this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Yep this. I knew people in FMRI research about 5-10 years ago, and the word was that everything before then may be all wrong or unreliable. The field was yet to get a grip on what it was doing.
And even then, I couldn’t help but be suspicious at what I saw in the nature of the field. It seemed very opportunistic and cavalier about how wonderfully easy it was for them to gather large amounts of data and perform all sorts of analysis. My bias being that I was more of a wet lab person envious of how easy their work seemed. But still it all seemed like a way too comfortable stretch.
I never actually got through my PhD and it was in physics anyway but yeah. It always seemed to me that the messier fields had these New Exciting Techniques (TM) where you could vacuum up absolutely insane amounts of data and then play with stats till it showed what you wanted.
I don't want to be like "Hur der they're doing it wrong". Studying anything to do with biology necessarily means you're stuck with systems with trillions of variables and you have the awful problem of trying to design experiments where they hopefully average into background. I just thing that, consequently, until stuff replicates a few times (which, unfortunately, is almost never done because it's not sexy. Anyway often papers are written so badly, and the universe so gloriously subtle, even mechanistic stuff like synthesis is a struggle to replicate) big headlines are irresponsible.
Yep. On top of the complexity of biology, which is real, there are real scientific issues with presuming we know anything at all with the brain and hire its observable qualities relate to our psychology. It’s just way too slippery a phenomenon (the mind) and system (the brain) to be remotely comfortable scooping and analysing piles of data.