The important details:
“11am, near the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, Saturday 19th September, to walk to the Tavistock Clinic in the leafy suburb of Belsize Park for about 4-5ish.”
And:
The walk is about 8 miles but I’m planning for a few minor detours for interesting sites (grounds of the old Bedlam Hospital, now the Imperial War Museum, St Thomas’ Hospital and the like) and with stops for lunch and maybe the occasional pint.
Wish I was in London to join this!
There are quite a few holy wars in the psychology of reasoning, the most famous of which was between mental rules and mental models. This has a negative affect on the community: researchers fight to support their own brand, even when the empirical evidence suggests that major revisions are needed (yes, the data offer challenges to theories, even in psychology!), and mistrust or ignore results interpreted using ideas from competing brands. It’s a problem even when just chatting with someone about results. For instance one day I tried, patiently, to explain an empirical result to someone, who got angry about the theoretical framework in which the result was interpreted, and thus refused to look at data which would have been relevant to (and actually supported, once you looked at the numbers) his brand.
Anyway, was nice to see relevant comments from two different corners of the literature lying on my desk. The first comes from a discussion of (using) the ACT-R theory (Anderson, 2007, p. 19):
“… this book is not about ACT-R; rather I am using ACT-R as a tool to describe the mind. [...] We may be proud of our ACT-R models and think they are better than others [...] but we try not to lose track of the fact that they are just a way of describing what is really of interest.”
Later (p. 239) Anderson cites Herbert Simon, who complained that
“‘brand names’ tend to make difficult the analysis and comparison of [...] mechanisms or the exchange of knowledge between research groups. [...] Physicists did not divide quantum mechanics into the Heisenberg Brand, the Schrodinger Brand, and the Dirac brand.”
Next example, from a book on social class (Wright, 1997, p. 34):
“Readers who are highly skeptical of the Marxist tradition for whatever reasons might feel that there is no point in struggling through the numbers and graphs in the rest of this book. If the conceptual justifications for the categories are unredeemably flawed, it might be thought, the empirical results generated with those categories will be worthless. This would be, I think, a mistake. The empirical categories themselves can be interpreted in a Weberian or hybrid manner. [...] As is usually the case in sociology, the empirical categories are underdetermined by the theoretical frameworks within which they are generated or interpreted.”
All commonsense, really. But this important faculty of reasoning appears to be lost in practice, due, I suspect, to the very competitive nature of research, e.g., the joys of peer-review, trying to look clever at conferences (and, maybe more importantly, to students), and how tricky it is to continue to appear credible when one changes one’s mind.
Solutions please?
References
Anderson, J. R. (2007). How can the human mind occur in the physical universe? Oxford University Press
Wright, E. O. (1997). Class counts: student edition. Cambridge University Press.
Becoming competent:
“… the kind of technico-rational knowledge that contributes to competence consists of idiosyncratic combinations of up-to-date specialist, and usually tacit, knowledge. It cannot usually be specified in advance but is accumulated through feeling-guided adventures into the unknown. Failure to build up such pools of knowledge stems from an absence of the motivational disposition to do so and thus cannot be rectified by external compulsion.”
“… occupational competence depends, above all, on ‘the ability to deal with the swamp’.”
Formal education:
“… the so-called educational system mainly performs sociological functions, like controlling access to protected occupations and legitimising huge disparities in quality of life. These, in turn, have the effect of compelling most people, against their better judgement, to participate in the unethical activities of which modern society is so largely composed – the manufacture and marketing of junk foods, junk toys, junk education and junk research.”
Helping others become more competent:
“Effective parents, teachers and managers study their children’s, students’ or subordinates’ interests and incipient patterns of competence and create situations in which those concerned are able to exercise and develop competencies like initiative, creativity and the ability to understand and influence their organisations and society in the course of carrying out activities (ranging from putting people at ease to creating political turbulence) that they themselves care about. They also expose those concerned to appropriate role models, in person or in literature. These role models are unusual in that they portray the normally private patterns of thinking and feeling which contribute to effective behaviour. They demonstrate how to set out into the unknown, reflect upon what one finds, and take corrective action when necessary.”
—John Raven, CPD – What should we be developing?
“After the war, when Turing’s role was no longer top-secret, he should have been knighted and fêted as a saviour of his nation. Instead, this gentle, stammering, eccentric genius was destroyed, for a ‘crime’, committed in private, which harmed nobody.” — Richard Dawkins
(Hat-tip: Michelle)
UPDATE: pettition over here. (Thanks VS.)
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released its call for research proposals a couple of days ago. A couple of topics look interesting:
I like the use of “merely” above.
In quite possibly the coolest ever application of the Doppler effect, Kaća Bradonjić has shown what velocity you ought to move in to hear, e.g., a major (triad) chord as a minor chord and vice versa, if the three notes are played from three different locations. (I shan’t pretend to have waded through the maths.)
Reference
Bradonjić, K. (2008). Relativity of musical mood. arXiv:0807.2493v1.
Any readers good at Latin?
Argumentum ad intractableum: the fallacy of arguing that a cognitive model is poor because it is computationally intractable (in general).
(I presume “intractableum” is incorrect…)
It may be taken for granted that any attempt at defining disorder in a formal way will lead to a contradiction. This does not mean that the notion of disorder is contradictory. It is so, however, as soon as I try to formalize it.
–Hans Freudenthal, cited in Michiel van Lambalgen’s PhD thesis
