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Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

There are over a dozen people involved with this, disregarding them all because of one controversial incident with one of them feels a bit extreme. In terms of methodology it does not strike me as very Ouija boardy as all patient input is in the form of Yes/No responses [0];

> We also validated the Yes/No responses in a question paradigm, in which the answers were assumed to be known to the patient.

> Finally, in an auditory speller paradigm, the patient could select letters and words using the previously trained Yes/No approach.

As somebody working in the German medical sector, I'm also pretty certain that the BfArM ain't casually greenlighting scam brain surgeries/implants. Nor am I sure how any of the researchers are supposed to scam the patient, or their family, with this?

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8

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Yeah, less than half of sessions yielded "intelligible" output.

From that, we learn that there's indeed an element of interpretation, as was seen with Koko the gorilla and the claims that she could talk, when in fact she was just spouting gibberish that her handlers would interpret.

I anticipate more scientists are going to become disgraced as this study is scrutinized by peers.

But, hey, I hope I'm wrong. It would indeed be nice to talk to locked-in loved ones.

I am also skeptic of the whole thing, but they say this:

> After 12 further days, the patient was able to reliably increase or decrease his neural activity to hit one of two “target” tones.

Isn't that evidence that this is not random noise?

The only thing that could be left to human interpretation is the "increase of activity" (I'm assuming "activity" is a signal with high dimensionality). But it is easy enough to build some metric, and demonstrate the answers are not random.

I have just enough faith in peer reviewing to hope that the paper would have been rejected without this experiment.

The full event streams have been published this time around, including the failed sessions. I recommend reading the article and watching the videos of the system operating - they have a video of the input calibration/training, and another video of the longest session. The sessions are few and many days apart, and not all of them demonstrate successful control, but on the days where the patient can successfully drive the system there is no doubt of the communication method's authenticity, and the researchers have no input or interpretation capability.

The previous controversy around the researchers is not about them scamming patients, it's about them publishing only the positive results of their work and not disclosing negative results, making the average success rate appear better. This is one reason they publish full event streams and list days with no attempts and failed attempts extensively in this paper. The code has also been published, and the raw potential recordings are available on request. I had a careful read and I can't find anything methodologically problematic in this publication. When you watch the video, be aware this is the longest and most successful session, and the researchers made this very clear.

> Yeah, less than half of sessions yielded "intelligible" output. / From that, we learn that there's indeed an element of interpretation ...

The first doesn't infer the second. It infers the opposite: They are eliminating unintelligible results.

> There are over a dozen people involved with this, disregarding them all because of one controversial incident with one of them feels a bit extreme.

One controversial incident? This is an extremely common type of scam. There's always somebody claiming they can speak to your comatose or deceased loved one, and they're always scamming you. No, the coma communicators aren't more reliable than the ghost communicators. No, there is no reason you would ever expect someone in this field to be telling the truth, particularly not when they've been caught running the same scam in the past.

The guy is not in coma – did you even read the paper?

He is in a coma in the sense that's relevant here:

> the patient, who was unable to move any muscles or even open his eyes

That is not a coma, the brain has remained functional and isn't shut down like in a coma. The patient has ALS not something that degrades brain functionality itself.

None of that is relevant in any way. The patient's behavior is the same; it attracts the same scam, because the scam is premised solely on the behavior of not talking. Nobody cares why the person isn't talking. Autistic patients attract this scam too.

Bruh.

> There's always somebody claiming they can speak to your comatose or deceased loved one

That's a common scam? Where is that documented?

Even if it is, this report has evidence to the contrary.

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