BF Skinner had HUGE BALLS

BF Skinner, in 1990, seven months before his death:
"Cognitive psychology was left as the scientific companion of a profession and as the scientific underpinning of educational, clinical, developmental, social, and many other fields of psychology. The help it has given them has not been conspicuous."

For those of you who don't know, Skinner was the guy who would put pigeons in a box and train them to spin around in circles. He advanced the notion that reinforcement and punishment were sufficient to explain all behavior, human or otherwise. He treated the mind as a "black box" - it does what it does, but its contents warrant no scrutiny. Skinner, along with the behaviorist tradition he represents, has been a favorite straw man of cognitive psychologists for half a century. And here he is, thumbing his nose at the zeitgeist, issuing in no uncertain terms a comprehensive "fuck off" to the institution that disdains him, yet still admires him enough to call him an idiot half a century after his heyday.

RESPECT

Somebody wants this guy alive

http://www.maniacworld.com/stunt-plane-loses-its-wing.html

Chrysalis of indolence

I'm completely stressed out, but I'm still engaged in a regimen of 90% fucking-around and 10% actual work. Which means I'm developing a Pavlovian association between procrastination and wanting to auto-defenestrate. Conditioned response: I'm going to emerge as the most productive person on the planet!

Help me coin a new word

I want to make up a word, for that moment when the time SINCE the end of some era equals the time DURING. Like when you're 4 years out of college, or when you're twice as old as your younger sibling, or when it's been 18 years (or 16 or 30 as the case may be) since you first had sex. Or how I started playing the guitar 12 years ago, when I was 12. You get the idea. What should we call it? Once we come up with the perfect word we're going viral with this thing, and it's going to be the first UNIVERSAL COGNATE, part of every lexicon in every language in the world.

The Journal of Null Results

Scientists often jokingly tout the need for a "journal of null results", a way for researchers to find out about all the projects that didn't yield sexy results (all right, turns out jellyfish DON'T fluoresce purple when exposed to Jimi Hendrix). Notwithstanding the fact that no one would ever, ever read this journal (like an early version of The Mighty Ducks, in which case our avian protagonists place fifth in the tournament), they're right. By limiting our ken to "successful"studies, we are committing an egregious sampling error. It's an amateur mistake, but we do it all the time! Give me funding for a hundred experiments with similar parameters, and I will prove to p <.05 that Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. I'll prove it five times, and I'll publish. WATCH ME.

My point is that we need more transparency in science:

1. ALL data should be readily available, at least within the academic community.
2. Research should be judged based on the quality of the work, not on the direction of the results. Sometimes well-designed experiments fail to reject the null hypothesis. That's why do science.

It's doable! Here's why:

1. Data storage is cheap. My entire Master's takes up about $20 worth of hard drive space, including 20 subjects' worth of whole-brain fMRI data.
2. We have the Internet, via which information can be easily and cheaply shared
3. There are far more researchers than funding sources. For example, agencies like the NIH fund an enormous fraction of biomedical research in the U.S. (28% from the NIH as of 2003). Creating a centralized community of data-sharing should be easy when the money is all coming from the same place.

Done ranting; time to go back to determining the locus of the soul. Wish me luck.

Israel - The Fundamental Premise

It seems that many of the individual debates regarding Israeli policy - the West Bank wall, the flotilla, the Gaza operation, the Lebanon operation, settlement expansion in the West Bank, etc - can be reduced to a single question. If this basic question can be satisfactorily answered, the rest will follow; the implications will percolate back upward until these peripheral controversies seem far more tractable. The problem is that this fundamental premise is worse than contested - contradictory views are taken as self-evident by different camps. The question is this: Does a Jewish homeland have a right to exist in the Middle East?
In any discussion regarding the above-mentioned issues, most pro-Israel American Jews depend heavily on an affirmative answer to this question. In fact, when you get down to it, it's the fundamental premise of their arguments.
At the other end of the spectrum, it is clear that the Arab nations in the area, including the Palestinian Authority, disagree on a fundamental level. It is the PA's refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist - and note that this is a symbolic concession, not a practical one - that is currently stalling the peace process.
So what is the answer? Is the fundamental premise sound?
On the one hand, our American sensibilities would incline us to say no, the existence of a Jewish nation is inherently discriminatory. What about the 20% non-Jewish minority in Israel? What are their rights?
On the other hand, why single out Israel? There are plenty of unequivocally religious governments in the world, most of them Muslim, and all of them more theocratic than Israel. According to one former presidential candidate, the United States itself should be listed among their ranks.
I'm writing this post in the hope that YOU have something to say about it. From an emotional perspective, I think most of you know where my loyalties lie, but my mind is open - I want your opinions.