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Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study

med.stanford.edu

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Re: Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study

#45

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

mmooss wrote: post #39
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN commenters have a far greater history of that. It may very well be true, it is also true that HN commenters can be quite good at spotting math errors. The broader point being that people make mistakes sometimes or even that people sometimes don't have the same knowledge and information as others. > researchers trained for years and invested a long time on this work; the HN commenter probably invested a minuted o…

> it is also true that HN commenters can be quite good at spotting math errors They can be quite good at making that claim, which is cheap. And others like to rally around it - just like the comments rejecting most OPs that make their way to the top. I'd need to see evidence that the claims are actually valid. Most similar HN take-downs, for fields I have knowledge of, are pretty poor.

> I'd need to see evidence that the claims are actually valid.

This would indeed be best, no argument here. But this comment thread was more about whether, without evidence, that automatically dismissing a comment because it was on HN or automatically accepting a claim because it was from 'stanford researchers' was ok.

Re: Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study

#46

Post by JadeNB »

mmooss wrote: post #35
JadeNB wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “some people have been wrong before” is not a reason to think you know better than the authors of an upcoming Nature article based on a few layperson-targeted paragraphs summarizing the paper from a very high level. Nor is "this paper is going to appear in Nature " a reason not to wonder whether there might be something that the authors don't know. The whole point of science is that anyone can make an informed crit…

> The whole point of science is that anyone can make an informed critique and self-evaluation of it, with no necessity of depending on a priesthood to interpret it. That's a misinterpretation: > anyone can (Of course nothing stops them, but I don't think that's your point.) > anyone can make an informed critique and self-evaluation of it, with no necessity of depending on a priesthood to interpret it. Science is spec…

Your reading of my comment seems perfectly charitable, but it also seems to find more in my comment than what I said.

> > anyone can make an informed critique and self-evaluation of it, with no necessity of depending on a priesthood to interpret it.

> Science is specifically not the wisdom of the crowds - that is pre-scientific. It is the wisdom of emprical facts, which are usually so complex and voluminous that it takes great expertise to understand and interpret them. Science is not democratic - your opinion is worthless and does not deserve consideration unless you can demonstrate otherwise.

I did not say that science is democratic, nor that the validity of a scientific fact is determined by the crowds, but rather that anyone can make an informed critique and self-evaluation. 'Can' is perhaps too strong a word; to do this is a skill that usually requires considerable background and training.

Here I think that one must distinguish between the sociology of science and the ideal of science. In the sociology of science, reputation matters, authority is often deferred to, and an amateur will have a tough time getting a serious hearing. That is the fact of imperfect human practice.

But the ideal of science is that everyone's idea does matter, or, if you like (though I find it pessimistic), that everyone's ideas don't matter. The ideas of the most untrained novice have exactly as much, or as little, scientific weight as those of the most expert, practiced, and credentialed scientist. This is distinct from the sociological weight of an idea: the scientific community is more likely to listen to the expert, practiced, and credentialed scientist than to the novice. But the quality of a scientific idea is intrinsic to the idea, not to who has it.

Re: Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study

#47

Post by amarshall »

fenazego wrote: post #37
amarshall wrote: post #10

Seems like a case of Simpson’s Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

This is not a case of Simpson's Parodox, at least the analogy about accuracy vs speed from the article isn't. You're not comparing global vs subgroup correlations. On the one hand you're measuring how speed and accuracy are correlated across the population when you ask subjects to solve a problem. On the other hand, (rather than measuring subgroup correlations) you're measuring how accuracy is affected when you ask a…

The actual paper (linked in another comment here) is literally titled “Nonergodicity and Simpson’s paradox in neurocognitive dynamics of cognitive control”. Why they omit it from the blog post version, I’ve no idea.
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