#Zotero still asking $60 for 1 year of 6Gb… 😭 @zotero I love you all but it’s 2024 now, maybe you could either reduce the price or increase what we get for it? #ReferenceManager
Across every aspect of being a self, we perceive ourselves as stable over time because we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves, not in order to know ourselves.
Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (The Sunday Times Bestseller) (p. 222). Faber & Faber. Kindle-editie.
@jonny I agree. Would you agree to the following: every person percieves himself as stable, but nobody really is stable (according to Seth): changing in time, in different situations etc. In queer people there is a more obvious discrepancy (or more at the surface?): between embodied self (experiences that relate directly to the body) and perspectival self (= subjective perception).
"This perspectival self is nowhere better illustrated than in the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach’s self-portrait, also known as ‘View from the Left Eye’."
Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (The Sunday Times Bestseller) (p. 179). Faber & Faber. Kindle-editie.
Fascinating first person account by a psychologist who faked data
The scientist: Diederik Stapel. A Dutch social psychologist. He wrote a book explaining the context and how one thing led to another until he was caught. Nick Brown translated it into English. Freely available here:
I also became increasingly skilled in the use of techniques that could put a healthy-
looking shine on otherwise mediocre results. If I didn’t get the effect I wanted across all the
different measures I’d used or the questions I’d asked, I would use the ones that did show
that effect. If an effect was present in an experiment, but not strongly enough to be tapped
by all of the types of measurements I’d used, I would make it stronger by combining the measures where the effect seemed to be only partly working. ...
Page 102:
After years of balancing on the outer limits, the gray became darker and darker until
it was black, and I fell off the edge into the abyss. I’d been having trouble with my
experiments for some time. Even with my various “gray” methods for “improving” the data,
I wasn’t able to get the results the way I wanted them. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go wanted it so badly. I wanted to belong, to be part of the action, to score. I really, really wanted to be really, really good. I wanted to be published in the best journals
and speak in the largest room at conferences. I wanted people to hang on my every word
as I headed for coffee or lunch after delivering a lecture. I felt very alone.
p103
I was alone in my tastefully furnished office at the University of Groningen. I’d taken
extra care when closing the door, and made my desk extra tidy. Everything had to be neat
and orderly. No mess. I opened the computer file with the data that I had entered and
changed an unexpected 2 into a 4; then, a little further along, I changed a 3 into a 5. It
didn’t feel right. I looked around me, nervously. The data danced in front of my eyes.
When the results are just not quite what you’d so badly hoped for; when you know that that
hope is based on a thorough analysis of the literature; when this is your third experiment
on this topic and the first two worked great; when you know that there are other people
doing similar research elsewhere who are getting good results; then, surely, you’re entitled
to adjust the results just a little?
@emma_cogdev@NicoleCRust I followed the case here in Holland when it was unfolding. It lookes like Diederik Stapel has never cared a lot about truth or the consequences of his behavior for other people, like his (junior) collaborators. Perhaps the publish or perish culture enabled this, but Stapel is not one of the normal scientists going astray. One of the (3) dutch Committees that investigated the fraud states:
"In discussions at lab meetings, critical questions in the direction of data collection were not appreciated. In this regard, Mr. Stapel was always clear in his communication when one should stop asking questions. Several doctoral students also indicated in interviews with the Levelt Committee that Mr. Stapel abused his position of power to silence them. To one research master's student, who found suspicious patterns in the data, Mr. Stapel indicated, 'If you want to be hired here, you have to show that you can finish something and just write down the results.'"
Translated with DeepL.com (free version) @PessoaBrain@lf_araujo@jonny@skarthik@Herman@jonobie@dumoulin@PeterLG
The reviewers (Borsboom and Wagenmakers ) describe the final chapter of the book as "unexpectedly beautiful" but consider that many of its lines are "copied" from the works of writers Raymond Carver and James Joyce, without due acknowledgement.[37] Borsboom and Wagenmakers reviewed the Dutch language edition; the English translation of Stapel's Ontsporing by Nicholas J. L. Brown includes a note regarding "Chapter 10 ½":[38]
which acknowledges the sources Carver and Joyce. @emma_cogdev@NicoleCRust@PessoaBrain@lf_araujo@jonny@skarthik@Herman@jonobie@dumoulin@PeterLG
"Measurements of attributes such as emotions, well-being, or intelligence are widely used for various purposes in society, but it remains a matter of discussion whether psychological measurement is analogous to measurement in the natural sciences, and to what extent it qualifies as measurement at all.' https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2300693
Edit: author is here! @mieronen
My initial take: what?! This seems silly. But I'm starting to warm up to it. It's about causality. Consider: "insomnia causes fatigue"; no one disputes it. But there's not a physical thing in the world called insomnia that causes a physical thing in the world, fatigue billiard-ball-style. Rather, the physical causal chain happens by way of a lack of sleep causing the brain state that leads to the mind state of fatigue (in other words, that word "cause" is doing some heavy lifting in that phrase). The question is: can you meaningfully talk about causality when you have abstracted away from physical interactions?
On one hand, of course - you can develop causal models formulated entirely at the psychological level (rewards, punishments, surprises, mood) that make falsifiable predictions and you can both perturb and measure these things to test those models.
On the other hand, we probably do need to take some care that we aren't confusing ourselves as we throw around that word "cause" interchangeably for things that physically interact and abstractions of those things.
Thoughts? I'm particularly curious about cases in which this type of abstraction has led researchers astray.
@albertcardona@PessoaBrain@katejjeffery@NicoleCRust@mieronen Hofstadter wrote "I am a strange loop" because he was frustrated that GEB was received well, but had no consequences or follow up in the field. (These are my words how I understood it). When I read GEB I thought it to be really something, but my understanding of his ideas was much helped by the second book.