Comment by NoodleIncident | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoodleIncident | Hacker News Reader

Here is one of the actual studies, which is much less annoying to read: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234325/?mod=ar...

I was particularly interested in the participant selection section; they did go to an effort to select male and female participants with similar gaming habits. However, this doesn't mean that the only explanation for the different "craving" response is a fundamental difference between men and women. Just because you end up with a similar population with similar habits, doesn't mean that the path those individuals traveled to get there is the same.

As an example of how the observed differences could still be due to nurture rather than nature, suppose that across all young boys and girls, there is a subset of people that are predisposed to addiction. Also suppose that in many cases, an addiction can begin the first time you're exposed to something. Even if both boys and girls were equally predisposed to become addicted to both video games and social media, they would not be equally likely to be exposed to those two addictive digital activities. It would be more likely that a boy's friends would introduce him to video games, and that a girl's friends would introduce her to social media. Once they are addicted to one or the other, they will spend more time on that activity, and will be unlikely to explore the opposite.

Eventually, these hypothetical boys and girls grow up, and our hypothetical scientists select participants for their version of this fMRI experiment. They do a good job selecting male and female participants who play games for similar numbers of hours, but the potential female video game addicts in this universe are much less likely to ever start playing games, before getting addicted to something else. Since these hypothetical people have selected themselves out of this hypothetical study, they discover a difference in fMRI responses to images of video games that's correlated with gender, but still 100% caused by existing gender roles and stereotypes.

This argument is superficially compelling but I fear that it is ultimately argument from ignorance. It is true that we don’t know everything. You even offer a fairly elaborate example of something that we don’t know whether it happened or not. It could be true. The problem here is that you offer no evidence to support whether it is true or not. Now it’s story time and instead of evaluating the studies and working with a minimal conclusion supported by the evidence, the task becomes telling the better story.

It's worth considering that in complex systems sometimes it is impossible (or extraordinarily unlikely/expensive) to be able to disentangle specific elements and that thus they might always be present, even in a rigorously considered study.

Arguably the only ethical way of removing external social conditioning might be to find a regional social setting which lacks that specific element in order to evaluate the statistical impact by comparing results that should be similar between the two environments.

Especially in communities. For ease, people lump things such as social media and gaming in with "addiction". I'm sure 100 years from now in many cases the "social media addicts" will have a subset that leans toward success beyond their local community, and the gamers have a longer life expectancy than many in their community. I'd rather my kid game than go outside even in our middle-class neighborhood. I'd rather have my kid keep in touch with friends via social media than having them all in my kitchen when I'm not home.

There're tradeoffs, pros and cons to social media and gaming, but framing it in an addiction narrative isn't helping matters. This is what led many Chinese people to put their kids in "camps" that used Electro Convulsive Therapy to "fix their internet addiction". This is born of ignorance, and the addiction narrative.

I think elements can be intuited, and more studies done, but when you're bashing the cheapest forms of entertainment and social contact, and safest to boot, as addictions... that's just ignorant.

You're arguing gamers would have a longer life expectancy than others, and that you'd rather have your child game than go outside. Do you disagree with the widely accepted fact that exercise is beneficial to health, and thus a longer life?

And not just physical health, but also mental health, which is a massive factor in many aspects of life.

> I'd rather my kid game than go outside even in our middle-class neighborhood. I'd rather have my kid keep in touch with friends via social media than having them all in my kitchen when I'm not home.

What?

You don’t allow your kid to go outside or hang out with friends face to face? You prefer his/her social interactions are all intermediated by a computer network? This seems like a very strange and dystopian preference.

Do you actually have a kid or is this hypothetical?

I also have very different ideas about what I'd want for my hypothetical kids than the OP, but preferring one thing isn't the same as disallowing the other.

> you offer no evidence to support whether it is true or not.

The point is that it illustrates the study may not have taken such considerations into account. It calls to question the accuracy and efficacy of their results.

There are and will always be considerations not taken into account. Raising them is thus a fully general counterargument, and as such is best ignored. If you don't want your potential confounders be ignored, the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence that these confounders actually matter.

There isn't a general case rule you can apply here to determine burden of proof.

If the target domain is incredibly complex with major fundamental unknowns, then even robust results should not be viewed as 100% definitive.

IMO the “burden of proof” is a mostly vacuous concept to begin with, because it always and only ever lies with the party that wishes to change others’ minds.

Because it's reasonable. You cannot disprove what has no evidence, and why should you look for it, other than normal single good science "college try" check? It's a great way to waste time.

If the concept is not obvious, the onus is even more on the person bringing it up. Otherwise we'd still have physics running on phlogiston, and medicine on leeches as everyone explored irrelevant ideas.

What you said is basically “the one who asserts must prove”, an old standard way to describe the burden of proof.

It is a good practice to not view results as 100% definitive and be willing to revise your ideas in the light of disconfirming observations — just not in the light of disconfirming stories.

The whole point for randomized trials, and much of modern statistics is to argue from ignorance. You hypothesize that maybe there's something missing, who knows. A causal boogey man. Then you design a test robust to that. One term for problems this leads to is omitted variable bias. It's not about "ooh maybe this one thing is bad." It's about "this class of problem is introduced."

It's tough to make an intuitive story for why RCTs are important, so the story sounds elaborate. You don't need to offer evidence against the theory to say that the methodology is weak.

Anyways, wet streets might cause rain.

The problem being, RCTs are tricky to set up for social variables to have enough statistical power, while avoiding the "test bias" which is known to change behavior. (Essentially a kind of placebo effect.) It has to be huge.

And how do you produce a social placebo to detect such effects by comparison? No treatment is not the same as known fake treatment.

In fact, even the observational study here is quite underpowered and not multicultural. It is to be taken with a few bags of salt.

Argument from ignorance is a specific kind of logical fallacy. It’s where you argue for something by saying, in effect, “we don’t know that it’s not true”.

If a hypothesis leads you to test for something and collect (dis)confirming evidence, And your argument hinges on the evidence, then we aren’t arguing from ignorance.

It seems like you're saying "this is weak methodology" is a fallacy. It's open to all sorts of errors, but since we don't know that any of the errors are really the case, so we shouldn't argue that it's bad evidence? We aren't arguing boolean true/false, but strength of evidence.

There are many ways to argue for something like "this is weak methodology" and some of them are fallacies. Some of them aren't.

A good argument against a study's methodology would probably talk a lot more about the methodology, and a lot less about a believable alternative narrative that is supported by the study. The latter strategy is accepting of the methodology because it is granting that the observed effect is real and deserving of explanation. In a different light, the earlier comment ("As an example of how the observed differences could still be due to nurture rather than nature...") is kind of weird because it is as though the effect might as well be due to nature -- it would present the same way and be as consistent and robust -- even if it were due to socialisation.

A common critique in all behavioral science is that most of it can be distilled down into telling the better story through weak or nonexistent evidence, and thus the only "real" way to conduct science into behavior is to use more hard evidence like genetics, neuroscience or even more concrete such as fossil records.

The problem is that the probability to finding a "gaming" gene, one that only exist or be expressed in males, would be very unlikely.

Robert Sapolsky has a good description of this in his lecture series "Human Behavioral Biology" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...).

This comment was never meant to be anything more than "story time". Logically, I know that this study doesn't prove any genetic difference in how men and women interact with video games. However, my monkey brain wasn't satisfied with "well there could be some other reason"; so I put together a neat little narrative, to represent a single point in that entire probability space. It took some effort to come up with this narrative, and the thread didn't have any good comments at the time, so I decided to post it.

If you do think that this study proves a genetic difference between how men and women, then one of us is wrong about what an experiment like this can "prove". (I don't think it's quite "correlation != causation", but it's along those lines; I don't have the vocabulary to precisely say why I think that position is wrong.) If that is your position, then maybe this one counterexample will be enough to change your view; it should be, even though that was never my intent. Maybe I've drastically misread your comment and you don't believe anything of the sort. If so, I'm sorry.

You say that you "know" that "that this study doesn't prove any genetic difference in how men and women interact with video games." That is a really strong statement, which you offer without support. How do you know that?

What if we asked whether this study "supports" such a difference instead of "proves" it? Would you still say you know it doesn't support it?

It isn't massively distinct, but another way the observed differences could still be due to nurture rather than nature is that the connectome of the subjects could literally be shaped by how we raise and socialized the genders. This is more like an expanded version of the parent argument--these experiences play a role in structuring the eventual-participants brains, and the study is (unknowingly) measuring past-exprience rather than biological destiny.

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