I guess I should clarify the larger epistemic point at which I was hinting. That others may not, in some reasonable number of attempts, reproduce an experiment does not mean that the experiment is categorically not reproducible. Any number of things, such as lab conditions (which are not, in practical, absolute terms, reproducible within a lab, much less between different labs), can influence the results of experiments, and while adhering to certain sound methodological principles abstracts away a lot of these real-world complications, and while statistics can tell us a certain probability of one thing or another, these are idealizations. There's a distinction between an experiment as an abstraction (i.e. that thing that gets written up in a methods section) and an instance of an experiment (i.e. that thing that gets written up in the results section) - only the latter exists in the tangible world, while the former exists as an idea. Thus, while we can comfortably talk of experiments that haven't been reproduced, it's another thing to casually throw around terms such as "not reproducible". We should be much more cautious about the latter term.
The ironic thing about statements like these is that they usually come from people with no scientific training in any field, nor any meaningful training in statistics...
See, spewing bogus claims like this is why people come to see you as the fraud that you are.
Wow - you seem to have a profound knowledge of me. Should I check the bushes for a creepy basement-dwelling type with a set of binoculars?
Either way, you might want to try to satisfy your desperate craving for any sort of human contact through some other activity than trolling.
The ironic thing about statements like these is that they usually come from people with no scientific training in any field, nor any meaningful training in statistics, but only a "sciency" inclination and questionable, popular distillation-derived knowledge of some principles from what they consider "the hard sciences".
Sadly, this irony will be lost on the people making such statements, who will, for some unfathomable reason, continue to disparage people doing meaningful work in the sciences, while never coming close to accomplishing anything of the sort themselves.
Actual academics have an idea of the hard work involved in contributing to the human knowledge base in all scientific disciplines, and thus, tend to respect each other's work (as long as others don't step on their own toes in their particular area of specialization, in which case, prepare for turbulence).
That's not really a problem from the perspective of scientists - in the fields of psychology, cog sci, and neuroscience, I've never encountered an instance of a researcher using any popular media distillation of some study as a meaningful source of info on that study (aside from making them aware of the study's existence).
Also, you seem to be assigning some a priori status of reproducibility or lack thereof to some studies, which really confuses the issue. For example, what does it mean for an experiment to be "not reproducible"? You can fail to reproduce the results of an experiment, but proving that a result is not reproducible, or somehow knowing that it isn't, is a different issue altogether.
Well, sure, it's plausible that based on intuition, he may have known early in life that he was different, or "not in tune with others' emotions", or something along those lines. However, it's worth keeping in mind that science has no way of telling you for certain that you're a "psychopath". Psychopathy is typically associated by psychologists with antisocial personality disorder, but these disorders are social constructs (as are other "niches in the human typecast", right?) - they are repeatedly defined and redefined by scores of psychologists specializing in these areas, and every so often, these new definitions are published as part of the DSM. You can be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, and that's as close to knowing that you're characterized by psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder as you're going to get - and for all you know, with the next iteration of the DSM, the definition of the disorder could change, and you may no longer meet the definition. Complete certitude of complex ideas is something that science doesn't provide.
Perhaps he specifically chose neuroscience because he wanted to deal in something more concrete, whatever that means, than just the tools (i.e. stats, formal definitions) associated with clinical psychology. I don't know anything specific about attempting to infer antisocial personality disorder from neural scans, but I'd be willing to bet that neural scans are not the most reliable indicator of that disorder (popular media distillations would have people believe otherwise, but it's generally pretty tough to infer complex behaviors/traits from these scans). But he probably didn't know these things when considering a career in the field.
In other words, it sounds like we may agree that it's a plausible notion that he may have intuitively known that there was something a bit unusual about himself early on, and this may have played a role in drawing him to the psych field. But I don't know enough about this guy to confirm or deny that. And it's also highly likely that his neuroscience/psych knowledge, and his studies of himself and his family, have given him a lot of insight into his behavior/character.
He explains in his TED talk that a relative informed him of his family's history of psychopathy after he developed an interest in the topic - this prompted him to perform neural scans of himself and family members. Whether he became interested in psychopathy because he had some suspicions about himself (as a neuroscientist, he would've had a course or two in psychopathology in grad school, and would have had a reasonable understanding of how antisocial personality disorder is formally defined; this isn't to mention the likelihood of other exposure to this topic) is another question altogether. If someone with a doctorate in a subdiscipline of psych showed antisocial personality disorder traits that qualify him as having this disorder under DSM criteria, it's pretty hard to believe that he wouldn't have been able to give himself a provisional diagnosis in accordance with these traits, although as a neuroscientist, being able to associate the neural scans to the symptoms probably helped him to convince himself.
out of fear or embarrassment of being labeled a psychopath. Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon has gone in the opposite direction, telling the world about his finding in a TED Talk, an NPR interview and now a new book published last month, The Psychopath Inside
I'd infer that his "boldness and inhibition" suggest that he's tenured.
The submitter presumably thought that enough people on/. should be familiar with R, the most popular statistical programming language, or from the context (i.e. R is mentioned together with Perl), would infer that it's a language, and google, "r language", or something along those lines. These assumptions seem pretty reasonable. Here's a bit of help:
Got it. It's just that it's probably more common than not to use open source languages/software for research and academic purposes (I've used R, Matlab, Perl, and Python in my own stuff), so it's a bit unusual to hear it mentioned prominently, unless it comes with an explanation of what particular features those tools had which made it worthwhile to mention them (i.e. different results might occur with other packages, or the functionality in some package is not known to be available anywhere else, etc.).
However, it's cool to see credit being given where it's due, whatever the underlying reasons.
It seems that mentioning certain functionalities or modules associated with particular languages used in the analysis, unless these features do not exist in other languages (and thus, are a topic worthy of discussion on their own right), trivializes the research itself.
Since when does papers being published have any value? I suggest not trusting reviews based solely on them being done by popular entities such as "scientific" journals. Instead, get advice from experts and think for yourself. See what experts think, not what a commercial entity that earns money by publishing stuff thinks.
There should not be a place "scientific" journals in modern science. They have no added value whatsoever and in fact harm free sharing of knowledge and information. It's not 1956 anymore - all scientific papers could easily be made available in a free open standardized way. The same goes for reviews. The scientific world failing to get this right is utterly sad.
Journals facilitate peer reviews by people with doctorates who specialize in a topic related to the paper you submit. Does a person fitting those criteria qualify as an "expert" by your definition? These academics/experts/specialists, along with the journal's editor, offer extensive critiques of your paper, often several pages long. A paper often goes through a few rounds of reviews, and often ends up a significantly stronger work with each iteration. Journals also provide a copy-editor who can perform a variety of useful tasks, from stylistic suggestions, to checking your references.
Journals can be criticized on various grounds, and there are models of scientific publishing being explored that should be considered as alternatives to journals, but to dismiss journals outright, as many on this thread have done is unwarranted, and much of this seems to stem from a lack of knowledge and experience in the academic publishing domain.
I now have to question every process to publish a paper in every country, as I'm willing to bet most review processes are just as pathetic.
I take it you've never had the pleasure of publishing a scientific paper. You should really go ahead and try to confirm your theory by publishing a paper in a journal with a reasonable impact factor - if you manage to do so, the results themselves would be worthy of publication.
Conclusion: We note an association between soda consumption and behavior among very young children; future studies should explore potential mechanisms that could explain this association
I didn't see a causal claim there - merely a claim of correlation, with the suggestion that causal factors should be investigated. Did you apply the same rigor to determining that evolution and global warming are hoaxes?
The study isn't telling anyone how to parent, nor does it seem to be making a claim of finding a causal link. It is merely offering information which suggests that it would be worthwhile to investigate a causal link.
The "common sense" which you want people to utilize isn't as fundamental as you make it seem. Good decisions depend on good inputs in the form of useful and abundant information about the domain in question. Scientific research gather information needed for decision making - a proponent of "common sense" such as yourself should know that.
Some people keep going on about the type of soda, stating that this could invalidate any causal claims, but to point out a somewhat more fundamental issue (I read only the summary, and glanced over some of the text of the study), this study is a survey rather than an experiment. If the authors did make any causal claims, as the/. summary implies, then the authors would have had to make a good argument for causality, including establishing temporal precedence (i.e. respondents' offspring were not aggressive until they started consuming soda) - this would be much tougher to do using a survey format than an actual experiment where, for example, soda consumption can be manipulated. The header says that the authors are based in a department of Epidemiology, a department of Economics, and a department of Health Policy and Management, which probably goes some way towards explaining the methodology (which, again, would be questionable if they were trying to establish causality).
However, the abstract seems to make no causal claim. It explicitly says, "future studies should explore potential mechanisms that could explain this association", referring to the association between soda consumption and behaviors in question. This paves the way for questions of causality such as, "are mothers who give their kids soda more likely to complain about their kids' behavior in a survey?", or, "are mothers who give their kids soda less effective parents in terms of x, y, z than mothers who do not, leading to a greater incidence of aggressive behavior in their kids?". It seems that the study achieved a goal of suggesting that it's worthwhile to look for a causal link between aggressive behaviors and soda consumption, and does not make claims beyond that.
In other words, it's more likely that the article isn't so screwy as to make questionable causal claims; it seems that the the summarizer is simply maintaining the time-honored tradition of popular media offering distorted interpretations of scientific articles.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I should clarify the larger epistemic point at which I was hinting. That others may not, in some reasonable number of attempts, reproduce an experiment does not mean that the experiment is categorically not reproducible. Any number of things, such as lab conditions (which are not, in practical, absolute terms, reproducible within a lab, much less between different labs), can influence the results of experiments, and while adhering to certain sound methodological principles abstracts away a lot of these real-world complications, and while statistics can tell us a certain probability of one thing or another, these are idealizations. There's a distinction between an experiment as an abstraction (i.e. that thing that gets written up in a methods section) and an instance of an experiment (i.e. that thing that gets written up in the results section) - only the latter exists in the tangible world, while the former exists as an idea. Thus, while we can comfortably talk of experiments that haven't been reproduced, it's another thing to casually throw around terms such as "not reproducible". We should be much more cautious about the latter term.
See, spewing bogus claims like this is why people come to see you as the fraud that you are.
Wow - you seem to have a profound knowledge of me. Should I check the bushes for a creepy basement-dwelling type with a set of binoculars?
Either way, you might want to try to satisfy your desperate craving for any sort of human contact through some other activity than trolling.
The ironic thing about statements like these is that they usually come from people with no scientific training in any field, nor any meaningful training in statistics, but only a "sciency" inclination and questionable, popular distillation-derived knowledge of some principles from what they consider "the hard sciences".
Sadly, this irony will be lost on the people making such statements, who will, for some unfathomable reason, continue to disparage people doing meaningful work in the sciences, while never coming close to accomplishing anything of the sort themselves.
Actual academics have an idea of the hard work involved in contributing to the human knowledge base in all scientific disciplines, and thus, tend to respect each other's work (as long as others don't step on their own toes in their particular area of specialization, in which case, prepare for turbulence).
That's not really a problem from the perspective of scientists - in the fields of psychology, cog sci, and neuroscience, I've never encountered an instance of a researcher using any popular media distillation of some study as a meaningful source of info on that study (aside from making them aware of the study's existence).
Also, you seem to be assigning some a priori status of reproducibility or lack thereof to some studies, which really confuses the issue. For example, what does it mean for an experiment to be "not reproducible"? You can fail to reproduce the results of an experiment, but proving that a result is not reproducible, or somehow knowing that it isn't, is a different issue altogether.
Well, sure, it's plausible that based on intuition, he may have known early in life that he was different, or "not in tune with others' emotions", or something along those lines. However, it's worth keeping in mind that science has no way of telling you for certain that you're a "psychopath". Psychopathy is typically associated by psychologists with antisocial personality disorder, but these disorders are social constructs (as are other "niches in the human typecast", right?) - they are repeatedly defined and redefined by scores of psychologists specializing in these areas, and every so often, these new definitions are published as part of the DSM. You can be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, and that's as close to knowing that you're characterized by psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder as you're going to get - and for all you know, with the next iteration of the DSM, the definition of the disorder could change, and you may no longer meet the definition. Complete certitude of complex ideas is something that science doesn't provide.
Perhaps he specifically chose neuroscience because he wanted to deal in something more concrete, whatever that means, than just the tools (i.e. stats, formal definitions) associated with clinical psychology. I don't know anything specific about attempting to infer antisocial personality disorder from neural scans, but I'd be willing to bet that neural scans are not the most reliable indicator of that disorder (popular media distillations would have people believe otherwise, but it's generally pretty tough to infer complex behaviors/traits from these scans). But he probably didn't know these things when considering a career in the field.
In other words, it sounds like we may agree that it's a plausible notion that he may have intuitively known that there was something a bit unusual about himself early on, and this may have played a role in drawing him to the psych field. But I don't know enough about this guy to confirm or deny that. And it's also highly likely that his neuroscience/psych knowledge, and his studies of himself and his family, have given him a lot of insight into his behavior/character.
He explains in his TED talk that a relative informed him of his family's history of psychopathy after he developed an interest in the topic - this prompted him to perform neural scans of himself and family members. Whether he became interested in psychopathy because he had some suspicions about himself (as a neuroscientist, he would've had a course or two in psychopathology in grad school, and would have had a reasonable understanding of how antisocial personality disorder is formally defined; this isn't to mention the likelihood of other exposure to this topic) is another question altogether. If someone with a doctorate in a subdiscipline of psych showed antisocial personality disorder traits that qualify him as having this disorder under DSM criteria, it's pretty hard to believe that he wouldn't have been able to give himself a provisional diagnosis in accordance with these traits, although as a neuroscientist, being able to associate the neural scans to the symptoms probably helped him to convince himself.
out of fear or embarrassment of being labeled a psychopath. Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon has gone in the opposite direction, telling the world about his finding in a TED Talk, an NPR interview and now a new book published last month, The Psychopath Inside
I'd infer that his "boldness and inhibition" suggest that he's tenured.
The submitter presumably thought that enough people on /. should be familiar with R, the most popular statistical programming language, or from the context (i.e. R is mentioned together with Perl), would infer that it's a language, and google, "r language", or something along those lines. These assumptions seem pretty reasonable. Here's a bit of help:
http://www.r-project.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)
Got it. It's just that it's probably more common than not to use open source languages/software for research and academic purposes (I've used R, Matlab, Perl, and Python in my own stuff), so it's a bit unusual to hear it mentioned prominently, unless it comes with an explanation of what particular features those tools had which made it worthwhile to mention them (i.e. different results might occur with other packages, or the functionality in some package is not known to be available anywhere else, etc.).
However, it's cool to see credit being given where it's due, whatever the underlying reasons.
It seems that mentioning certain functionalities or modules associated with particular languages used in the analysis, unless these features do not exist in other languages (and thus, are a topic worthy of discussion on their own right), trivializes the research itself.
Since when does papers being published have any value? I suggest not trusting reviews based solely on them being done by popular entities such as "scientific" journals. Instead, get advice from experts and think for yourself. See what experts think, not what a commercial entity that earns money by publishing stuff thinks.
There should not be a place "scientific" journals in modern science. They have no added value whatsoever and in fact harm free sharing of knowledge and information. It's not 1956 anymore - all scientific papers could easily be made available in a free open standardized way. The same goes for reviews. The scientific world failing to get this right is utterly sad.
Journals facilitate peer reviews by people with doctorates who specialize in a topic related to the paper you submit. Does a person fitting those criteria qualify as an "expert" by your definition? These academics/experts/specialists, along with the journal's editor, offer extensive critiques of your paper, often several pages long. A paper often goes through a few rounds of reviews, and often ends up a significantly stronger work with each iteration. Journals also provide a copy-editor who can perform a variety of useful tasks, from stylistic suggestions, to checking your references.
Journals can be criticized on various grounds, and there are models of scientific publishing being explored that should be considered as alternatives to journals, but to dismiss journals outright, as many on this thread have done is unwarranted, and much of this seems to stem from a lack of knowledge and experience in the academic publishing domain.
I now have to question every process to publish a paper in every country, as I'm willing to bet most review processes are just as pathetic.
I take it you've never had the pleasure of publishing a scientific paper. You should really go ahead and try to confirm your theory by publishing a paper in a journal with a reasonable impact factor - if you manage to do so, the results themselves would be worthy of publication.
From the study (emphasis mine):
Conclusion: We note an association between soda consumption and behavior among very young children; future studies should explore potential mechanisms that could explain this association
I didn't see a causal claim there - merely a claim of correlation, with the suggestion that causal factors should be investigated. Did you apply the same rigor to determining that evolution and global warming are hoaxes?
The study isn't telling anyone how to parent, nor does it seem to be making a claim of finding a causal link. It is merely offering information which suggests that it would be worthwhile to investigate a causal link.
The "common sense" which you want people to utilize isn't as fundamental as you make it seem. Good decisions depend on good inputs in the form of useful and abundant information about the domain in question. Scientific research gather information needed for decision making - a proponent of "common sense" such as yourself should know that.
Some people keep going on about the type of soda, stating that this could invalidate any causal claims, but to point out a somewhat more fundamental issue (I read only the summary, and glanced over some of the text of the study), this study is a survey rather than an experiment. If the authors did make any causal claims, as the /. summary implies, then the authors would have had to make a good argument for causality, including establishing temporal precedence (i.e. respondents' offspring were not aggressive until they started consuming soda) - this would be much tougher to do using a survey format than an actual experiment where, for example, soda consumption can be manipulated. The header says that the authors are based in a department of Epidemiology, a department of Economics, and a department of Health Policy and Management, which probably goes some way towards explaining the methodology (which, again, would be questionable if they were trying to establish causality).
However, the abstract seems to make no causal claim. It explicitly says, "future studies should explore potential mechanisms that could explain this association", referring to the association between soda consumption and behaviors in question. This paves the way for questions of causality such as, "are mothers who give their kids soda more likely to complain about their kids' behavior in a survey?", or, "are mothers who give their kids soda less effective parents in terms of x, y, z than mothers who do not, leading to a greater incidence of aggressive behavior in their kids?". It seems that the study achieved a goal of suggesting that it's worthwhile to look for a causal link between aggressive behaviors and soda consumption, and does not make claims beyond that.
In other words, it's more likely that the article isn't so screwy as to make questionable causal claims; it seems that the the summarizer is simply maintaining the time-honored tradition of popular media offering distorted interpretations of scientific articles.