The inferential path between the fMRI instrument and anything meaningful is extraordinarily long, complex, and tenuous. Just at the front end it involves several stages of statistically torturing the distorted and noisy data to get some stable signal out of it.
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I would guess few psychiatrists can follow details of fMRI data processing methods, so their faith in it has another basis. Confronted with the extreme nebulosity of human mental dysfunction, having SOME authoritative knowledge source must be reassuring?
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This tweet thread prompted by the analogy with upset responses whenever I say “deep learning stuff is mostly nonsense.” Those seem to come mostly not from actual AI researchers, but AI fans. Personal and non-professional community identities depend on belief in AI progress.
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“Quasiscience” may be a useful term for a field somewhere between science and pseudoscience. The foundations are dubious and the whole thing may be nonsense. There well may be some real stuff there, but it’s impossible to sort out which, given the methods used.
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Quasisciences address problems everyone wants answers for, but for which no good methods are available. Practitioners collude to obscure the foundational problems. Funders want answers and choose to overlook doubts. Identity communities form around the field’s outputs.
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Everyone has to decide what to eat, so there’s infinite funding for nutritional research, which was a quasiscience for decades. It seems to be collapsing into a pseudoscience now: no one takes it seriously anymore. It’s just is legitimate to use dowsing.
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Would love to see an overview of the criticisms of fMRI based studies - have you written such an article or is there one you would recommend?
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I’m afraid neither.
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Stephen J. Morse at U. Penn. law school has some entertaining papers addressing what he calls "brain overclaim syndrome" in the legal domain (based on claims from neuroscience taken far beyond the evidence into legal and moral philosophy).
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"Literature says activation in region A corresponds to cognitive phenomenon X" "sounds great. what kind of measurement scale is it?" "what?" "like is the gap between 10 and 15 the same as 40 to 45? Is it meaningful to take averages, etc?" "well this is all very standard..."
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