or our weakness, or how much we are despised by others that we need to be reminded to remember.

9/11 was a tragedy of the highest order. But we suffered it with neither wisdom nor compassion. Instead we sought revenge. In light of that, I’m not so convinced that we are entitled to yet another day where we think only of ourselves and our justified—but now overshadowed—grief.

Friday political music selection bonus edition

I first heard this song by David Rovics not long after the attacks.  A group of us organized a major educational event in DC, trying - futilely I think we all knew - to make Americans think about economics, morality, international law, and even prudential rationality before launching into a response. As I say, we knew that we were going to lose this one, that the US was going to massacre lots of Afghan civilians on account of the fact that it was wrong to kill civilians, increasing hatred of the US in the process.  But of course none of us knew the extent of the descent into authoritarianism and criminal war that was soon to follow.

Anyway, we gathered, exhausted in that way that only 4 intensive weeks of 18 hour a day organizing can make you. We were at a fabulous place called Busboys and Poets in DC - check it out - to unwind and this guy showed up to play.

Tears were shed.

A big oops in neuroscience?

A new paper by Nieuwenhuis, Forstmann, & Wagenmakers in Nature argues that roughly half of all papers in five top neuroscience journals assert differences between the effects of interventions when at most they are entitled to is to assert that an intervention has had a statistically significant effect. Their argument is explained very well in a Guardian article by Ben Goldacre. The authors write in their introduction:

Are all these articles wrong about their main conclusions? We do not think so. First, we counted any paper containing at least one erroneous analysis of an interaction. For a given paper, the main conclusions may not depend on the erroneous analysis. Second, in roughly one third of the error cases, we were convinced that the critical, but missing, interaction effect would have been statistically significant (consistent with the researchers’ claim), either because there was an enormous difference between the two effect sizes or because the reported methodological information allowed us to determine the approximate significance level. Nonetheless, in roughly two thirds of the error cases, the error may have had serious consequences.

So the headline should not be: “Half of Neuroscience Papers are Wrong”, but rather “Half of Neuroscience Papers are Insufficiently Well Argued/One-Third Need Fixing”. We’ll see what the headline-writers do…

A sidelight: the authors, whose affiliations are Dutch, use “intuition” in more-or-less the philosopher’s sense. Is that use diffusing into world outside philosophy?

On magnets and lies, and checking sources

The historian’s attitude toward his or her sources, when attempting to establish matters of fact, is one of tempered but universal skepticism. The same applies to the history of the present. For example:

Don’t depend on popularizations for your knowledge of neuroscience (see also the previous item in this blog for a similar issue concerning the biology of sex). A recent headline in several newspapers and online sources reads something like this: “Magnetic Pulses To The Brain Make It Impossible To Lie”. Wow! That’s exciting! And scary too…

The only problem is, it’s false.