A neuropsychology of political orientation: ideology in patients w lesions | Hacker News Reader

A neuropsychology of political orientation: ideology in patients w lesions

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

4 pointsDrierCycle13 comments

ha-ha, I just began serializing a novel where...

Two days after a CDC scientist is fired, she uploaded a research paper linking MAGA behavior to a mind-altering parasite. She never expects people to believe it. But they do—and that's not just the beginning. It’s the end.

https://usop.substack.com

Yes! I saw that and read it but didn't favorite in time. And I'd heard some friends talking about these papers a year ago and we'd brought them up in our lunchtime chats, So when I found the link notes, I posted them.

The first one was flagged, here it is. This post here was a more specific study.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065113

The earlier entry was flagged, yet the science regarding how beliefs can be made extreme with reduced flexibility has a sizable citation list. Let's keep an open mind, folks, our discourse is not expanding these days, it's constricting. We should try to find out how.

Reposting something that was flagged generally not a good idea. Taking a look at this research it is quite a lot like a lot of research over the past hundred years that is very similar. Attempting to find medical problems for an ideology or a culture/race you disagree with. None of which is widely accepted by the scientific community although you still will find the ardent backers of such things.

If you have decades of peer-reviewed research then you might have something but that is not what you have here. Just because something's published doesn't make it correct.

Even just reading the abstract of this paper shows it is highly suspect. Because they went looking for something and then they found it. This is a well-known cognitive bias. What they should have been looking for is ways to disprove it not ways to find some correlation.

I didn't repost anything form the previous post, I posted work that reflects the overarching view of neuropsychology that precedes that PFC work, which is neuroscience.

Mike Meager is a preeminent neurologist at Grossman/NYU, Jay Van Bavel is high-level academia. They didn't go looking for something to fit it into an argument, they used hard science to test the results.

The previous flagged posts are not "medical problems" it's hard science at Northwestern's brain lab, one of the premiere labs in the country.

This is fundamental, peer-reviewed research about how ideologies are developed. How fundamentalism and extremism as biases against flexible thinking are becoming epidemic now. The research is empirical, and it's built first in a theoretical approach (theory is evidence mapped in deeper hypothesis) and then developed through empirical results.

These are both decades of peer-reviewed approaches culminating in these papers, read the citations, check the academics, they are the highest caliber.

You can read the abstract and see that they absolutely went looking for a pattern. They found some mild correlation and then they went looking for a bigger pattern. They didn't look for the opposite they didn't look for the exceptions they didn't look for the outliers. They did not rigorously investigate correlation and causation.

You only need to look through lots of medical research that has shown all kinds of things that have been routinely debunked. Many of which were done by prominent people in their day. This is simply an excuse to find a medical reason for ideologies you disagree with. That always ends badly for everyone.

Clearly you have absolutely no idea how these experiments are developed. Everything you're stating is from a folk science POV. These are all controlled. There's a base used to compare the experimental evidence with, and data is used to prove the correlations. We have 40 years of proof of this statement alone: "Substantial evidence indicates that damage to the PFC can modify individuals’ belief systems."

I'd get a degree in science instead of pretending to understand neuroscientific testing.

Making the assertion that damage can modify a belief system is one thing. That was well known long before this. Claiming that that damage makes people maga is quite a different thing.

Again there is 100 plus years of reputable scientists publishing claims trying to associate biological or medical conditions to racial or cultural things. All of them ideologically based and at the time it was widely supported. This appears no different. Do you want to justify your distaste and dislike for an ideology you don't agree with due to a medical cause. Makes it easier to say that they're not bad people and force them to get some sort of re-education. Does that sound familiar at all? It should maybe you should get it history degree.

>>Claiming that that damage makes people maga is quite a different thing.

This is very obviously not what's being discussed. Please read the experiments and the summary conclusions before inventing a fantasy about the scientific method. If you keep making outlandish and false assertions like this, I'll have to ignore the response.

Clearly you don't remember why your other post was flagged. So now you're trying to twist it to fits your narrative. I have read it and I understand the scientific method. Clearly you do not understand history. How often people have used the scientific method to support their biases.

I know it feels good to seem to find a medical reason for an ideological difference. What I found nowhere in this study was a concentrated effort to find the exceptions. Because once you find the exceptions then you have to put forth another explanation. When you're not actively looking for those people who have the similar brain lesions that don't exhibit the same behavior or if you find methods to dismiss why those are different than these. It's using medical science to confirm a bias that you already have.

Please take a look at history and how this has happened many times before. It's zealots like you who hide under the cloak of science to trying homogenize the world under your view which is the most scary thing we have ever had. The problem is it keeps coming around again and again and nobody is learning from these mistakes. The scientific minds that we keep being told that we must trust keep doing the same garbage research to push an ideology or to fight against an ideology they don't like.

Am I missing something? Science is not a random act of testing hypotheses. The scientific method is used to test educated guesses, or advances or existing findings.

Should have also tried looking for religious ideology correlations.

My previous flagged entry was a trio of papers detailing this, I'll repost them here, they're quite amazing. We talk about them quite a bit on our team of devs studying the political rhetoric.

Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism Zhong https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5500821/

A neural network for religious fundamentalism derived from patients with brain lesions https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2322399121

The neural underpinning of religious beliefs: Evidence from brain lesions https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9583670/

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