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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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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Replying to @Meaningness
Have you written anything in depth on why you think it's mostly nonsense?
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Replying to @skybrian
No… I’ve written a preliminary post but not gone into details.https://meaningness.com/metablog/artificial-intelligence-progress …
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Replying to @Meaningness
If you summarized your view as something like "AI doesn't seem to be making scientific progress" I suspect you'd see a lot less pushback? "Mostly nonsense" is a broad claim and anyone seeing any kind of progress might see reason to object.
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OTOH... the problem really isn’t so much lack of progress as apparent progress that is probably illusory.
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