“Debates about scientific realism are centrally connected to almost everything else in the philosophy of science, for they concern the very nature of scientific knowledge. Scientific realism is a positive epistemic attitude towards the content of our best theories and models, recommending belief in both observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences. This epistemic attitude has important metaphysical and semantic dimensions, and these various commitments are contested by a number of rival epistemologies of science, known collectively as forms of scientific antirealism. This article explains what scientific realism is, outlines its main variants, considers the most common arguments for and against the position, and contrasts it with its most important antirealist counterparts.”

Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

(Thanks, Benedikt)

I love the future. As dystopic as things might get, politically, economically, ethically – there will always be things to keep me going.
Like swarm robotics.

“Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs”.

When I grow up, I want to become a swarm roboticist.

Extremely important paper. Must-read for every scientist working in psychology.

Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797611417632
LINK

Another very important one, with a focus on neuroscience.

Ioannidis, J. P. a. (2011). Excess Significance Bias in the Literature on Brain Volume Abnormalities. Archives of general psychiatry, 1-8. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.28
LINK

Highly interesting paper about the phenomenon of emergence and the understanding of the human mind in modern neuroscience.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2010). Neuroscience and the correct level of explanation for understanding mind. An extraterrestrial roams through some neuroscience laboratories and concludes earthlings are not grasping how best to understand the mind-brain interface. Trends in cognitive sciences, 14(7), 291-2. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.04.005
LINK

Brain images bias our minds to find papers more plausible.

McCabe, D. P., & Castel, A. D. (2008). Seeing is believing: the effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition, 107(1), 343-52. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.017
LINK

All organized bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself.

– John Stuart Mill (1872). A System of Logic (Bk III, Ch. 6, Sec. 1, 8th edn), Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer

One should not judge people just because they don’t understand a scientific area – I personally don’t understand most scientific areas, and I guess that’s just the way things are today, even if you happen to be a scientist.

But maybe you can judge people who judge scientific areas without having the slightest clue about them?

Here is a wonderful rebuttal by Robert Kurzban, whom I consider to be pretty witty, against some of the (wrong) notions you regularly hear from feminists (and many other people) about Evolutionary Psychology. Moreover, it really is a decent introduction into Evolutionary Psychology, if you happen to be interested in what we do, what (some of us) think, and what we try to do.

There should be no tension between feminism and evolutionary psychology, and what tension there is derives from erroneous views such as those of Marcotte. At its heart, evolutionary psychology uses ideas from biology and other disciplines in the service of trying to understand and explain human behavior. It is, of course, a positive enterprise, and the normative ghosts Marcotte sees are just that, ghosts.

The problem, I think, boils down to this. Evolutionary psychologists say “biology” but what Marcotte hears is “genetic determinism.” Because she is in favor of political change, and because she (incorrectly) understands evolutionary explanations to pull the other way – against change – this causes her to frame us as enemies.

This article sums up very nicely that google is providing different people with different “truths” about subjects like climate change, depending on your personal google history:

So if last time you looked up climate change and chose to open something by, say, Marc Morano, then Senator Inhofe, and then the Drudge Report, which would all poo-poo climate change, google thinks, “oh, this moron likes denier news about climate change,” and next time, more of its top suggestions for your search will be skewed even further to the right.
As you keep heading further into la-la land, Google is there, holding your hand, assuring you that indeed, this is the objective, google-able truth. Two people with different search histories get two entirely different sets of google “facts” for the identical search terms.
– Susan Kraemer, “How Google is Making the Climate War Worse”

Results:
Medication vs placebo differences varied substantially as a function of baseline severity. Among patients with HDRS scores below 23, Cohen d effect sizes for the difference between medication and placebo were estimated to be less than 0.20 (a standard definition of a small effect). Estimates of the magnitude of the superiority of medication over placebo increased with increases in baseline depression severity and crossed the threshold defined by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence for a clinically significant difference at a baseline HDRS score of 25.

Conclusions:
The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial.
– Fournier et al., 2010

Please take this into account when you treat people with depression. Also, read up on the fact that depression is not the same thing in every person. There is no “depression” – we invented this category. Yes, there are people who show similar symptoms, but most of the people with the diagnosis depression have very different symptoms, and hundreds of studies convincingly show this. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help people who suffer. It just means we need to be careful with medication and therapy.

These patients are all different. They have different problems that cause their depression (some of them more common than others), they have different genetic make-ups making them more or less vulnerable to adverse life events, they show different psychophysiological responses to the same stressors. They have different constellations of protective and vulnerability factors.

There is a reason we haven’t found biomarkers for depression yet that have any form of sensitivity and specificity regarding the diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. The reason is that MDD is, unlike schizophrenia and similar diseases, very different from person to person.

We would be happy if a depression would be just like a broken leg – it doesn’t matter how you broke it, we can reliably fix it with a set of interventions by helping the two pieces of bone to grow together again. But it is not, and pretending things are that simple will do much more harm than good.

(I have to admit I didn’t know JAMA, but it doesn’t seem to be just another random journal in which you get everything published: “2009 impact factor of 28.899, ranking it 3rd among 133 journals in the category ‘Medicine, General & Internal’”.)

Worth living: Open Access Week at University of Michigan.

Dear Faculty and Grad Students,

In honor of international Open Access Week (Oct. 24-30), I’m writing to encourage you to think about access and copyright when you submit your work to journals for publication.

Open Access (OA) literature is peer-reviewed, scholarly work that is available online for free, immediate, and permanent access. Anyone who has access to the Internet may read, download, store, print, use, and data-mine the digital content of Open Access works. (UM Copyright Office website) This allows knowledge to be more available to users around the world who may not have access to expensive journal subscriptions. Of course, authors still retain copyright to any works they create, unless they explicitly sign away those rights.

Here are some ways you can support the principles of Open Access:
Read the rest of this entry »

” ‘Refinement’ is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether ‘refined’ is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.

Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.”

– William James, Pragmatism, 1907