There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and fake quotes.
Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
61–70 of 110 posts
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#62I've become increasingly convinced that the idea of averaging is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding things... it contains the insidious trap of feeling/sounding "rigorous" and "quantitative" while making huge assumptions that are extremely inappropriate for most real world situations. Once I started noticing this I can't stop seeing this almost everywhere- almost every news article, scientific paper, etc.…
Yeah it's a common mistake, but this is like intro to stats stuff. It's not some big secret that if you summarize a distribution with a single number then you've lost information. > I've become increasingly convinced that the idea of averaging is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding things. I'd counter that it's easily one of the biggest assistants in understanding things. The Central Limit Theorem in partic…
> The solution isn't less literacy.
This.
It's interesting how a common instinct to seeing problems is way too often to "destroy and rebuild" instead of "correct and improve". "Institutions have failed us?" A) "Let's burn them down" vs B) "Let's have better institutions, keep what's good, fix what's bad"
I get it that sometimes, rarely, it's impossible to improve something because it's soo rotten and entrenched that you literally have to destroy and rebuild from scratch, but it's almost never the case.
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#63As a computer scientist, I was blown away the first time my friend explained to me that his research focused on the timing of neuron spikes, not their magnitude. After talking about it for a while I realized that machine learning neural networks are much closer to simple early models of how neuron's work (averages and all), not how neuron's actually signal. Makes sense when you consider how the latest LLM models have…
An elephant brain has 3 times as many neurons as a human.
They are pretty smart animals but so are dogs who have way less neurons. The point here being that the number of neurons is just one of the many factors that determines intelligence (general or not)
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#64I've become increasingly convinced that the idea of averaging is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding things... it contains the insidious trap of feeling/sounding "rigorous" and "quantitative" while making huge assumptions that are extremely inappropriate for most real world situations. Once I started noticing this I can't stop seeing this almost everywhere- almost every news article, scientific paper, etc.…
Averages can definitely oversimplify things, especially in neuroscience where outliers often tell the real story. Taleb touches on this in Antifragile—focusing too much on the average can make us miss what’s happening at the edges, where the most interesting things are. Instead of leaning on averages, we might get more insight by paying attention to the extremes, where the real nuances are hiding.
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#65I've become increasingly convinced that the idea of averaging is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding things... it contains the insidious trap of feeling/sounding "rigorous" and "quantitative" while making huge assumptions that are extremely inappropriate for most real world situations. Once I started noticing this I can't stop seeing this almost everywhere- almost every news article, scientific paper, etc.…
I was at the Denver museum’s mummy exhibit and disturbed to see that they said the lady died at 30, a “normal age for death in those times”. You would think a museum should know better. https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-ancient-s...
Half the people died before 40 in the middle ages, discounting pre-5 mortality. I would assume it is lower for female, as first pregnancies had a 10% mortality rate (this rate increased after the middle age, until germ theory), and following ones carried a 2-5% mortality rates.
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came to the same realisation about a decade ago, after being a "science" enthusiast growing up. As you said once you see it you can't unsee it. Most of science is just a scam. The exceptions are those fields backed up by real world engineering. All of social and most of biological sciences are worse than useless, they are outright dangerous.
>Most of science is just a scam Most of the scientists are not scammers. So if you believe that all science disciplines other than engineering are wrong[1], you should use another word that doesn't suggest researcher malice. [1]Which is a very strong statement, because you claim to be an expert in all science disciplines at once.
At minimum the social and even a fair bit of medical science are scams, as they rarely have enough evidence to definitively draw claims due to a mixture of flawed methodology, small sample sizes, and lack of additional studies to reinforce their claims. See for instance the claim every man makes at some point, that “going braless makes breasts perkier”. Small sample size that isn’t indicative of all breast sizes/shapes, few if any studies supporting their findings. At least with engineering experimentation is far easier, can be extrapolated, and can even be simulated reliably.
And no, one does not claim to be “an expert in all disciplines at once” by pointing out the objective fact that we lack concrete data in a lot of fields.
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the right thing to use in this specific context not because it is explaining the full picture better than the average, but because it distorts the picture in a different way: the modal age being high is incompatible with the incorrect assumption people are making when seeing a low average life span- that people in ancient times basically never made it to an old age in their 70s or older. People then jump from th…
>because it distorts the picture in a different way: the modal age being high is incompatible with the incorrect assumption people are making when seeing a low average life span- that people in ancient times basically never made it to an old age in their 70s or older. I literally proved by demonstration why having a distribution with an absolute mode in the extreme most value means that 97% of people still died young…
Neither of us are wrong per se- we are saying different things that are fully compatible with one another, but are both incomplete. However, I am using a biased model on purpose while aware of its limitations, and you seem to be confusing yours with reality, which is why mine seems “wrong” to you- because my model is specifically being used to show where yours does not fit reality. Looking at mode alone is pretty useless other than to make this one point, I think it is important to emphasize that I do not think it is somehow better than the improper use of averages I was criticizing, or that it should be generally used in the same way averages generally are.
What I am saying is important to me because I’m interested specifically in what health and life were like for those few people that made it to old age in ancient times - to see how it might provide ideas to improve our health today. For example, I have found that I need a huge amount of exercise and natural light or else I feel fatigued and depressed… I felt I “should not” need this, until I realized not getting this is some sort of anomaly in human history- and there is no reason to expect everyone to be able to handle low levels of light and activity.
Reading about “evolutionary medicine” theorizing was so fascinating it led me to get my doctorate and become an academic PI, although my research is not really in that area these days, I still find it interesting and useful as a hypothesis generator and not "anti science" as another person on here accused me of.
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#68I've become increasingly convinced that the idea of averaging is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding things... it contains the insidious trap of feeling/sounding "rigorous" and "quantitative" while making huge assumptions that are extremely inappropriate for most real world situations. Once I started noticing this I can't stop seeing this almost everywhere- almost every news article, scientific paper, etc.…
@ flagged aaron695:
> The brutal reality is you don't have the IQ to understand averages or statistics like most people.
> Most of our ancestors lucky enough to made it to 45 years old in human history did not make it to 70.
> Using mode is misleading with "age", and you quickly showed you didn't understand 'the con' when you accidently tried to apply it.
> This is a political, the "past was wonderful fantasy" which is anti-science. It's used by the Woke for instance."
In this case I am using an equally "wrong" model on purpose while being well aware of its limitations, just to make a specific point. It highlights a point where people are doing exactly what you are accusing me of- romanticizing the present, and not understanding the reality of how it actually differs from the past. E.g. what are the actual reasons people had shorter life spans in the past, and what their lives were actually like. One should not forget the limitations of such a simple model, which was basically my point in the first place.
I am fascinated by "evolutionary medicine" and using such ideas as a hypothesis generator to figure out ways to treat "modern diseases of civilization." I am in no way romanticizing the past, but trying to understand the specifics, to better figure out how to develop more effective modern day medical treatments, not to return to the past. In truth I despise political thinking altogether, and like to look at mechanisms and biological details.
Your post smacks of "scientism" which is incompatible with actual practice of science. The very idea that a certain line of thinking or theorizing is "anti science" or should be taboo for political reasons is itself incompatible with creative open minded problem solving.
I can see it was a mistake to use this specific example for discussing the problem with averages- ironically because it is so accurate. Since so many people on here hold the exact misunderstanding I was criticizing, they are getting angry and insulting me instead of my intent, which was to explain a phenomenon and have this click as a simple example of it. A less charged example, where people don't have strong opinions already would have been better.
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
My grad school research was with an NIH neuroscience lab studying low-level sensory processing that offered a fascinating perspective on what's really going on there! At least for the first few levels above the sense receptors in simpler animal models. To oversimplify, you can interpret gamma-frequency activity as chunking up temporal sensory inputs into windows. The specific dynamics between excitatory and inhibitor…
By “low level” do you mean in the thalamus or cortex or something else. Live a citation. I initially thought that “low level” meant at the level of receptors and the first few synapses. But to the best of my knowledge gamma oscillations will not play a roll in the periphery. It would be great if you had a citation. I have been reading Karl Friston’s work all day.
Here's an example[1] examining the functional role of gamma oscillations in the hippocampus:
Re: Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience
#70I've become increasingly convinced that the idea of averaging is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding things... it contains the insidious trap of feeling/sounding "rigorous" and "quantitative" while making huge assumptions that are extremely inappropriate for most real world situations. Once I started noticing this I can't stop seeing this almost everywhere- almost every news article, scientific paper, etc.…
It's just trying to assume normal distribution when it's not normal. Modern science rely so much on that distribution that i actually whether they have overestimated its ubiquity just because it's so damn convenient to use.
Yes, this is the actual issue- assuming a normal distribution in cases that are not normally distributed. People also even leave off the standard deviation, and seem to be mentally thinking of the average as a point rather than considering even the “width” of the normal distribution- so the overemphasis of the average even causes people to misunderstand things that really are normally distributed.