Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerrya | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

"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.

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...

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.

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

fMRI: Modern day phrenology

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com