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Comment by gentooflux | Hacker News Reader

Which is to say, hacking one's wifi router is a legitimate and worthwhile pursuit, but hacking one's mind is not?

No, that's a strawman. Honest people don't put words in other people's mouths.

The one other comment here that I responded to was

"I put saliva on my scalp to clean the testosterone from the hair. That one was inspired by cats. The male scalp excretes lots of testosterone which cannot be removed with just shampoo. This also fixes androgenetic alopecia (it does not get reversed, but stops happening)."

That's not hacking one's mind ... rather, it's a series of false claims. I looked at their other comments and found them reasonable and competent ... thus my statement above.

I'm not about to get drawn further into this tangle ... this is my last comment on this subject.

I read that comment as an obvious - but very well composed - parody.

I think they point more towards the dichotomy of rigorous engineering versus woo.

Formulate hypothesis, test hypothesis, record results, compare results against previous experiments, adjust hypothesis, share the data. Again, I think the problem you have is with the subject matter.

I have no problem with the subject matter and routinely hack my own firmware, I'm just clarifying the point that you seemed to miss. This thread is full of the kind of anecdotal evidence that would be laughed out of the room on any other day. That's not a judgement it's just a fact.

And actually, if I do have a problem it's quite the opposite of what you're suggesting: I'd like us to give more weight to the lived experience of others even in other contexts and regarding other subject matters.

On HN it's very common to see a blog post along the lines of "I found this old piece of equipment with no brand name, I used some network traffic inspection to figure out what it does, I hacked around a bit, I got it working and turned it into a self-ringing doorbell with wifi" (or whatever). All of that is anecdotal, N=1, "I did what worked for me, I hope it's interesting to you". And those posts are highly prized and rightly so.

That's great yes, and I'd like us to give even more weight to the lived experience of others even in other contexts and regarding other subject matters.

In contrast I like the fact that there is often an indication of what is not substantiated by strong/provable/scientific evidence and what is not. In fact I quite love both these subjective experience reporting and the more sceptical perspectives. A lot depends on the specific subject and whether evidence exists or is feasible to gather. I would hate to not hear about cool sounding ideas that MIGHT work, but is just not endorsed by rigorous chains of evidence. As long as the discussions are honest and in good spirit. People can point out risks and likihoods and alternative explanations. I really like those too.

People very easily get confused between the vibes and reality of "rigor". It's a good exercise to consider whether particular views you hold appeal to you because of actual evidence-based analysis or just because they feel science-like to you.

To pick a random example in two directions:

1. "The thoughts, ideas and feelings experienced by a human mind consist of patterns of neurons firing": you'll read this often on HN from people who think of themselves as rational, and it is usually stated in relation to the idea that those thoughts, ideas and feelings can also be experienced by a suitable computer program. This isn't remotely rigorous, though. There are certainly arguments that can be made in favour of it, but there are also arguments against and the whole debate properly belongs to philosophy at this stage, not science, as the questions involved aren't even properly formulated let alone experimentally validated. What science actually tells us is that neurons fire, that there are observable relationships between neuron firing and external stimuli and motor action and that the firing of particular neurons affects the firing of other neurons. Science gives us detailed mechanisms for some of these relationships, and ways of influencing them. This is a vast body of knowledge, but nowhere does it contain the conclusion that "the thoughts, ideas and feelings experienced by a human mind consist of patterns of neurons firing". Perhaps some day it will, once the question of "neural coding" is solved (along with many other such questions) and we've experimentally verified that reproducing a firing pattern alone is sufficient to replicate a subjective experience. Until then the statement isn't science, to the extent that it isn't even formulated in a way that can be supported or opposed by science. It just feels sciencey to some people and that's enough for them.

2. "Meditation can alter the subjective perception of time": This might sound more "woo" than the above, but it's a lot less so. It can quite easily be stated in way that can be quantified and experimentally validated/falsified, and there are studies that have explored it (I have no views on the quality of them). The outcome is not even surprising - time seems to pass more slowly when you sit still and breathe deeply, what a shock!

I certainly wouldn't argue with that point but I think if you ignore your made up examples and actually look elsewhere in the thread you'll agree as well that the criticism above was not misplaced.

I'm not saying the comments on this post are rigorous. I'm saying the ones elsewhere on HN are not. I therefore see rather less of a disparity between these comments and "the average HN user" than the commenter at the top of this thread. It's just more obvious to them because they don't agree with what's being said.

(Edit: That said, my example 2 seems pretty relevant to at least some of the comments here, no? Eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45048410. And my example 1 isn't at all made up: it's a claim made very frequently on HN, and usually implied to be self-evident.)

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