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Overthinking


Us psychology types are constantly reading and thinking about things like logic, experimental design, and statistics. I recently came across a nice little article, Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation, that summarizes a bunch of issues in designing and interpreting science experiments.

I found the last point the most interesting:

Mistake I9: Being Too Clever

Sir R. A. Fisher (1890-1962) was one of the greatest statisticians of all time, perhaps most noted for the idea of analysis of variance. But he sullied his reputation by arguing strongly that smoking does not cause cancer. He had some sensible arguments. First, he rightfully pointed out our Mistake I7, correlation is not causation. He was clever at coming up with alternative scenarios: perhaps lung cancer causes an irritation that the patient can feel long before it can be diagnosed, such that the irritation is alleviated by smoking. Or perhaps there is some unknown common cause that leads to both cancer and a tendency to smoke. Fisher was also correct in pointing out Mistake D1, lack of randomized trials: we can’t randomly separate children at birth and force one group to smoke and the other not to. (Although we can do that with animal studies.) But he was wrong to be so dismissive of reproducible studies, in humans and animals, that showed a strong correlation, with clear medical theories explaining why smoking could cause cancer, and no good theories explaining the correlation any other way. He was wrong not to see that he may have been influenced by his own fondness for smoking a pipe, or by his libertarian objections to any interference with personal liberties, or by his employ as a consultant for the tobacco industry. Fisher died in 1962 of colon cancer (a disease that is 30% more prevalent in smokers than non-smokers). It is sad that the disease took Fisher’s life, but it is a tragedy that Fisher’s stuborness provided encouragement for the 5 million people a year who kill themselves through smoking.

It’s a nice reminder that sometimes, knowing too much can get in the way of seeing the truth that’s right in front of us, and can even be deadly. If we don’t agree with some conclusion, we can whip out all the “correlation does not equal causation”, “research is still inconclusive”, and “there was no control group” we want, but that doesn’t make the conclusion false. Deep issues concerning statistics and scientific reasoning are important, sure, but sometimes we just need to look past these trees and see the giant fucking forest that’s been there all along.

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Book Review: The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1), by Phillip Pullman


The Golden Compass is actually called Northern Lights in every place except North America. I guess the publishers thought that kids would get confused, because they would not know what lights could possibly be doing in the north. Never mind that the book never refers to the titular object as a compass; that’s not confusing at all, no.

It’s like how the first Harry Potter was renamed “Sorcerer’s Stone” from “Philosopher’s Stone” in the United States (but luckily not here). Because, publishers must think, kids are dumb; they wouldn’t want to read a book about philosophy! Never mind that the idea of a philosopher’s stone has been around for centuries. Just rename it and kids won’t have to learn anything new.

With that out of the way: While I’ve just referred to The Golden Compass as a kid’s book, it’s really not. Not any more than Lord of the Rings is a kid’s book. It may have talking animals and magic, but there is also disturbing violence and very adult themes. There are polar bears in this book that will chew your face right off.

It’s also no secret that Pullman is a raging atheist, but while it shows in the novel in subtle ways (incorporation of deep scientific principles, and participation of the Church in certain questionable activities), he never beats the reader over the head with it. It’s more atheistic by omission; there is no fuzzy feel-good God-is-watching-over-us and the-lion-is-Jesus message. Not that there aren’t feel-good moments, because Pullman creates characters that you’ll actually care about, who interact in very human (or human-like) and touching ways.

Overall, The Golden Compass is a dark, touching, epic fantasy novel that is just chock full of giant killer polar bears. I really enjoyed it, and look forward to the forthcoming movie (though it looks to have been pussified quite a bit, leaving out the disturbing parts. boo.), and to the other two books in the trilogy.

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A Diatribe on the Nature of Intellect, and A Method With Which One Can Answer the Query, “Do Lycanthropes Possess Testes?”

Lately, most of my time is taken up reading for comprehensive exams. One of the topics I’m studying is intelligence. An interesting finding in this field is that raw IQ scores have been increasing over the last few decades; this is known as the “Flynn effect”, named after its main discoverer. There is some confusion over whether this is a superficial increase in IQ test scores, or a real increase in what they are meant to measure (i.e., intelligence). This leads to the following awesome quote from one of my books:

“Flynn argues that if the intergenerational gain in IQ scores were “real” (i.e. reflected g), the real-life consequences would be conspicuous. For example, the younger generation with average IQs would perceive their parents and grandparents as intellectually dull or borderline [R-word]. Flynn even suggests that baseball and cricket fans of two or three generations past wouldn’t have had enough intelligence to understand the rules of the game.”

I just find it hilarious to imagine every kid in the world coming to realize that their parents are dumber than they are. They’d get together in the playground and swap stories about how their dad couldn’t find Africa on a map, or their mom gave $30 as a 15% tip on a $100 restaurant bill. “I swear,” they’d say, “my parents are hella intellectually dull.” Then dad would take his son to the ball game, and be all like “Wha? Why’d he just swing at the ball with that there stick? Who’s them guys with the mitts? What’s going on, son?”, eating a hot dog and drooling the entire time.

But hey, maybe it’s not so far fetched. If 80s movies and South Park have taught me anything, it’s that kids are the only ones who really know what’s going on. If Dracula and the Wolfman tried to take over the world, it would be kids who would have to stop them, and not their cognitively challenged parents.

P.S. Monster Squad is finally coming out on DVD!!!!

P.P.S. The quote is from Arthur Jensen’s “The g Factor”, p. 329.

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Read This or Else


So I finished my last and only exam today.

The following occured to me: In grad school, it’s not really writing exams that matters, but the threat of writing exams.

See, marks don’t really matter. In a grad course, everyone is going to get a good mark no matter how well (or poorly) they do on an exam (unless something goes horribly wrong), and marks are barely important for any future endeavors * anyway. What matters is that the students have learned the material taught in the class.

To learn the material, any motivated student will learn all they can possibly learn in preparing for an exam. But see, it’s preparing that makes them learn, not writing. So if everyone thought they were going to write an exam and thus prepared their asses off, but then it got cancelled, they will have learned just as much as if they had actually written it. The threat of writing just needs to be there, and needs to be taken seriously.

It’s like how some beetles will mimic the colouring of bees and wasps, so that potential predators will think they’re all badass and stingy and leave them alone. Or how peacocks puff up their feathers to look gigantic and attract the ladies, even though under all that fluff they’re just a shitty little runt of a bird. They achieve their purpose by threatening to accomplish something that won’t actually happen. It’s exactly the same thing.

Wait, I forget what my point is. Oh…let’s just say…the moral of this post is… “faking your way through life is nature’s way.”

* CONGRATULATIONS! You have witnessed my first usage of the word “endeavor” evor!

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Book Review: The Colorado Kid, by StephenKing


Casual fans of Stephen King might have missed this book. It came out in 2005 as a little paperback published by Hard Case Crime – a small publisher of pulp mystery novels. I didn’t know it existed until recently.

This is a tiny little story. The entire tale unfolds as a single conversation taking place between three people. When it finally gets there, the main plot is about an unidentified body – The Colorado Kid – found on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. That’s it. There is nothing else to it.

King seems to have designed this book to piss people off. Right from the start, the characters make it clear that this is not a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Rather, it’s about stories themselves, and the nature of mystery. There is no ending, no resolution, no story, no nothing. Still, I enjoyed every page. As a scientist-type dabbling in mystery myself, I totally get what King is doing here. He’s written a novel-length essay on how it may be mystery itself, and not its resolution, that keeps us going. And he’s done so with charming characters and a story that keeps you reading even though you are assured it will not go anywhere.

Perhaps he’s also responding a bit to criticisms of his other novels; as we saw with The Dark Tower series, endings aren’t really his thing.

Being pissed off isn’t always a bad thing, and I think this is proof of that. I recommend reading this infuriating book at your earliest convenience.

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So It Goes

Aw shit, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died.

Celebrity deaths don’t affect me often, but there is something different about authors. My heart skipped a few beats when I heard this. I think many people have a very real and very intimate connection with authors. Stephen King once wrote that writing is like telepathy, and in a way that’s true. An author transmits their thoughts onto paper, then that paper reaches readers who are distant in space and time, who mentally recieve the author’s thoughts through the filter of their own thoughts. It’s necessarily one-way telepathy – author to reader – but it’s still very personal, especially if the author is putting themselves in their work, as Vonnegut did (both literally and figuratively).

I read a few of his books in high school, and they most certainly influenced my thoughts from that point forward. I remember doing my big “ISP” (independent study project) in English class on him. Instead of a boring essay, I wrote a short story in his style. I’ll post it below. It’s not all that well-written (but hey, I was a teenager when I wrote it), and obviously nothing compared to Vonnegut himself, but I still think it captured a bit of his style. And although it makes no sense, I think it has a certain internal logic running through it. Think of it as a tribute.

digital-actors-or-now-were-having-fun.pdf

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Nuking Dreams

This is from a recent issue of Science:

In 2004, a research team led by Pierre Maquet of the University of Liège, Belgium, used positron emission tomography (PET) to monitor brain activity in men playing a virtual-reality game in which they learned to navigate through a virtual town (actually a scene from the shoot-’em-up video game Duke Nukem). The same regions of the hippocampus that revved up when the subjects explored the virtual environment also became active when the men slipped into slow-wave sleep that night.

Well first, that’s pretty neat. I guess dreams aren’t a waste of time after all.

But: Duke Nukem?? In 2004? Assuming they meant Duke Nukem 3D and not the 1991 original, that game is almost 10 years old. By today’s standards, the graphics are horrible and unrealistic. You’d think that they would get better results using a game that resembles real life; and, um, less meaningful results with a game where you walk around a pixely city fighting cartoony 2-dimensional pig-people with a freeze ray.

Of course, if they really wanted a Duke Nukem game to use, that was their only choice. The sequel to Duke Nukem – Duke Nukem Forever – is one of the most hilarious things in the video game world. It’s been in development since 1997, and was scheduled to be released in 1998. It is still not out. It’s now almost 10 years over its scheduled release date. What’s funny is that every few years, news of the game will come out, usually saying that it will be out soon, accompanied by a tiny screenshot. Nobody will admit that it’s been cancelled. The fact that it has “forever” in the title, and abbreviates to “DNF” (i.e., did not finish) makes it even better. Still, there are plenty of games, out now, that have gorgeous graphics which psychology researchers could easily use to simulate real life. Look at Gears of War.

And this, friends, is why spending countless hours playing video games is no more a waste of time than dreaming. It’s pretty much studying for school and my future career as a psychologist.

I’ve now outed myself as a pathetic geek.

To be all intellectually honest, here is the full source of the quote in glorious APA format:

Miller, G. (2007). Hunting for meaning after midnight. Science, 315 (5817), 1360 – 1363.

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ROFLCOPTER

So I was reading this article on the top 10 mysteries of the mind, and one of them was about the purpose of laughter. Nobody really knows what it is.

And when you think about it, laughter is pretty strange. Someone says something “funny”, and in response, your lips curl up and you start grunting. Why?

Some researchers guess that laughing signals to other people that you meant something “in fun”, but this seems kinda circular. People would only do something “in fun” if it was funny, and then that just gets us back to asking what funny means. Others think that laughter is a playful response to things that don’t make sense. Ok, sure, but what’s the point of going into a fit every time something doesn’t make sense? Since I’m in personality psychology, I’d also point out that there are huge individual differences in laughter. Some people laugh at South Park, while others think Hope & Faith is hilarious (note: I’ve never watched it. Maybe it is.)

My guess is that, like most things, laughter is complicated. It serves multiple purposes depending on the situation, and depending on who’s doing the laughing.

Hah! Laughter. It makes me laugh. LOLX0rS.