Identity communities often form based on outsider understandings of fields on the boundary of science and pseudoscience. When I asserted recently that fMRI stuff is largely nonsense, I got many outraged responses, apparently mostly from psychiatrists.https://twitter.com/EikoFried/status/1141015324474712071 …
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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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Have you written anything in depth on why you think it's mostly nonsense?
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No… I’ve written a preliminary post but not gone into details.https://meaningness.com/metablog/artificial-intelligence-progress …
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In my work, I treat deep learning as a legitimate engineering tool, divorced from any claims about "intelligence" or "AI." It may be nothing but a powerful curve-fitter, but it turns out you can solve many hard engineering problems with high-dimensional curve-fitting.
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