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Comment by dust42 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting stuff but it hurts so much that the writer has the common misconception of pavlov's dog doing a circus trick. Sure the dog also consciously understands the connection between bell and food. But the physiological reaction of the saliva flowing is not a conscious decision of the dog. Circus tricks with animals existed long before Pavlov. The key discovery is that there is a physiological reaction which cannot be suppressed anymore consciously. That's why PTSD is such a bitch to be treated: even with the stimulus gone, the physiological reaction remains.

That said, the article is still worth a read.

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The article just reminds me that I hate modern journalism and try to not read any news articles.

Hyperbolic attention grabbing headline followed by appeal to authority, appeal to authority, appeal to authority, counter opinion appeal to authority that the previous appeal to authority might all be wrong.

So wide reaching and all over the place, the reader and can pick from the menu on what point they want to use as confirmation of what they already believe to be true. Then the article can be cited in a type of scientistic, mostly wrong, gossip.

IMO a complete waste of time.

You shouldn't conflate a pop science magazine with all of modern journalism. Try a high quality outlet like The Economist. "I try not to read any news articles" screams anti-intellectualism.

The GP has a point about the state of journalism generally and the pervasive nature in which Yellow journalism is returning.

One need not be anti-intellectual to find the state of reporting to be difficult to deal with and not wanting to read it. In addition to the GP’s complaint; journalists of any ilk also tend to conflate editorializing with reporting. You see this all the way from pop science to NYTimes to Fox News and yes even the Economist.

A question is whether the more fact based reporting of the early-mid 20th Century is the exception to the tendency of Yellow journalism that existed before and seems to exist now.

I see the same thing with YouTube videos. I catch myself watching and afterwards being like "that was a load of wasted time"

I think it depends. While AI has flooded YouTube and further degraded its quality, some channels are still useful (or can be). Daily Dose of Internet is still semi-ok, as one example, though I also noticed I have fatigued quite a lot lately - too much time wasted on youtube in general.

Yes, a common issue now with Youtube content, enormous variability in quality of content. Gemini does a good-enoug job of debunking Youtube transcript, and I use that when I have a doubt, but clearly will all the slp I get sent by well-meaning YouTube-watching acquaintances, I don't want to butn too many tokens on that treadmill... I wonder how man Terms & Conditions of use some distributed debunk-data repository for videos would cross? Users vetted by hckrnews-karma checks posting "this video is bunk because"... Would be a real boon.

Ah come on, Drumeo is excellent entertainment with cocktail party knowledge bits here and there. ;)

I love those Drumeo challenges. I don’t even play drums. But watching creative people who are excellent at their craft solve an unknown problem in a new way - when we are all familiar with the original solution - is fascinating.

> IMO a complete waste of time.

That's the new New Scientist entire. The mag is now pap for non-scientists.

Conflating New Scientist with all modern journalism is a category error. New Scientist has been a zombie mag for going on two decades at this point. As with many magazines, the internet killed it.

You say the dog “also consciously understands the connection between bell and food,” which is actually not something Pavlov’s framework establishes at all. Whether the dog has conscious understanding of the association is exactly the kind of claim Pavlov’s behaviorist approach was designed to avoid. We can observe the salivation; we can’t observe the dog’s understanding.

The PTSD analogy is intuitively appealing but also somewhat off. You say “even with the stimulus gone, the physiological reaction remains,” but PTSD is better characterized by impaired extinction and stimulus generalization (too many things become triggers), not by the response persisting in the total absence of any triggering stimulus. The difficulty of treating PTSD has as much to do with how the fear memory is consolidated and how extinction learning fails to transfer across contexts as it does with the simple involuntary nature of the response.

> That's why PTSD is such a bitch to be treated: even with the stimulus gone, the physiological reaction remains.

Helping a friend with cPTSD and this is so true! It’s such a hard thing to overcome. By helping I mean I’m helping pay for counseling and therapy not that I’m doing it cuz I’m hella unqualified.

Perhaps I failed to read the nuances between lines, but I don't find the article contradicting what you said.

"It showed that dogs process information from their environment and use it to make predictions"

Exactly that is not what the experiment is about because we all know that dogs will quickly learn the connection between bell and food as dogs are easy to teach new tricks.

If you replace 'dogs' with 'humans', it becomes an empty phrase: "It showed that humans process information from their environment and use it to make predictions" - we all know that.

The groundbreaking part of the experiment was that it showed there are responses which are not part of the conscious mind and which are not willingly controllable by the conscious mind. The dog did not 'decide' to produce saliva.

The experiment was done with a dog because obviously you wont find humans willing to undergo surgery to have the saliva come out of the cheeks instead of into the mouth.

One has to forget about the dog and mentally replace it with a human: now the observation that the human connects the bell with the food is shallow. But the conditioned saliva reflex remains and can't be suppressed - and that is a remarkable insight. It works both with negative and positive stimuli. The latter one being a recipe for a long-lasting happy relationship ;)

The claim that the conditioned salivary response “can’t be suppressed” keeps getting repeated, and it’s still wrong. Pavlov’s own experiments demonstrated extinction. The conditioned response does weaken and disappear when you stop pairing the bell with food. It’s resistant to conscious override in real time, sure, but it’s not permanent or unsuppressable in the way you keep implying.

The framing that Pavlov’s key insight was about “responses which are not part of the conscious mind” is historically a bit anachronistic. Pavlov was a physiologist, not a psychologist. He wasn’t primarily making claims about consciousness vs. unconsciousness. He was mapping the mechanics of reflexes and their modification. The conscious/unconscious framing is more of a later psychological interpretation layered on top. Pavlov himself was pretty hostile to mentalistic language and would probably have objected to framing his work in terms of what the “conscious mind” does or doesn’t control.

The claim about surgery is also a bit misleading as a reason for using dogs. Pavlov used dogs because he was a digestive physiologist studying gastric secretion. The surgical fistula was created so he could measure salivation precisely, not because the experiment required it conceptually. You could (and people later did) study conditioned physiological responses in humans through things like galvanic skin response, heart rate changes, and eye-blink conditioning, none of which require surgery.

So you have a legitimate complaint about a shallow reading of Pavlov, but you’re building their correction on some inaccuracies of your own, and you keep asserting the “can’t be suppressed” point which is the weakest part of your argument.

> he groundbreaking part of the experiment was that it showed there are responses which are not part of the conscious mind and which are not willingly controllable by the conscious mind.

That's... interesting. How did they know that? Did they interview the dogs and ask them if they actively and consciously decide to produce saliva? Did they ask the dogs to try to surpass the reflex and the dogs failed to do it? Is "dogs have human-like conscious mind" even a scientific consensus?

Your opposing theory is that the dogs consciously chose to salivate?

The parent commenter's claim is:

> The key discovery is that there is a physiological reaction which cannot be suppressed anymore consciously.

My opposing theories are

1. dogs don't have conscious minds that are similar to humans' so the whole experiment can't be extrapolated to humans

2. dogs can suppress it consciously if they really want, like we can suppress the 'hanger reflex', it's just we don't have a way to tell dogs to do that

I really don't know how Pavlov experiment nullified these theories, and if it did, why "training animals to do circus tricks" didn't. Are we sure 'doing circus tricks' is equal to consciousness, and how?

Actually Pavlov did research about the digestive system for which he got the Nobel prize of medicine a few years earlier.

> Did they interview the dogs and ask them if they actively and consciously decide to produce saliva? > Is "dogs have human-like conscious mind" even a scientific consensus?

That's exactly the point - once you have understood the significance of the experiment you understand that it is not important:

A veteran with PTSD can have a surge in adrenaline, heart rate, and cortisol when hearing a car backfiring but he can not suppress it.

Whether the dog was conscious or not about the salivation is completely and utterly irrelevant. In 1907 this was for the first time evidence of a mind-body connection not being accessible to the consciousness. Seriously, forget about the dog. This is all proven beyond any doubt for conscious humans. Nobody cares about what the dog felt.

Associative learning was already known at that time which in its simple form is just circus tricks. The experiment extended this to physiological responses which are not accessible to consciousness in humans.

That’s not the point at all. It’s not about consciousness or being able to suppress it, or for example neurofeedback training or exposure therapy wouldn’t work either.

It’s about transference of an innate stimulus response mechanic which can be transferred to another stimulus if paired in quick succession of the original stimulus, thereby eliciting the same response.

It says absolutely nothing about this being conscious or not, or impossible to suppress.

Isn't it because stimulus is fast? A slow stimulus like arachnophobia is manageable.

Can you quote what part of the article has this misconception?

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