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nut posted:a lot of psych programs actually give undergrads a certain number of credits they must achieve by volunteering in case you were wondering what kind of mindset someone is in while doing the task very true, I've been on all sides of that (student, technician, researcher) and basically no one takes it seriously and everyone is more or less from the same socio-economic background (not only university student, but more specifically freshman in psych 1) IMO the bigger problem is the statistics. Psych and other fields rely on a statistical method where (to oversimplify) if your theory is wrong, there is still a 5% chance that the results will confirm it. That sounds fine, if 5% of studies are wrong, maybe it's unavoidable. But when you consider that researchers will discard negative results and keep trying until they confirm their theory, and journals will reject negative results and accept positive ones, especially if the results are "surprising", then it could be that those 5% of studies that are wrong are specifically the ones more likely to be published. Imagine if every single psychology theory in the world is wrong. Every single experiment is based on a hypothesis that is incorrect. In this hypothetical, still 5% of those studies would (incorrectly) confirm their hypothesis. And those 5% would be the studies that get published, rather than the 95% of studies in which "insufficient evidence was found to confirm the hypothesis". We could very well be in this scenario where no one knows anything but still 5% of studies show a positive result only by chance, and those are the studies that people talk about.
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Mar 10, 2021 10:23
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Zodium posted:imo the bigger problem is that academic psychology has no method to speak of at all. it doesn't even have a way of measuring the phenomena it purports to explain. where is behavior? what is behavior? it's whatever I define it to be, and it's where I can conveniently sample that. but that isn't a problem for psychology. its actually good, because at least since skinner, and especially since the cognitive revolution, academic psychology has been in the business of reifying individualism. if you aren't taking the individual as your basic unit of analysis for behavior, then outside of niche theoretical spaces like ecological psychology and perceptual control theory, you are by informal definition not doing psychology. no one's saying "it's wrong to research behavior that way", but no one in psychology will fund it, because it isn't, conceptually, psychology. it isn't sociology either. it isn't really any major academic field. but it is counter-terrorism. it is command and control. hey what's up we exchanged pms about ecological psychology like 10 years ago of course, agree
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Mar 14, 2021 16:32
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Zodium posted:i went looking up that head quote, and because this wasn't important to me ten years ago, i missed that james gibson developed his principles of ecological psychology based on work he did for the air force. Oh true! I hadn't thought about that since I myself was Epstein-pilled. I don't know if there's anything there but it reminds me of two more stories: This DARPA grant that the Neo-Gibsonians had about a decade ago. In fact I thought this poo poo was very interesting when I started graduate school (although I was a bit weirded out that it was a DARPA grant) and I probably would have worked on it but it was canceled about a month before I started my PhD. I guess they realized nothing practical was going to come from it (at least not any time soon) and they canceled it in favor of some neural networks poo poo that I'm sure turned out to be much more practical. Those of you discussing philosophy of mind on the last page should check this poo poo out. The article above sucks though and misses the point, the real poo poo is here if you have journal access, or this more foundational article (2010 reprint of a 1991 article). Here's the abstract: quote:An argument is developed to show that the origin and evolution of the perceptual guidance of movements and the movement enhancement of opportunities to perceive, that is, perception-action cycles, have a direct and deep connection with thermodynamic principles. The cornerstones of the argument are: (a) maximum entropy production as a physical selection principle (thermodynamic fields will behave in such a fashion as to get to the final state-minimize the field potential or maximize the entropy-at the fastest possible rate given the constraints); (b) the inexorability of order production (order production is inexorable because order produces entropy faster than disorder); (c) evolution as a global phenomenon (the Earth system at its highest level evolves as a single global entity); and (d) information in Gibson's law-based, specificational sense (invariant relations exist between higher order properties of structured energy distributions and their environmental sources). In the coordination of self-organizing dynamics with information in the specificational sense, access is provided to otherwise inaccessible opportunities to produce ordered flow and to dissipate, thereby, the geocosmic potential at faster rates. The progressive emergence of perception-action cycles in the evolution of the Earth as a global entity is the lawful product of opportunistic physics: There was no other way to produce the collective (ordered) states that would engender these higher levels of dissipation. Perception-action cycles express higher order symmetries of the world itself, in its own becoming. Perception-action is the physics at these higher levels. It's definitely worth mentioning that the author Rod Swenson is a total crackpot type, complete with a bunch of websites so lovely I always thought he was trying to come across as a crackpot on purpose. I was disappointed to see they were taken down (probably the people still working on this stuff were embarassed) but I found one on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20080202125334/http://www.entropylaw.com/ (Fake edit: found this PDF that he seems to have crackpot-ized: https://spacetimenow.tripod.com/SwenTurv1.pdf). He also was involved in the punk scene in the 70s (he founded the Plasmatics with Wendy Williams). Unfortunately I never met him during my studies. In the end I never directly worked on this stuff but I know all the people that do, and despite the veneer of insanity around it I think it's 100% correct and it has informed my scientific worldview since I first understood it. Basically, the "purpose" of life, as the purpose of self-organizing systems more generally, is to dissipate energy (generate entropy). Intelligent life developed in order to generate entropy even faster. it follows that underlying reason that human civilization exists is to use up all the energy it can find. ----- Second story. Some of these same researchers (not Rod Swenson though) were doing research in the 1970s on some cogntive aspects of language and particular reading. Serbo-croation was a useful test case because it has more or less the same language with two different writing systems, allowing for some clever experiments. Some of these ecological psychologists went to communist Yugoslavia for this research. Once or twice over beers I was told stories about smuggling in computers because the US government didn't allow it. I don't remember any more details at the moment but looking back I wonder if they weren't "allowed' to bring in those computers... SurgicalOntologist has issued a correction as of 17:57 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 13:26
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I don't know if I've been reading too much of this thread but I'm paranoid about an encounter I just had. Context: I work at an early stage startup in sports analytics in Europe, we analyze video from sports matches. Not quite stealth mode but pretty much zero public profile. We get contacted by a guy interested in doing a project with us... let me just put it in bullets
So, this is an op, right? Any suggestions for interacting with him or should I just disengage? Yes, here I am bringing work-related cybersecurity issues to the Epstein thread. What have I come to?
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Apr 29, 2021 08:40
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I think it's probably real... it's not unusual for viruses to have post-infection symptoms. Polio has physical symptoms that can appear 30 years later.
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Feb 1, 2024 10:47
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