Why did you teach me to corrupt the scientific method? An open letter to my professors of 1993 and beyond.

Nijmegen,  15-06-2013

"There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination."

- Daniell Dennett 

Esteemed prof. / dr. / PhD. / drs. / (emeritus),

almost exactly 20 years ago, in the summer of 1993, I was preparing for an exciting new chapter in my life as I was about to start my education as a student of Psychological Science at the same University at which I am currently employed as a docent and researcher. You probably do not remember me, I now know from personal experience what a lecture hall filled with 300+ students looks like from the professor's perspective. I followed your lectures, with great interest. 

During this first year you may have heard me ask some questions that were the topic of the books I was reading at the time: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett. Of course you were right to point out that, although interesting, such questions of philosophy were not the things empirical scientists like yourself cared much about. I know that now. Also, it was pointed out to me there was a philosophy course in the second year that pretty much covered all those things. 

(That course was indeed about philosophy, but not so much about the philosophy of psychological science. So I decided in my second year to write an essay about a story that appeared in a book edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. This you may remember, I won me the first prize in the 1995 university essay contest. Included was a short meet and greet with Daniel Dennett who was visiting in 1996 to promote his new book: Darwin's Dangerous Idea, from which I took the quote above this letter. By the way, do we still have an essay contest at our university?)

My question is about the following: 

In that same summer of 1993 an article appeared in the Journal of Experimental Education by Ronald Carver entitled: The Case Against Statistical Significance Testing, Revisited

Revisited, refers to the fact that Carver has to conclude that all the issues with statistical inference and the lack of replication of phenomena he identified in an article published in 1978 in the the Harvard Educational Review by the same title (save Revisited of course), were still around in 1993.

In fact, if you did not know the date of the publication, the excerpt from the article I copied below could very well have been published in the summer of 2013. The information in the abstract alone, contains all the answers one would need in order to change the corruption of the scientific method.

My question is: Why didn't you change? Your scientific work, the content of your lectures?

Why didn't we set up a study to quantify how bad this corruption really was? 

That would have been an excellent topic for a Master's thesis.

Why didn't we at least discuss these issues during my formative years as a scientist?

Why?

Sincerely, 

Your former student,

Fred Hasselman

Carver, R. (1993). The Case Against Statistical Significance Testing, Revisited. The Journal of Experimental Educationl, 61(4), 287–292. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20152382 

ps. Carver is one of many scholars who have been warning us about these problems. If you missed his work, here's a selection of just a few of the publications that appeared just before and during the time I was a student that could, maybe should have caught your attention:

Cohen, J. (1990). Things I Have Learned (So Far). American Psychologist, 45(12), 1304–1312.
Cohen, J. (1994). The earth is round (p<. 05). American Psychologist, 49(12), 997–1003.
Freeman, W. J. (1997). Three centuries of category errors in studies of the neural basis of consciousness in intentionality. Neural Networks, 10(7), 1175–1183.
Kugler, P. N., Shaw, R. E., Vincente, K. J., & Kinsella-Shaw, J. (1990). Inquiry into intentional systems I: Issues in ecological physics. Psychological Research, 52(2), 98–121.
Meehl, P. E. (1990). Why Summaries of Research on Psychological Theories Are Often Uninterpretable. Psychological Reports, 66(1), 195.
Michell, J. (1997). Bertrand Russell’s 1897 Critique of the Traditional Theory of Measurement. Synthese, 110(2), 257–276.
Van Orden, G. C., & Paap, K. R. (1997). Functional neuroimages fail to discover pieces of mind in the parts of the brain. Philosophy of Science, 64(S1), 85–94.

pps. I have to exclude the advisors on my Master's Thesis who taught me the important lesson to publish data only when you are more than 100% sure they are reliable. Some of the pronunciation errors I had categorised could not be labelled unambiguously, or in other words, another rater would arrive at a different conclusion. So we did not publish.

天

The connectome: Into the brain and beyond

As you may know, I am not a fan of contemporary neuroscience that attributes to the brain the central processor function that you may encounter in a computer.

Of course, it must be there for a reason and it is probably not just there to cool blood as Aristotle believed

As you may also know, I am currently studying the brain (again) using a complex network approach. The video below is a very impressive talk I came across on TED. Although I would go much further and be more radical about what it is that is connected, or rather nested this talk very elegantly gives an insight in the overwhelming complexity that is involved. Yes, much more complex than a machine that obeys the algorithmic laws of computation.

http://youtu.be/HA7GwKXfJB0

http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html

Just ignore the technology fallacy at the end (i.e. if we wait for bigger, better, fancier technology, we'll know everything...). Where are the robots?

day 8-9: Here Come the Salsa Robots

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I was on a break for the weekend
Went to a great party
Heard some great stories
Some ugly ones too

Hey, I may have told some as well

But we danced to Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto’s interpretation of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots”

El Baile Aleman means: “The German Dance”
They cover a lot of Kraftwerk songs on this one
Salsa version of course... so Sheik Yerbouti!

I don't know much about dancin' [..]
One of my legs is shorter than the other
'N both my feet's too long
'Course now right along with 'em
I got no natural rhythm

Interesting, I don't know if it is true but:
Romance languages call anything German: Al(l)eman (add some diacritics depending on the language), so do the Turks and in fact all arabic languages. In English it’s: German, in Baltic languages and Finnish it’s: Saksa, in Dutch and other Germanic languages, it’s, Deutsch / Duits / Dutsk (Frisian) / Tusk (Norwegian, Swedish), etc.

Now, in the days of the Roman Empire, there were the provinces of Germania (Inferior and Superior). So why did this turn into Allemania for all of southern Europe? The Allemannen were a Germanic tribe. They were pretty annoying for the Romans and eventually stopped the progress of the Roman Empire and conquered the Germanic provinces. So the Romans in a way were “defeated” by the Allemannen and so you name that country after that tribe, logical. For the Baltics this also holds becuse the Saxons, that other Germanic tribe were the bad guys. The Roman province of Britannia, after the fall of the Empire, was conquered by yet some other Germanic tribes (the Angles and the Saxons, hence Anglo-Saxon). So you name your language after the ones who “defeat” you.

Now, France was conquered by the Franks, yet, yet another Germanic tribe. Those guys lived in the lower Rhine delta and around the “Zuyder Zee”, yep the Dutch and Flemish... (Not the Frisians, they held their own territory for a while and had some influence on the English language later on). The Franks went on to become the Merovingian Dynasty, but that is another story that centers around the French region of Orange and the date of the 30th of April (or is it just a coincidence this date is our Koninginnedag?).

So the Franken, Allemannen and Angles and Saxons all spoke kind of the same language. It was called the language of the people and “diutisc” means “of the people” (zum Volk gehörig) in althochdeutsch. Very consistent people, Volkswagen expresses the same idea. But also, Alle Mannen of course means All Men. And then some monks fled to the New World and that’s why the language “Nederlands” is “Dutch” in English (Could this be one of the first American English influences on British English?).

But I digress, back to the robots.

Sometimes you read a scientific paper that really stuns, amazes, infuriates, or inspires you...
Sometimes you read a paper that appears to have been sent backwards in time from a distant future...

After I first came across this paper I immediately integrated it into a course I taught (now cancelled due to budget cuts), in which I predicted that soon engineers and technicians would know more about human development, human cognition, human emotion and well, basically everything psychology claims to study than psychologists would.

The reason: engineers and roboticists have long abandoned the idea that the human brain is something like a machine of the computer kind. So have I, so have philosophers of cognitive science, so have the ecological psychologists, but not mainstream psychology, behavioural science or cognitive science. Even the past proponents of the information processing approach admit it was a mistake to think that just increasing computation speed and storage of information would eventually lead to artificial intelligence. It does not, and if it ever will, it will not be an intelligence we will recognize as such.

I used to play a really cool roleplaying game hosted by my brother when I was young called TORG: the possibility wars. Situated in the Near Now, the background was that there were different Cosms or realities invading the Earth to obtain something called possibility energy. If successful they would impose their Axioms and Cosm Laws upon Earth’s reality, or Core Earth (f.i. Magic is possible). North America turned into The Living Lands (stone-age with dinosaurs), South-East Asia into Orrorsh (Horror genre), Egypt into The Nile Empire (Superhero / 1930s pulp genre), France into the Cyberpapacy (Cyber Punk genre), Great Britain / Scandinavia into Aysle (Fantasy genre) and more... Very noticeable changes for the inhabitants of those regions of course. Except for one region: Japan. Japan was invaded by the Nippon Tech cosm (Japanese SF genre). To the Japanese it just seemed that technological advances were happening more quickly than in the rest of the world. Nothing special.

Well, there may be some truth to that... just watch the video below:



The cool thing is: These roboticists build their robots based on the theories of J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology and direct perception and affordances, on embodied embedded cognition and on a view of development from a the perspective of Complexity Science (i.e. dynamics of complex systems), all stuff that is NOT, I repeat NOT being taught at schools of psychology. I tried.

What is important to remember is that there is no “pre-programming” of movements. They are all “learned” through perception and action. They even have simulations of fetal and movements in the womb and neonatal movements after birth, where they observe “self-touching” behaviour and very eerie realistic “uncontrolled” goal directed behaviour emerge from out of nowhere. The main reason why I think they are successful is that it is scary! It looks like there is someone inside that suit! Well, there isn’t and what it actually does in terms of movements is not pre-programmed as an algorithm but has developed... much like this cockroach robot that doesn’t have a brain at all (ok a two neuron brain).

On the site of the Asada Project we can read a clear vision of what future research should focus on:

“The 21st century is known as the "Century of the Brain" and will be an era of robot habitation with humans [...] It is important for life sciences in the 21st century to regard the brain as a complete system, and to clarify how brains realize function through interactions with the external world based on its dynamics.”

That is exactly what I (want to) do!
It is kind of sad though, that this was also exactly what many great minds since the 60s have wanted to do, but never got the chance and were and are even now ridiculed or just ignored for proposing such ideas...

Well, guess again,

the Near Now... is Now

I’m sure they will eventually be able to Salsa-dance as well

day 5: f.i.t Disk

[caption id="attachment_293" align="alignnone" width="526" caption="F.I.T"][/caption]

When I saw the F.I.T Mobile Mixer link pop up in google, I immediately thought someone had made a cool iPhone app to mix some tunes, an Ableton-like app or something.

Well.

It wasn’t

Apparently there is a great need among bodybuilders to create “smoothly mixed protein shakes” when there is no socket in the vicinity or while moving around a lot.

It is “A Portable And Lightweight Mixer For Protein Powders And More!” (Nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean? )

Here’s the most hilarious part:

“F.I.T. specializes in making mobile drink mixers. All of our products are durable, portable, and lightweight.”

You can specialize in anything of course and I commend the company for finding this niche in the market, but isn’t it kind of weird to promote your product to bodybuilders as being lightweight?

Nice.

day 1: Welcome to the jungle

 

[caption id="attachment_189" align="alignleft" width="450" caption="Meyboske"][/caption]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am on a two week mission to finish up on some writing that is due almost 5 years now.

I headed out into the Dutch jungle also known as the Achterhoek (which roughly, yet appropriately translates to “rear-corner”).

Surrounded by corn fields, some chickens and a whole lot of nothing, I put up camp in the backyard of an old farm. I let the locals carry the frozen rations, the local brewski and all the coffee I brought with me.

For they dared not touch the devilish technologies I wanted to set up so close to their lodgings.

“How can a piece of aluminum be a controller
for a computer that is itself just a piece of aluminum?”

Black magic indeed, all without wires.

...But there is a magical nothingness here
I can even see the grass grow...

...just heard a snail trip over a grain of sand...

...the sneezing of a butterfly...

... may cause a storm in a glass of water
on the other side of the globe ...

Yeah, I think I’m getting in the right mood here.