Oh come on. All academics aren't bad. =) I've taught Intro Psych courses at my University, and it's always better to provide people with examples that are relevant in their own life, even if they don't reflect 100% of the research on the topic.
Geeks are a great target audience for Psychology and Neuroscience, because even though they usually don't know much about neurons, they know an awful lot about networks and computers, and that's a very good background to have when approaching most of this material.
Information Processing, Distributed Neural Nets - they're all models of the brain that were imported from the land of computers. I think you'd have a good time reading a modern psychology text if you found one that was geared to your interests. One of the biggest problems with intro books these days is that they're "dumbed down" in all the areas comp. sci people have no problem, and they're filled with examples that are really foreign to a lot of these types. It's kind of a shame to be honest, because when you get into it, experimental psychology is really one of the most incredible "applied engineering" disciplines out there. I think I can count four or five professors in my department alone who had undergrad degrees in physics or computer science and eventually switched to neuroscience. I got into psychology by hanging out in the lab and coding data analysis software and working for an absolutely fantastic guy. =)
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to seem as though I didn't think it was a well written study, or as though I didn't like the design. I understood the experiment.
I was just trying to quell the legions of people who would suggest that Apple was chosen because of it's transcendent quality of awesomeness. It was chosen because of it's association with the particular trait in question, relative to the other brand choice.
It wasn't a criticism so much as an explanation. =)
Well, you could read their intro for a more in-depth analysis and discussion of priming, but I wouldn't call it a suggestion so much as I would call it bias to act in a certain way.
The basic idea behind priming is that there is a large interconnected network of information and that activating one piece of information partially "boosts" other connected pieces of information. When you are prompted to act in new tasks, you have a higher likelihood to engage in actions that have this extra "boost" in activation.
Geek Priming Example: In geek terminology, it's something like this. Suppose you were Google, and imagine you were designing a system to deliver targeted advertising to people. You had thousands of possible ads you could show someone, but you want the advertising to be more specific.
Lets say you were choosing between just two companies that want to sell advertising today. One of these companies is called "Joe's Fisheries", and they have a special on Sole (a kind of fish). One of these companies is called "Joe's Shoe Supply", and they've got a special on Sole Repair (the bottom of your shoes).
You might intercept an email about Soles, but you're not sure which sole it is. You don't want to be selling Fish to guys who need shoe repair, and you don't want to be selling Shoes to guys who want fish. On the other hand, other words in the email tell you if it's about shoes (like laces, or boots) and other words tell you if it's about fish (scales, salmon, whatever).
Whatever your way of deciding is, you probabilistically weight Fish over Shoe (or vice versa) depending on some other cues. Then you show the ad you think is most appropriate.
In a priming study, basically what they're doing is providing some bogus information to your same cortical networks that weight and categorize information. They're feeding you stimuli (like "scales", and "salmon"), and when they ask you to use the word Sole in a sentence, you say something like, "Gee, I could really go for a nice filet of sole", rather than "I hate it when gum sticks in the Sole of my shoe".
Mostly, these primes only affect the way you behave in either carefully constructed follow-up tasks, usually ones that require you to categorize or manipulate information. A classic example is something like Word Completion, for example: "SOL_".
I'm sure you filled in "Sole" even though you could have put in "Solo" and "Sold", far more common words.
The research is neat, but essentially what they're showing is that they can validate pre-test measures of "creativity" and "honesty" using a priming technique.
They chose the brands that they chose because Apple was rated as more creative a brand than IBM in pre-test:
"As predicted, there was a significant difference in the extent to which Apple and IBM were perceived to be creative, t(23) = -4.91, p.001, with Apple receiving higher ratings (M = 7.62, SD = 1.23) than IBM (M = 4.17, SD = 2.12). Thus, pilot tests confirmed that in our college sample, Apple is believed to be more creative than is IBM. IBM, it is important to note, is not seen as particularly creative or uncreative; it is rated at approximately the mid-point of the scale."
And because Disney is rated as being more "honest" than E!: "As predicted, there was a significant difference in the extent to which Apple and IBM were perceived to be creative, t(23) = -4.91, p.001, with Apple receiving higher ratings (M = 7.62, SD = 1.23) than IBM (M = 4.17, SD = 2.12). Thus, pilot tests confirmed that in our college sample, Apple is believed to be more creative than is IBM. IBM, it is important to note, is not seen as particularly creative or uncreative; it is rated at approximately the mid-point of the scale."
It's not showing that people subliminally exposed to the Apple logo - regardless of prior beliefs - will be spontaneously more creative. It's showing that people spontaneously exposed to things that they (at least, a similar sample) feel reflect creativity will prime, behaviorally, creativity.
It doesn't mean that people who work with Apple are more productive, or that people need to buy Apple to be creative. It's a neat implementation of priming on future behavior, but it's really showing that specific brands are associated with specific traits (and that those specific traits prime actions).
The Slashdot love for Wikileaks seems childish and immature. I understand that "information wants to be free" and that "censorship is bad", but I think we need to recognize that there is a limit to the healthy release of this sort of information. There's a reason you can't find this kind of material in a library, and it's not because they want to "repress your thoughts" or make you into a "(insert favorite conspiracy theory here) drone".
Obviously we would have little problems if these were plans for a gun instead of a nuclear device, and both kill people. But it seems like we should exercise some judgment before we decide that all information about everything should be available to all people all the time. "Woah! Cool! Nuclear Weapons plans! I bet we'd get a lot of press if we released THOSE!" seems like poor justification for wanting to distribute material of this kind.
I'm uncomfortable with this, and I'm sure others are too. There's a difference between sharing with P2P, sharing scientific information, and sharing nuclear weapons plans, especially on a site called "Wikileaks". The first I can justify by saying, "Lots of good stuff is shared on P2P". The first I second justify by saying, "Although these journals may technically hold the copyright on this information, the American people paid for it and it's ultimately good to release scientific information to the public." The third is ultimately pretty tough to justify. If Wikileaks was instead a book about "Engineering the World War" and parts of the plans were released to diagram how the allies used particular types of circuitry, I think I'd be okay with it. But simply releasing plans like this for no other reason than attention whoring seems at best like an incredibly severe lapse in judgement. And I'm ashamed to be part of a community that is supporting it.
Other Media of Related Interest
on
Donkey Kong and Me
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Not that it has direct relevance here, but if you haven't seen it, "The King of Kong" is a fantastic documentary about "Competitive Donkey Kong". It's the tale of a guy who has the gall to challenge the world record holder in Donkey Kong and the corruption in the competitive gaming industry. It's also fantastically funny and a great time to watch.
Highly recommend it if you're at all into gaming, but it's also a great social commentary to watch even with your non-gamer girlfriend/boyfriend.
In fact, the Parent is also true. It is unlikely to cause long lasting damage in most patients, but depending on the drugs (or number of drugs) you are taking, it can be a dangerous and poor choice. You should always speak to a Doctor when you suddenly stop a medication, especially a psychoactive one.
In any event, the drugs mostly discussed in these comments are SSRIs (Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors).
In case that website doesn't strike you as scholarly, how about Medline: (Fluoxetine is Prozac) "It may take 4 to 5 weeks or longer before you feel the full benefit of fluoxetine. Continue to take fluoxetine even if you feel well. Do not stop taking fluoxetine without talking to your doctor. If you suddenly stop taking fluoxetine, you may experience withdrawal symptoms such as mood changes, irritability, agitation, dizziness, numbness or tingling in the hands or feet, anxiety, confusion, headache, tiredness, and difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. Your doctor will probably decrease your dose gradually."
So, you're right. The affects of abrupt continuation aren't likely to be anything as severe as death, but the above cluster of symptoms doesn't strike me as anything I'd like to have.
Just a note - whether or not you think your pills are helping you, don't try this. It's extremely dangerous with most medications. I'm not posting to berate the Parent, just letting others know that it's a really bad practice that can lead to serious consequences with a lot of these drugs.
Please read the entire thread before responding to one post.
I do like what you did there though. You separated attacks on US troops by roadside bombs and suicide bombs on Iraqi civilians as if they weren't being orchestrated by the same people. Reality check - they are.
The quote I was replying to: "I love the terrorist-fearing pant-loads crying that the terrorists use women and children to fight off the people who have invaded and occupied their country. Do they really think American women and children wouldn't volunteer to help resist the Chinese, if they entered our nation and set up a puppet government?"
The point still stands. At no time in the revolutionary war did American Soldiers attack their own civilians to prove a political point. The original poster was alleging that the women, children, and disabled individuals who are being recruited by the Terrorist Movements in Iraq are somehow making a willful point to join and participate, to resist occupation. Please confirm to me that you understand that these mentally handicapped individuals are not, in fact, making an informed decision to participate in these bombings and that they are being used to awful and destructive ends by extremely evil individuals.
Also, geoff, I appreciate the snide closing to your post, as if your level of education was somehow greater than mine.
The people in the American Revolution never bombed their own civilians in an attempt to spurn British rule, nor did they use women or disabled individuals as weapons. Their "non-noble" fighting techniques were to not stand in a straight line.
Do you have a better example, or am I to assume that you last took eighth grade American history and can't argue without cursing at people?
This "don't you think you'd help fight the Chinese!" argument is so asinine it's not funny.
If the Chinese came and took over Hawaii, you can bet hard money that citizens wouldn't be setting off bombs in supermarkets or strapping explosives to disabled people to use as weaponry. The disabled people that they strap weapons to aren't fighting "the noble fight", they're people who don't know the difference because of mental disability. Would we use the full force of our military to stop such an attack? Of course. But don't act like we'd suddenly turn into religious fanatics that would bomb civilians in our own country to prove a point.
I know that you think the war is wrong, but don't try to justify terrorism by blaming the victims of terrorism - either the brainwashed kids or the innocent, targeted civilians. There were plenty of terrorist attacks around the world before Iraq, all of them due to a lethal combination of ignorance, hatred, and explosives.
No, but it's not very hard to understand why religion is such a big issue with people.
Strong religious values are viewed as something people "just don't violate". Steadfast positions are valued in American politics because voters want to elect someone that they think has a reasonable chance at actually delivering on their elected platform, and if you change your mind right after you get into office, that's all down the tubes. So, people look at things like religious values as the values or morals in a person that aren't likely to change when they get into office.
Besides, the US is still a pretty religious country through and through. Lots of the religious conservative positions are things that resonate with people.
I'm not saying I agree with any of this (I think choosing a candidate for religious reasons is insane), but it's not that hard to imagine why someone would do it.
The project to which you are referring was the work of Skinner, and called Project Pigeon. It was canceled.
On the other hand, virtually the same experiment as the one conducted with dogs was conducted with pigeons, in 1964, by Herrnstein and Loveland. So, someone beat you to it. =)
Novelty would be a fine explanation, but in both types of trials (choice and no-choice trials), the monkeys saw both alternatives. The difference was in the fact that in one type of trials, the monkey was allowed to make a choice.
Also, the stimuli weren't really novel - they had lots of exposure to these things.
"It's called reenforcement. Like Pavlov's dog salivating.
The blue M&M was not preferred. The monkey felt bad about being given what it didn't prefer. This bad feeling became associated with the blue M&M and the monkey therefore preferred any other colour."
I've already tried to address this issue in other posts in this thread, but the authors take great pains to equilibrate preference for the choice offered to the Monkeys.
Furthermore, Pavlov's dogs do not salivate because of reinforcement per se. Pavlov's dogs salivate because of the repeated pairing of a non-response-eliciting Conditioned Stimulus (CS), like a tone, with a reponse-eliciting Unconditioned Stimulus (US), like meat. You're thinking of Operant conditioning, in which a behavior is rewarded with a particular outcome (for example, pressing a lever to get food).
It could be that your failure to appreciate the novelty of the work is due to your own lack of knowledge in the particular subject area.
The monkeys had experience eating all of the colors of M&Ms used in the experiment (and, there were more colors than the few you mention). Safety of the choice has little to do with the outcome.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. On the one hand, you make a claim about the paucity of the sample and its insuffiency in determining a uniform preference. On the other, you claim that wondering about this is a waste of time because later bias to choose a particular color can be influenced by a choice procedure.
Whether or not these things are true is somewhat orthogonal to the original question, which was essentially, "How do we know the effects are not caused by different color perception in monkeys and humans?". (apologies for the poor paraphrase)
To which the reply is that the effect is balanced across color selection and not dependent on factors that might influence the confusion or perception of colors per se.
I suppose the main issue for BWJones (and now I'm putting words in his mouth, again I apologise) was that in the example, the colors used were Green, Blue, and Red. Supposing the animals were dichromats, after being given a choice between Green and Blue and choosing Green, a subsequent test between Blue and Red might not be diagnostic because a Green/Red discrimination would be heavily impaired. Obviously this is a drastic over-simplication of the intricacies of color perception (and might not even be what he was thinking, he might have just been thinking about the similarity of the human and monkey task in general).
As I think the final word on this issue, until BWJones chimes in with the real visual neuroscience - In fact, actually, the particular species of monkey used was Cebus Apella (Capuchins). Males of this species are dichromats, having greatly impaired red/green discrimination, whereas Females have been shown to be trichromats. Since the authors never report the sex of the animals, it's not possible to tell the extent to which their monkeys were biologically similar in their ability to tell the difference between the particular colors. On the other hand, it is unlikely that the Capuchins actually would suffer from a serious inability to discriminate these items, as dichromats can still readily discriminate items that vary in brightness, and I think it's a fair assumption that M&Ms aren't well controlled psychophysical stimuli that would really have equilibrated brightness.
Not that I am in any way supporting or rejecting the claims made in the study, but your criticism is probably unfounded**.
The M&M (and sticker choices) were different across subjects, so it is unlikely that a systematic bias could result from visual perception of the items. The M&M choices chosen for the subjects were determined by relatively equal preference in a pretraining phase of the experiment. Given the fact that they find an effect, it's unlikely that it's due to an inability to tell the items apart.
Specifically: We first assessed the monkeys' existing preferences for M&M's of different colors by timing how long they took to retrieve individual M&M's. For each monkey, preferences for at least nine different M&M colors were assessed. As each preference test began, the monkey was inside its home cage, just outside a testing chamber, and was allowed to watch as the experimenter placed one colored M&M on a tray outside the other side of the chamber. The door to the testing chamber was opened, and the monkey was allowed to enter when it wished to retrieve the M&M. We measured how quickly the monkey entered the testing chamber to retrieve the M&M. Preferences for each color were assessed across 20 trials per monkey; trials for each color spanned two experimental sessions.
After preference testing, we performed analyses of variance to determine whether each monkey had statistically significant preferences. We identified triads of equally preferred colors (all ps >.05), and designated the items within each triad as choices A, B, and C (choices were specific to each individual monkey); although there were no significant differences in preferences across the three M&M colors within a triad, we conservatively used each subject's least preferred color of the three (i.e., the one the monkey took longest to obtain during preference testing) as option C.
**By the way, I've been reading your slashdot comments for quite some time, and so don't take this as a personal affront or anything. =) I think you're probably one of the better scientist/posters on the site. =)
Evolution is not really a theory about how life started. It is a theory about how life changes.
If you are a chemist, this type of argument would be the moral equivalent of understanding how volume and pressure interact in a particular cylinder, publishing the results, and having the editor fire back, "yes, but how did the gas get there in the first place?"
Understanding something about the nature of a dynamic system does not require the complete understanding of that system.
Not really, because the RIAA tactic has been to call everyone a murderer and then ask to search their premises for knives. We have laws against that sort of thing when the police want to do it, and we should have laws against that sort of thing when corporations want to do it.
Not allowing baseless evidence gathering is the same as not allowing baseless search. But casting a very wide net and calling everyone a thief, and then when asked to produce evidence, claiming that you'd have it if you could go searching for it - this is just simply not the way the American justice system works, for better or worse.
First of all, the story you read last week was an anecdote, too. It's not as if last week was a published study and this is a random guy saying "nuh uh!"
"And again, i'd bet that there are more people pissing away their lives on WoW than their are people who can just hop on and off (alternatively, who cares about the people who are perfectly functional on and off WoW, shouldn't we be worrying about the people pissing their lives away, since they're the ones in trouble?)."
That's like asking, "shouldn't we focus on the problem area without worrying how much of the population they actually represent?"
I mean, people die from eating pizza and choking on it. They're a very small percentage of the population of pizza eaters. But we don't ban pizza. Without knowing something about the rest of the population, we don't really know anything at all about the degree to which the game impacts lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on. All academics aren't bad. =) I've taught Intro Psych courses at my University, and it's always better to provide people with examples that are relevant in their own life, even if they don't reflect 100% of the research on the topic.
Geeks are a great target audience for Psychology and Neuroscience, because even though they usually don't know much about neurons, they know an awful lot about networks and computers, and that's a very good background to have when approaching most of this material.
Information Processing, Distributed Neural Nets - they're all models of the brain that were imported from the land of computers. I think you'd have a good time reading a modern psychology text if you found one that was geared to your interests. One of the biggest problems with intro books these days is that they're "dumbed down" in all the areas comp. sci people have no problem, and they're filled with examples that are really foreign to a lot of these types. It's kind of a shame to be honest, because when you get into it, experimental psychology is really one of the most incredible "applied engineering" disciplines out there. I think I can count four or five professors in my department alone who had undergrad degrees in physics or computer science and eventually switched to neuroscience. I got into psychology by hanging out in the lab and coding data analysis software and working for an absolutely fantastic guy. =)
Could be.
But then you're probably stuck trying to explain the Disney vs. E! "honesty" bias in terms of text vs. picture, and I'm not sure how that would work.
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to seem as though I didn't think it was a well written study, or as though I didn't like the design. I understood the experiment.
I was just trying to quell the legions of people who would suggest that Apple was chosen because of it's transcendent quality of awesomeness. It was chosen because of it's association with the particular trait in question, relative to the other brand choice.
It wasn't a criticism so much as an explanation. =)
Well, you could read their intro for a more in-depth analysis and discussion of priming, but I wouldn't call it a suggestion so much as I would call it bias to act in a certain way.
The basic idea behind priming is that there is a large interconnected network of information and that activating one piece of information partially "boosts" other connected pieces of information. When you are prompted to act in new tasks, you have a higher likelihood to engage in actions that have this extra "boost" in activation.
Geek Priming Example:
In geek terminology, it's something like this. Suppose you were Google, and imagine you were designing a system to deliver targeted advertising to people. You had thousands of possible ads you could show someone, but you want the advertising to be more specific.
Lets say you were choosing between just two companies that want to sell advertising today. One of these companies is called "Joe's Fisheries", and they have a special on Sole (a kind of fish). One of these companies is called "Joe's Shoe Supply", and they've got a special on Sole Repair (the bottom of your shoes).
You might intercept an email about Soles, but you're not sure which sole it is. You don't want to be selling Fish to guys who need shoe repair, and you don't want to be selling Shoes to guys who want fish. On the other hand, other words in the email tell you if it's about shoes (like laces, or boots) and other words tell you if it's about fish (scales, salmon, whatever).
Whatever your way of deciding is, you probabilistically weight Fish over Shoe (or vice versa) depending on some other cues. Then you show the ad you think is most appropriate.
In a priming study, basically what they're doing is providing some bogus information to your same cortical networks that weight and categorize information. They're feeding you stimuli (like "scales", and "salmon"), and when they ask you to use the word Sole in a sentence, you say something like, "Gee, I could really go for a nice filet of sole", rather than "I hate it when gum sticks in the Sole of my shoe".
Mostly, these primes only affect the way you behave in either carefully constructed follow-up tasks, usually ones that require you to categorize or manipulate information. A classic example is something like Word Completion, for example:
"SOL_".
I'm sure you filled in "Sole" even though you could have put in "Solo" and "Sold", far more common words.
See! You can be primed too!
The research is neat, but essentially what they're showing is that they can validate pre-test measures of "creativity" and "honesty" using a priming technique.
.001, with Apple receiving
.001, with Apple receiving
They chose the brands that they chose because Apple was rated as more creative a brand than IBM in pre-test:
"As predicted, there was a significant difference in the extent to
which Apple and IBM were perceived to be creative, t(23) = -4.91, p
higher ratings (M = 7.62, SD = 1.23) than IBM (M = 4.17, SD = 2.12). Thus, pilot tests confirmed that in
our college sample, Apple is believed to be more creative than is IBM. IBM, it is important to note, is
not seen as particularly creative or uncreative; it is rated at approximately the mid-point of the scale."
And because Disney is rated as being more "honest" than E!:
"As predicted, there was a significant difference in the extent to
which Apple and IBM were perceived to be creative, t(23) = -4.91, p
higher ratings (M = 7.62, SD = 1.23) than IBM (M = 4.17, SD = 2.12). Thus, pilot tests confirmed that in
our college sample, Apple is believed to be more creative than is IBM. IBM, it is important to note, is
not seen as particularly creative or uncreative; it is rated at approximately the mid-point of the scale."
It's not showing that people subliminally exposed to the Apple logo - regardless of prior beliefs - will be spontaneously more creative. It's showing that people spontaneously exposed to things that they (at least, a similar sample) feel reflect creativity will prime, behaviorally, creativity.
It doesn't mean that people who work with Apple are more productive, or that people need to buy Apple to be creative. It's a neat implementation of priming on future behavior, but it's really showing that specific brands are associated with specific traits (and that those specific traits prime actions).
No, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
The Slashdot love for Wikileaks seems childish and immature. I understand that "information wants to be free" and that "censorship is bad", but I think we need to recognize that there is a limit to the healthy release of this sort of information. There's a reason you can't find this kind of material in a library, and it's not because they want to "repress your thoughts" or make you into a "(insert favorite conspiracy theory here) drone".
Obviously we would have little problems if these were plans for a gun instead of a nuclear device, and both kill people. But it seems like we should exercise some judgment before we decide that all information about everything should be available to all people all the time. "Woah! Cool! Nuclear Weapons plans! I bet we'd get a lot of press if we released THOSE!" seems like poor justification for wanting to distribute material of this kind.
I'm uncomfortable with this, and I'm sure others are too. There's a difference between sharing with P2P, sharing scientific information, and sharing nuclear weapons plans, especially on a site called "Wikileaks". The first I can justify by saying, "Lots of good stuff is shared on P2P". The first I second justify by saying, "Although these journals may technically hold the copyright on this information, the American people paid for it and it's ultimately good to release scientific information to the public." The third is ultimately pretty tough to justify. If Wikileaks was instead a book about "Engineering the World War" and parts of the plans were released to diagram how the allies used particular types of circuitry, I think I'd be okay with it. But simply releasing plans like this for no other reason than attention whoring seems at best like an incredibly severe lapse in judgement. And I'm ashamed to be part of a community that is supporting it.
Not that it has direct relevance here, but if you haven't seen it, "The King of Kong" is a fantastic documentary about "Competitive Donkey Kong". It's the tale of a guy who has the gall to challenge the world record holder in Donkey Kong and the corruption in the competitive gaming industry. It's also fantastically funny and a great time to watch.
Highly recommend it if you're at all into gaming, but it's also a great social commentary to watch even with your non-gamer girlfriend/boyfriend.
In fact, the Parent is also true. It is unlikely to cause long lasting damage in most patients, but depending on the drugs (or number of drugs) you are taking, it can be a dangerous and poor choice. You should always speak to a Doctor when you suddenly stop a medication, especially a psychoactive one.
In any event, the drugs mostly discussed in these comments are SSRIs (Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors).
There is a specific syndrome called SSRI discontinuation syndrome:
http://www.postgradmed.com/issues/2003/08_03/ditto.htm
In case that website doesn't strike you as scholarly, how about Medline:
(Fluoxetine is Prozac)
"It may take 4 to 5 weeks or longer before you feel the full benefit of fluoxetine. Continue to take fluoxetine even if you feel well. Do not stop taking fluoxetine without talking to your doctor. If you suddenly stop taking fluoxetine, you may experience withdrawal symptoms such as mood changes, irritability, agitation, dizziness, numbness or tingling in the hands or feet, anxiety, confusion, headache, tiredness, and difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. Your doctor will probably decrease your dose gradually."
So, you're right. The affects of abrupt continuation aren't likely to be anything as severe as death, but the above cluster of symptoms doesn't strike me as anything I'd like to have.
"A few days after I'd quit the pills cold turkey"
Just a note - whether or not you think your pills are helping you, don't try this. It's extremely dangerous with most medications. I'm not posting to berate the Parent, just letting others know that it's a really bad practice that can lead to serious consequences with a lot of these drugs.
Please read the entire thread before responding to one post.
I do like what you did there though. You separated attacks on US troops by roadside bombs and suicide bombs on Iraqi civilians as if they weren't being orchestrated by the same people. Reality check - they are.
The quote I was replying to:
"I love the terrorist-fearing pant-loads crying that the terrorists use women and children to fight off the people who have invaded and occupied their country. Do they really think American women and children wouldn't volunteer to help resist the Chinese, if they entered our nation and set up a puppet government?"
The point still stands. At no time in the revolutionary war did American Soldiers attack their own civilians to prove a political point. The original poster was alleging that the women, children, and disabled individuals who are being recruited by the Terrorist Movements in Iraq are somehow making a willful point to join and participate, to resist occupation. Please confirm to me that you understand that these mentally handicapped individuals are not, in fact, making an informed decision to participate in these bombings and that they are being used to awful and destructive ends by extremely evil individuals.
Also, geoff, I appreciate the snide closing to your post, as if your level of education was somehow greater than mine.
What does this even mean?
The people in the American Revolution never bombed their own civilians in an attempt to spurn British rule, nor did they use women or disabled individuals as weapons. Their "non-noble" fighting techniques were to not stand in a straight line.
Do you have a better example, or am I to assume that you last took eighth grade American history and can't argue without cursing at people?
This "don't you think you'd help fight the Chinese!" argument is so asinine it's not funny.
If the Chinese came and took over Hawaii, you can bet hard money that citizens wouldn't be setting off bombs in supermarkets or strapping explosives to disabled people to use as weaponry. The disabled people that they strap weapons to aren't fighting "the noble fight", they're people who don't know the difference because of mental disability. Would we use the full force of our military to stop such an attack? Of course. But don't act like we'd suddenly turn into religious fanatics that would bomb civilians in our own country to prove a point.
I know that you think the war is wrong, but don't try to justify terrorism by blaming the victims of terrorism - either the brainwashed kids or the innocent, targeted civilians. There were plenty of terrorist attacks around the world before Iraq, all of them due to a lethal combination of ignorance, hatred, and explosives.
No, but it's not very hard to understand why religion is such a big issue with people.
Strong religious values are viewed as something people "just don't violate". Steadfast positions are valued in American politics because voters want to elect someone that they think has a reasonable chance at actually delivering on their elected platform, and if you change your mind right after you get into office, that's all down the tubes. So, people look at things like religious values as the values or morals in a person that aren't likely to change when they get into office.
Besides, the US is still a pretty religious country through and through. Lots of the religious conservative positions are things that resonate with people.
I'm not saying I agree with any of this (I think choosing a candidate for religious reasons is insane), but it's not that hard to imagine why someone would do it.
Disclaimer: I am a Democrat.
You had to leave Ron Paul out of the summary so all of his insane, techie fans could turn this thread into a giant flamewar, right? Right?
Incoming "Media Bias Against Ron Paul" anger in 5... 4...
The project to which you are referring was the work of Skinner, and called Project Pigeon. It was canceled.
On the other hand, virtually the same experiment as the one conducted with dogs was conducted with pigeons, in 1964, by Herrnstein and Loveland. So, someone beat you to it. =)
If you look at the apparatus, the Monkeys are some distance from the M&Ms, and the shapes would be tough to make out.
Plus, color is a much more easily discriminable cue than shape in 99% of behavioral experiments.
Novelty would be a fine explanation, but in both types of trials (choice and no-choice trials), the monkeys saw both alternatives. The difference was in the fact that in one type of trials, the monkey was allowed to make a choice.
Also, the stimuli weren't really novel - they had lots of exposure to these things.
"It's called reenforcement. Like Pavlov's dog salivating.
The blue M&M was not preferred. The monkey felt bad about being given what it didn't prefer. This bad feeling became associated with the blue M&M and the monkey therefore preferred any other colour."
I've already tried to address this issue in other posts in this thread, but the authors take great pains to equilibrate preference for the choice offered to the Monkeys.
Furthermore, Pavlov's dogs do not salivate because of reinforcement per se. Pavlov's dogs salivate because of the repeated pairing of a non-response-eliciting Conditioned Stimulus (CS), like a tone, with a reponse-eliciting Unconditioned Stimulus (US), like meat. You're thinking of Operant conditioning, in which a behavior is rewarded with a particular outcome (for example, pressing a lever to get food).
It could be that your failure to appreciate the novelty of the work is due to your own lack of knowledge in the particular subject area.
The monkeys had experience eating all of the colors of M&Ms used in the experiment (and, there were more colors than the few you mention). Safety of the choice has little to do with the outcome.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. On the one hand, you make a claim about the paucity of the sample and its insuffiency in determining a uniform preference. On the other, you claim that wondering about this is a waste of time because later bias to choose a particular color can be influenced by a choice procedure.
Whether or not these things are true is somewhat orthogonal to the original question, which was essentially, "How do we know the effects are not caused by different color perception in monkeys and humans?". (apologies for the poor paraphrase)
To which the reply is that the effect is balanced across color selection and not dependent on factors that might influence the confusion or perception of colors per se.
I suppose the main issue for BWJones (and now I'm putting words in his mouth, again I apologise) was that in the example, the colors used were Green, Blue, and Red. Supposing the animals were dichromats, after being given a choice between Green and Blue and choosing Green, a subsequent test between Blue and Red might not be diagnostic because a Green/Red discrimination would be heavily impaired. Obviously this is a drastic over-simplication of the intricacies of color perception (and might not even be what he was thinking, he might have just been thinking about the similarity of the human and monkey task in general).
As I think the final word on this issue, until BWJones chimes in with the real visual neuroscience - In fact, actually, the particular species of monkey used was Cebus Apella (Capuchins). Males of this species are dichromats, having greatly impaired red/green discrimination, whereas Females have been shown to be trichromats. Since the authors never report the sex of the animals, it's not possible to tell the extent to which their monkeys were biologically similar in their ability to tell the difference between the particular colors. On the other hand, it is unlikely that the Capuchins actually would suffer from a serious inability to discriminate these items, as dichromats can still readily discriminate items that vary in brightness, and I think it's a fair assumption that M&Ms aren't well controlled psychophysical stimuli that would really have equilibrated brightness.
Not that I am in any way supporting or rejecting the claims made in the study, but your criticism is probably unfounded**.
.05), and designated the items within each triad as choices A, B, and C (choices were specific to each individual monkey); although there were no significant differences in preferences across the three M&M colors within a triad, we conservatively used each subject's least preferred color of the three (i.e., the one the monkey took longest to obtain during preference testing) as option C.
The M&M (and sticker choices) were different across subjects, so it is unlikely that a systematic bias could result from visual perception of the items. The M&M choices chosen for the subjects were determined by relatively equal preference in a pretraining phase of the experiment. Given the fact that they find an effect, it's unlikely that it's due to an inability to tell the items apart.
Specifically:
We first assessed the monkeys' existing preferences for M&M's of different colors by timing how long they took to retrieve individual M&M's. For each monkey, preferences for at least nine different M&M colors were assessed. As each preference test began, the monkey was inside its home cage, just outside a testing chamber, and was allowed to watch as the experimenter placed one colored M&M on a tray outside the other side of the chamber. The door to the testing chamber was opened, and the monkey was allowed to enter when it wished to retrieve the M&M. We measured how quickly the monkey entered the testing chamber to retrieve the M&M. Preferences for each color were assessed across 20 trials per monkey; trials for each color spanned two experimental sessions.
After preference testing, we performed analyses of variance to determine whether each monkey had statistically significant preferences. We identified triads of equally preferred colors (all ps >
**By the way, I've been reading your slashdot comments for quite some time, and so don't take this as a personal affront or anything. =) I think you're probably one of the better scientist/posters on the site. =)
That's because knowing the real news is a prerequisite to finding The Daily Show humorous.
Satire isn't in itself informative, but the people who read it are informed because the content of the media is directed towards the informed.
Evolution is not really a theory about how life started. It is a theory about how life changes.
If you are a chemist, this type of argument would be the moral equivalent of understanding how volume and pressure interact in a particular cylinder, publishing the results, and having the editor fire back, "yes, but how did the gas get there in the first place?"
Understanding something about the nature of a dynamic system does not require the complete understanding of that system.
Not really, because the RIAA tactic has been to call everyone a murderer and then ask to search their premises for knives. We have laws against that sort of thing when the police want to do it, and we should have laws against that sort of thing when corporations want to do it.
Not allowing baseless evidence gathering is the same as not allowing baseless search. But casting a very wide net and calling everyone a thief, and then when asked to produce evidence, claiming that you'd have it if you could go searching for it - this is just simply not the way the American justice system works, for better or worse.
First of all, the story you read last week was an anecdote, too. It's not as if last week was a published study and this is a random guy saying "nuh uh!"
"And again, i'd bet that there are more people pissing away their lives on WoW than their are people who can just hop on and off (alternatively, who cares about the people who are perfectly functional on and off WoW, shouldn't we be worrying about the people pissing their lives away, since they're the ones in trouble?)."
That's like asking, "shouldn't we focus on the problem area without worrying how much of the population they actually represent?"
I mean, people die from eating pizza and choking on it. They're a very small percentage of the population of pizza eaters. But we don't ban pizza. Without knowing something about the rest of the population, we don't really know anything at all about the degree to which the game impacts lives.