How to tell if your brain is no good at reading?

[tundra]

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[Boidhre]

Science doesn't make anything happen.

Who said it does? Please, do not put words in my mouth.

(For the record, I said I was not very familiar with psychology. I did not say I was unfamiliar with science.)

This doesn't mean that the research teams are incompetent. It is rather that science takes truth very seriously.

To quote the article:

Nearly all of the studies that purport to provide evidence for learning styles fail to satisfy key criteria for scientific validity.

We should have every respect for properly done science. But it looks like many of the studies they reviewed were simply not good science, however good the intentions may have been. We remain in the dark as to whether there are significant differences in learning styles. Again, to quote the article:

[...]psychological research has not found that people learn differently, at least not in the ways learning-styles proponents claim. Given the lack of scientific evidence, the authors argue that the currently widespread use of learning-style tests and teaching tools is a wasteful use of limited educational resources.

Science is only as good as the standards of the journals that publish it. You can get some very dodgy work out in pretty much any field once you know which journal to aim it at (of course the fact that it's that journal is a red flag for people familiar with the field). In the harder sciences like physics the overall quality tends to be better because, well, if the electromagnetic field is a certain strength, it is a certain strength and we can measure that quite precisely. In the softer sciences and the social sciences it's a lot more problematic because what you're trying to measure has a much higher degree of uncertainty and quite often you're not exactly sure what you're specifically trying to measure or if it even exists or you can't directly measure it.

I'll give an example I came across recently. They were trying to examine whether videogames could make someone more violent. So they got people to give two written samples before and after playing various types of computer games and analysed the language of them to see if there were differences. They did find a tendency for violent videogames to cause people to use more forceful or violent language (hard in itself to define, but whatever). The thing is, does this actually tell us anything about whether people are more violent after playing violent videogames? If I use more forceful language am I more likely to go out and hit someone over the head with a lump of wood or something? It's not like they can go into someone's head and see the likelihood of violent behaviour increasing so they needed to use a proxy, but I mean what can you use as a proxy for that? It's all very messy.

[Bill Spight]

I'll give an example I came across recently. They were trying to examine whether videogames could make someone more violent. So they got people to give two written samples before and after playing various types of computer games and analysed the language of them to see if there were differences. They did find a tendency for violent videogames to cause people to use more forceful or violent language (hard in itself to define, but whatever). The thing is, does this actually tell us anything about whether people are more violent after playing violent videogames? If I use more forceful language am I more likely to go out and hit someone over the head with a lump of wood or something? It's not like they can go into someone's head and see the likelihood of violent behaviour increasing so they needed to use a proxy, but I mean what can you use as a proxy for that? It's all very messy.

Modern ethical standards present a real problem for this kind of research. (Not that I am against them.) The most violent thing that the subjects did was to play the video games. It would have been unethical to give them the opportunity to engage in real violence.

[daal]

http://www.jokes.com/funny-dark-humor/t ... or-the-cia

[SmoothOper]

I'll give an example I came across recently. They were trying to examine whether videogames could make someone more violent. So they got people to give two written samples before and after playing various types of computer games and analysed the language of them to see if there were differences. They did find a tendency for violent videogames to cause people to use more forceful or violent language (hard in itself to define, but whatever). The thing is, does this actually tell us anything about whether people are more violent after playing violent videogames? If I use more forceful language am I more likely to go out and hit someone over the head with a lump of wood or something? It's not like they can go into someone's head and see the likelihood of violent behaviour increasing so they needed to use a proxy, but I mean what can you use as a proxy for that? It's all very messy.

Modern ethical standards present a real problem for this kind of research. (Not that I am against them.) The most violent thing that the subjects did was to play the video games. It would have been unethical to give them the opportunity to engage in real violence.

This is why it is important to observe. For example a patient who happen to have a part of their hippo-campus removed...

[Boidhre]

I'll give an example I came across recently. They were trying to examine whether videogames could make someone more violent. So they got people to give two written samples before and after playing various types of computer games and analysed the language of them to see if there were differences. They did find a tendency for violent videogames to cause people to use more forceful or violent language (hard in itself to define, but whatever). The thing is, does this actually tell us anything about whether people are more violent after playing violent videogames? If I use more forceful language am I more likely to go out and hit someone over the head with a lump of wood or something? It's not like they can go into someone's head and see the likelihood of violent behaviour increasing so they needed to use a proxy, but I mean what can you use as a proxy for that? It's all very messy.

Modern ethical standards present a real problem for this kind of research. (Not that I am against them.) The most violent thing that the subjects did was to play the video games. It would have been unethical to give them the opportunity to engage in real violence.

Well, the only way they can do it is through a longitudinal study where as part of it they look at video game consumption and the type of games and then convictions for violent crimes. But they'd have had to start that study 10-15 years ago for it to be useful now so...