Neuroscience: Under Attack | Hacker News Reader

Neuroscience: Under Attack

nytimes.com

43 pointssew25 comments

Interesting article, and a terrible headline in the Times about it. It's not Neuroscience: Under Attack, it's Pop Neuroscience: Under Attack, and it's under attack by scientists.

It's also part of a fad of how science works or is absorbed in culture.

Here's the Times in 1973, reviewing Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which the antagonist, Dwayne Hoover's actions are caused by the bad chemicals in his system.

Is Kurt Vonnegut Kidding Us?

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-bre...

In 1973 it was chemistry. In 2013 it's neuroscience.

"It's not Neuroscience: Under Attack, it's Pop Neuroscience: Under Attack, and it's under attack by scientists."

Neuroscience itself is generally pretty shoddy, so I don't think the distinction between neuroscience and pop neuroscience is necessarily all that important. E.g. this article explaining that over 50% of neuroscience journal articles are completely invalid because they use statistics incorrectly:

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n9/full/nn.2886.html

And that's only one type of error out of dozens.

To be fair, that's generally only a criticism of fMRI experiments. Far from all the neuroscience research being done.

fMRI: Modern day phrenology

This is not a particularly enlightened view. While many people think top-down neuroscience like cognitive psychology, using techniques such as fMRI is the entire field, the majority of subfields in neuroscience are bottom up, and attempting to answer smaller-scale questions more concretely than we can in humans.

To say that there are some over-interpreted cognitive psychology studies so all of neuroscience is worthless completely misses the point.

That is not what the posted article is about, though, so the title is still misleading.

No. The core of neuroscience (as reported in Neuron or Nature neuroscience) is top notch science. What you see blown up in media reports are usually reports that jump to conclusions and generalizations too fast. Neuroscience is not shoddy, however due to its relation to psychology it's bound to be abused by pop press. The truth is, at this point we still know very very little about how the brain works, so everything that is 'backed by neuroscience' should be taken as early speculation.

The problem of bad statistics is more applicable to medicine than neuroscience: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

As another comment notes, the strength of science is that if something is true, it will still be true even if a report about the fact is initially exaggerated or initially ignored. Over the long haul, people who commit themselves to finding out about replicated results that are consistent with the previous established principles of science will gradually gain a better understanding of reality. Someday, we have hope of understanding our brains and how we think better than we understand that now. The discussion here on HN often helps clarify issues that are not well reported in the popular press. There are several working neuroscientists who regularly post here, and I enjoy the stories they post and the comments they make and learn from them.

From the article: "A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies."

We certainly observe submissions to HN regularly that are based on press coverage of scientific findings that has gone through the "Science News Cycle"

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

such that a preliminary research finding gets hyped up in a press release, and then the press release is sensationalized by a blogger or by a lazy journalist who doesn't check other sources. This is one good reason not to submit to HN at all any "story" that comes straight from a press release aggregation service, as other participants on HN have been suggesting for years. ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. Users here on HN think there are better sites to submit from.

Comments about ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

Comments about both ScienceDaily and PhysOrg, another press release aggregator:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185

"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529

"Original source:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...

"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361

"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766

"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.

"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."

> A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies.

I have a feeling this would be true of most scientific fields.

And NYT misreported a good chunk of the topics of those 3000 offensive articles.

Because of the Assange affair, us Swedes have had the opportunity to first-hand fact-check statements made by famous leftist/feminist activists (the likes of Naomi Wolf and Michael Moore). The whole process appears to have left a lot of people disillusioned. A lot of books and other kind of media made by these people have been sold here the past decade.

Here is a series of blog posts fact checking Naomi Wolf:

http://samtycke.nu/eng/category/naomi-wolf/

After reading this I can't trust this person.

This absolutely horrible framing of the issue aside, here is an example of what the Times heretofore have written on the subject of "neuroscience":

1. http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2011/10/01/the-new-york-times...

2. http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/kyxgi/the_new_york_t...

Are we going to argue that medical science is under attack, because homeopathy is criticized?

What's wonderful about science is that the facts don't change just because someone doesn't understand them or misrepresents them. It's just the cold hard truth of our universe. Regardless of what anyone says or wants, the world is as it is. So I realize it's tempting to get angry at sloppy science reporting. I don't like to be half informed and I don't appreciate the smugness of decorating bad information with an air of unearned authority. It's on us to teach our children to think critically and point out bad science reporting when it happens. Yet I take comfort in the realization that good science will prevail, because it's just measuring the way things are.

We haven't taught critical thinking in (US) schools for at least 30 years. It's all about standardized test scores now; fill-in-the-bubble rather than fill-in-the-blank.

I learned critical thinking 20 years ago, and I did some of my critical thinking tests in multiple choice format.

What part of choosing answers created and selected by someone else do you consider to be critical thinking?

The 'attack' is a useful counterweight to the recent tendency to "Just Add Neuro- to Everything" (as someone suggested during the "Five Word TED Talks" Twitter trend)

Very flawed article. Confuses the media's erroneous conclusions about findings and application of neuroscience with its validity as a subject of scientific study.

The author's point is well taken, but misses the greater problem.

Neuroscience has unveiled to us findings which fundamentally contradict what non-scientists hold to be common wisdom. The greater damage that pop-scientists perpetrate is to cherry-pick neuroscientific research to simply reenforce lazy outdated assumptions that the public holds.

Hence, all of the uninformed nature/nurture debates.

I think it cuts both ways - sometimes pop science writers cherrypick data that reaffirms existing biases. In other cases, they'll cherrypick tenuous data to contradict these biases. Both are effective headline strategies.

"Neuroscience" as a word is abused too much.

Half the time that I watch a YouTube video, I see a "Lumosity.com" advert that tells me it "just feels like games" but it's "serious brain training" and "based on neuroscience".

Based on neuroscience my ass. It's a glorified DS Brain Training (Brain Age in US) but you have to pay for it.

It is based on neuroscience, just like exercise routines are based on bioscience. It may be low tech, but that doesn't make it wrong. "lifting with your knees, not back" is utterly simple, but it is back by sound biokinematics.

[TFA quoting some scientist:] "it was based on the belief that some humans are genetically inferior"

I thought some members of a species being genetically inferior to others was the principal tenet of evolution. Are humans somehow exempt from this?

Inferiority is meaningless in genetics. Evolution randomly selects with a random statistical pattern that prefers individuals who are most able to survive and reproduce in their particular niche , a notion that has minimal relevance to human society, and does not correlate strongly with "superiority" as defined by human social groups. Example: evolution would reward a poor prolific con artist rapist far more than a strong rich asexual genius.

Given how terrible the media is in reporting about any subject, this article might as well have been titled "Everything: Under Attack."

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