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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“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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Replying to @Meaningness
Hmm. Seems like you’re conflating application métis and fan theories a bit? Most programmers don’t understand semiconductor manufacturing but build their theories atop abstractions that they trust up to a point. Programming lore does not appear to be a quasiscience in your sense.
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
There is a spectrum going from programming lore on one end (based on strong, nearly leakproof abstractions) through fMRIology to social psych and say startupology. The abstractions they depend on get progressively leakier, and conclusions shakier.
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Replying to @vgr @Meaningness
Fandom seems almost like an epiphenomenon of shaky foundations but not in itself an indictment of the foundations. You look for more social reassurance when your truths have a half life of 5 years rather than 50. But that’s degree, not kind.
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This sounds like an interesting thread of questions, but I’m not sure I understand what it is. Is the point that there’s a continuum from reliable science to pseudoscience? Yes definitely. “Quasi” refers vaguely to the middle ground there.
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Replying to @Meaningness @vgr
There are fields that haven’t quite managed to get into a normal-science groove yet, because the methods are still shaky or there’s still ontological problems. Kuhn called them “pre-paradigm”.
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Replying to @Meaningness @vgr
Pre-paradigm science is great (only place I personally want to be; normal science, however valuable, bores me). Quasisciences are ones that are pre-paradigm but are treated as normal due to public desire for answers. That’s pathological.
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