Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.
Unless that was just Time fucking it up, which probably wouldn't be a first, I would steer a wide berth around a computational neuroscientist who views the mind "as software" rather than "as something usefully analogous to, and modellable by, software".
We don't know as much as we would like about the brain; but we know enough to say that it looks very, very, very unlike a "computer" or something that "runs software" except for near-uselessly broad definitions of those things. If anything, the more or less complete annihilation of analog computers by cheap, fast, transistors and the brutally fast Von Neumman architecture devices that they make possible have made the "brain = computer, mind = software" analogy less useful than it used to be(ironically, of course, at the same time, those same not-very-brainlike machines have brute-forced their way ever closer to being able to model biological neural networks of non-useless size...)
Very insightful. Wish I had mod points for you. The trick, of course, would be to prove that the brain is equivalent to a Turing Machine. It's not been done yet, and we don't understand enough to even think about such a thing. That thought notwithstanding, the fundamental insight behind the Church-Turing Thesis is that there are a countably infinite number of TM configurations, and an uncountably infinite number of languages that could be applied to TM's. Therefore there are languages that TMs will be
I think that language is what allows the human brain to be a Turing machine -- and a universal one at that. This is pretty self-evident to me since it is clear that you can teach a human being, with pencil and paper to execute any effective algorithm that can be programmed into a computer. It might be slow but the program behaviors would be functionally equivalent so long as run time doesn't matter. You might argue that this isn't entirely the brain, that it is really the entire system composed of a huma
I wouldn't write off Turing Machines as useless. You're right that it really doesn't help to say that a CA is a UTM just like an I7 processor. You're just as correct in saying that processors technically are not UTMs, they are finite tape TMs with somewhat less power than a UTM. The real importance of TMs in general is that there are problems that cannot be solved, no matter how much time or memory you have. That's a pretty big statement to make, yet there it is, and it's anchored solidly in logical arg
I didn't mean to imply that Turing completeness is unimportant. Not by a long shot! I just hear people bringing up Turing completeness as if it is the end all and be all of computer science. In A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram makes a lot out of the fact that Rule 30 is a universal Turing machine and the Church-Turing thesis. I can see how this is important from a theoretical perspective but I dont' see how it makes the types of problems that most developers face any easier. People frequently com
It's not been done yet, and we don't understand enough to even think about such a thing.
Why do you say so?
The computational universality of a number of artificial neural network designs has been proven. Of course, that doesn't make a specific network necessarily universal.
Turing's machine assumed that you could have as much tape as you needed. The equivalent in feed forward neural networks (universal, and apparently common enough in the brain) is to assume that you can have as many neurons in the hidden layer (only one required for universality) as needed and that the order (highest number of
Yes, but NN's are not equivalent to human brains. They approximate similar patterns, but are in no way the same thing. You can't go from Neural Network is Turing Complete to human brain is a Neural Network, therefore the human brain is Turing Complete. You're about a billion steps from showing equivalence between those two things.
You're about a billion steps from showing equivalence between those two things.
I said that already:
Because of this, we can't say exactly how they work, and I would therefore be hard-pressed to give a formal proof of universality
I have already given you proof of the computational universality of the brain. (But the proof does not involve NNs, which would be the more interesting proof because the long-term goal would be to build wetware computers with a constructive proof.)
They approximate similar patterns, but are in no way the same thing.
Biological NNs work on the same basic principles as artificial NNs. Also, the definition of neural network is rather broad. Let me grab a book:
Definition: Neural computing is the study of networks of adaptable nodes which, through a process of learning from task examples, store experiential knowledge and make it available for use.
This definition is such that the neural nets of the living brain are included in the field of study.
(Aleksander, I. & Morton, H. An introduction to neural computing. (p. 1))
You can't go from Neural Network is Turing Complete to human brain is a Neural Network, therefore the human brain is Turing Complete.
There are two meanings of "neural network" here. There is the biological one that the brain satisfies and the computer science one that it has not been proven to. You can't treat them as if they are equivalent.
I thought by the Church-Turing thesis all Turing complete computers were equivalent. What difference does analog or digital make?
Not entirely true. First, Turing machines are sequential. There are many cases of parallel computation that cannot be expressed by a Turing machine or as term normalization in untyped lambda calculus. Take for example A parallel-OR B: it will return true when A returns true even if B never terminates. You cannot express this sequentially. Second, analog neural networks with "real" real numbers are "super-Turing" (aka hypercomputers), i.e. computational machines that can solve tasks that a Turing machine can
I would like to provide a counterpoint position. Borrowing echoes of "soul in the machine", let's call the body below the neck as basically "hardware". Skipping for the moment the folks with special needs, we all have quasi-comparable hardware. At our best we tweak the opportunities between short folks going for horse jockeys or maybe swimming, while the stocky types go for construction or he military (to use random examples.)
But all the excitement is in the mind. It's like a play of operating systems and d
I'm a computational neuroscientist. I view the mind as software.
Then why the hell do programmers spend 90% of their time doing 1) user interface code, 2) error validation and 3) doing stuff to accommodate various usage patterns? In other words, if humans truly grok software, and human/computer interaction is basically just a matter of finding a common language, why do programmers have to make the software to serve human needs and human limitations? Why do humans keep not getting or disregarding the software? Why do people make mistakes while using the software? And most
Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.
You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! If they listed midgets and goatse.cx too high up people would have an aneurysm:-)
(Very much tongue in cheek. I agree that this "science" is nothing of the sort).
It's funny how often things go badly when people(even, perhaps especially) very smart ones step out of their discipline and assume that somebody else's disciple must be fairly simply reduceable to the rules and techniques of their own. Economists seem to be the most notable offenders; but these computational neuroscientists seem to have wandered deep into the sociologists' territory just because they saw a database and a tenuous connection to human behavior. Of course the primitive locals who've been developing the study of population behaviors had nothing to teach them... so they stumbled merrily into nonsense.
Sorry kids, it is arguable that some disciplines are utterly useless, or that some disciplines attract smarter people than others; and it is definitely the case that strict segmentation between them is counterproductive; but it is rarely the case that your neighbor's discipline is just a pitiful subset of yours, engulfed in darkness and just waiting for you to enlighten them...
but it is rarely the case that your neighbor's discipline is just a pitiful subset of yours, engulfed in darkness and just waiting for you to enlighten them...
That doesn't stop the engineers and IT folks on Slashdot. Hell, it doesn't even slow them down.
I qouls actualy argue that engineer and IT folks dont usually fall into this category. They/We/I may overesitmate their knowledge of a subject, but they dont actually try to boild down psychology into IT. Making correlations is not the sam thing.
And it applies to many of the "scientists" touted by global warming deniers. An astrophysicist, for example, may think he/she has spotted a flaw in the interpretation of the data, and will announce loudly that he/she has "disproved" AGW while failing to see the fatal flaw in his own interpretation. This is of course not true of the pure sellouts, who simply repeat the scripts provided by their paymasters: "We have no conclusive proof that cigarettes cause lung cancer, Senator."
But it also sometimes works out very well. Computational neuroscience itself seems to be an example of that. The wiki page for computational neuroscience [wikipedia.org] mentions the term was coined by an Eric Schwartz [wikipedia.org] who appears to have crossed from physics into neurobiology.
The "father of neuroscience", Ramon Y Cajal [wikipedia.org], had quite a colorful background. He had skill in art, which probably helped him record his observations and study neural cells, and in his professional career started out studying inflammation and cholera before moving into neurobiology.
It doesn't appear to be limited to biology either. I've heard there are well-respected economists who were physicists in previous professional lives. To take it even further, even in music, genre-crossing usually has interesting results, like Richard Cheese, who does lounge-singing covers of pop songs, or that bluegrass cover of Snoop Dog's Gin and Juice.
I'd submit that changing fields can often be productive, bringing a new way of looking at things to the field. Assuming the field is simple is the real problem, but that's a pitfall whether you're switching fields or staying in your own field.
Part right, part true. Never underestimate your neighbor, always be careful with what you don't know you don't know.
With that said, some disciplines are in the dark ages, this is proven when 20 years ago the first computer generated research articles got accepted in humanities and sociology journals. Computers still can not pass a comparison to a 8 year old kid (Turing test), but they have successfully demonstrated being indistinguishable from a serious researcher in one of the bullshit sciences.
What are you talking about? Some disciplines are a subset of others, that is an unavoidable fact. Now it can happen that an specialist can have better insight about his specialty than a generalist, this is not the case of the lesser disciple being better, equal nor even different than the greater discipline, it is still a subset of what the generalist should know, It is not the fault of the greater discipline that some specific adherents aren't up to date with it.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to throw in my conjecture anyway. What about some other considerations:
Is it true that simply the most searched for terms are what the most people are actually looking for? For example, if something is easy to find, why bother doing any searching? Thus the most searched terms could be the ones that people are just most dissatisfied with in what they find. Another example, does 'cheating wives' mean that men are actually desiring to cheat on their wife or fantasize about havi
Another example, does 'cheating wives' mean that men are actually desiring to cheat on their wife or fantasize about having sex with a cheating wife?
Like many mammals, male humans are wired to try and mate with as many females as possible, while also defending his breeding stock from being impregnated by rival males. Like many mammals, female humans are wired to try and mate with only the "best" male candidate, and to "trade up" when a more suitable mate comes along.
So yeah, "cheating wives" makes perfect sense in light of the natural mating habits of our species. Of course the religious nutjobs will be on here screaming about free will and all that jazz
Like many mammals, male humans are wired to try and mate with as many females as possible, while also defending his breeding stock from being impregnated by rival males. Like many mammals, female humans are wired to try and mate with only the "best" male candidate, and to "trade up" when a more suitable mate comes along.
So yeah, "cheating wives" makes perfect sense in light of the natural mating habits of our species.
Even if we take a strict biological view, this only implies that people will cheat - it doesn't imply that cheating sex will be more attractive to people than non-cheating sex. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, why would a female in a relationship with someone else be viewed as more attractive than a single female, assuming all other factors are equal?
If impregnation is successful , the male won't have to provide for the female and the bastard child, that weight falls on the "competitor". Think what cuckoo birds do.
Some comments contend that our alma mater Boston University disclaimed us, revoked our websites, and rescinded our emails. This is just plain silly. Though we’re now alumni, we still maintain the same BU web addresses we’ve always had, and still have access to our same BU email accounts, though we now rely on non-university accounts.
Neither the Boston University IRB nor our former department (nor any other BU entity) ever issued any reprimand because we did not violate any university policy or regulation. Though it’s true that many colleagues in our former department were uncomfortable with our choice of research subject—some explicitly tried to dissuade us from studying sexual desire—there’s an enormous gap between disliking our research and disclaiming it.
So, well done spreading that particular line of FUD.
I’m not saying that these researchers did everything right (they almost certainly did not), but really, what sort of methodology *would* these people like to see? It is basically impossible to do *any* research in this area, as has been stated repeatedly both in the book and in the discussions online, due to how politically and emotionally charged these issues are. It’s like complaining that scientists using telescopes to find planets with habitable atmospheres are doing bad science because they aren’t there scooping up samples of the atmosphere to check its actual composition.
It’s also totally unclear to me as to what these people are complaining about since there is absolutely no mention of what the problem is in either of the two journals you linked to. As far as I can tell, it seems some people believe the entire book is based on a single survey posted to LiveJournal, which is great for their egos but entirely non-factual.
I had to work with them setting up some resources while working for a major adult website, as far as I can tell they just had talks with a lot of people in that community (450K+ people) about why they like and don't like. Don't know if this qualify as 'methodology' but at least they bother to talk with actual people and their approach was quite professional and scientific (given their public talks at least).
Apart from that I'm just happy those hours setting up blogs had a reason:-)
Indeed, that's the problem with keyboards today is so many porn related searches require two hands.
Accordingly I am designing a porn layout for keyboards allowing the most efficient one-handed typing speeds. Currently I can search for porn at 152 words per minute, however all other typing is down to 9 words/minute. Further optimization may be less than useful.
At least awhile ago Google Trends was showing that 'sex with sister' and 'sex with mother' ranking higher than'sex with girlfriend' and sex with mother was the highest ranked by far. Given what they said and what I've experienced on the net I'd say I've not read anything that's incorrect. Mind you I did only read the Time link.
Doctor... Venkman. The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable! You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman!
This "study" was an idiotic exercise in which a couple of junior researchers mined search terms to reinforce their culturally formed and far from unbiased notions about sexuality. All the crap about men searching for cheating wife porn (I believe "cuckold" porn is a popular current term for it) because of jealousy being hardwired and competition triggering arousal was especially telling--these guys are parroting outdated "conventional wisdom" (i.e., assumptions based on post-facto theory rather than formed from evidence-based research) and nothing more. The real work is being done by folks like the authors of _Sex at Dawn_:
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm. So, men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago when agriculture changed a hunter-gatherer society of communally shared lives (mating included) into a hierarchical society of enforced order and scarcity (mating changed into a scarce resource like everything else).
In other words, today we have external software (a legacy of early subsistence-farming civilization) installing a chimp-like sexuality of scarcity and aggression and competition into our heads, when our native OS is more bonobo-like and tells us we want to share sex partners.
And we can actually validate this theory, because we have extensive records of contact with "stone age" tribes some of whom are still around today, and true monogamous marriage is almost unheard-of. Most tribes practicing their ancestral ways without Western influence have marriage--but almost never exclusive marriage where partners are expected to be "faithful." Women are usually expected to be promiscuous, and many tribes have "partible paternity"--the belief that every man a pregnant woman has sex with contributes semen towards making the baby, and that if a woman is not promiscuous enough she's not giving the baby a big variety of helpful traits from the fathers, or that the baby could miscarry from lack of continued semen contribution. Some uncontacted tribes literally have had no idea that sex even causes pregnancy, because from the moment females are physically developed enough to have sex they're doing so, often with multiple partners over time, so that the connection between sex and pregnancy isn't clear to them.
Point being, if you want to really learn about human sexuality, read _Sex at Dawn_ and ignore this other crap.
men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
Are you really making the argument that if something is "the norm" for tens of thousands of generations (your words) it will neatly stay out of our genome?
You can't have 10s of thousands of generations in 10,000 years. maybe for field mice, or some other small mammal but, we generally recognize human generations as being about 20 years.... so, 10,000 years is more like 500 generations.
Also... um... do you really think monogamy has been so strictly practiced that it really would be considered the "dominant strategy"? What family of any size doesn't have one or two "serial monogamists" (on his 4th wife is he?) or know someone who found out that they had adult s
You can't have 10s of thousands of generations in 10,000 years.
Of course.
That's my point. It got encoded in our genes up to 10,000 years ago when the 'norm' changed.
Human tribes roamed the planet for millions of years - that's 60+ thousand generations per 1 million years.
Even if we restrict our thinking to the homo sapiens species alone then it roamed the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, 6000+ generations per hundred thousand years.
That was plenty of time to get 'social norms' partially encoded in genes.
The last 10,000 (600 generations) was not (nearly) eno
men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
The part about men being naturally wired for sexual jealousy is the mistake--modern thinking dictating their conclusions based on present customs, rather than starting from the anthropological past and working forward without bias. Jealousy isn't hardwired in our sexual software; it's a modern overlay, and not a positive emotion but a negative one:
I don't buy the idea that men are turned on by women having sex with other men because it's 'how we evolved' idea.
'Cheating wives' is popular, I would guess, with married men because they can fantasize about having an affair with a 'cheating wife' supposing that she will keep the fun secret because she doesn't want to be caught either. Married women can fantasize about being the 'cheating wife'. Unmarried men can suppose that they might have a relatively string-free tryst with a 'cheating wife' who is onl
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm.
Let me guess, they invented a time machine and frequently travel back and forth to confirm their claims, and that is the reason why you are citing their claims as a good example of scientific methodology.
Thanks for a sensible and well-informed post. It amazes me how people start ridiculing the only one in the discussion who actually provides some basis for their arguments, just because it contradicts their prejudices.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time a couple decades ago, and this sounds very likely.
Here are some tangential things I wrote just now in some email discussion related to this, branching out from these ideas to thinking about the evolution of human cognition in general.
===
First, some comments I wrote as I discussed this with someone else, who wrote first about women using beauty to be upwardly mobile in power and money:
Fake "Science" (Score:5, Informative)
Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.
Check these out, yo:
A thorough summary of the fail [journalfen.net]
Another roundup [livejournal.com]
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I'm a computational neuroscientist. I view the mind as software.
Righto. Abort, Retry, Fail for you, dude.
Re:Fake "Science" (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't know as much as we would like about the brain; but we know enough to say that it looks very, very, very unlike a "computer" or something that "runs software" except for near-uselessly broad definitions of those things. If anything, the more or less complete annihilation of analog computers by cheap, fast, transistors and the brutally fast Von Neumman architecture devices that they make possible have made the "brain = computer, mind = software" analogy less useful than it used to be(ironically, of course, at the same time, those same not-very-brainlike machines have brute-forced their way ever closer to being able to model biological neural networks of non-useless size...)
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I think that language is what allows the human brain to be a Turing machine -- and a universal one at that. This is pretty self-evident to me since it is clear that you can teach a human being, with pencil and paper to execute any effective algorithm that can be programmed into a computer. It might be slow but the program behaviors would be functionally equivalent so long as run time doesn't matter. You might argue that this isn't entirely the brain, that it is really the entire system composed of a huma
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I wouldn't write off Turing Machines as useless. You're right that it really doesn't help to say that a CA is a UTM just like an I7 processor. You're just as correct in saying that processors technically are not UTMs, they are finite tape TMs with somewhat less power than a UTM. The real importance of TMs in general is that there are problems that cannot be solved, no matter how much time or memory you have. That's a pretty big statement to make, yet there it is, and it's anchored solidly in logical arg
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It's not been done yet, and we don't understand enough to even think about such a thing.
Why do you say so?
The computational universality of a number of artificial neural network designs has been proven. Of course, that doesn't make a specific network necessarily universal.
Turing's machine assumed that you could have as much tape as you needed. The equivalent in feed forward neural networks (universal, and apparently common enough in the brain) is to assume that you can have as many neurons in the hidden layer (only one required for universality) as needed and that the order (highest number of
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You're about a billion steps from showing equivalence between those two things.
I said that already:
Because of this, we can't say exactly how they work, and I would therefore be hard-pressed to give a formal proof of universality
I have already given you proof of the computational universality of the brain. (But the proof does not involve NNs, which would be the more interesting proof because the long-term goal would be to build wetware computers with a constructive proof.)
They approximate similar patterns, but are in no way the same thing.
Biological NNs work on the same basic principles as artificial NNs. Also, the definition of neural network is rather broad. Let me grab a book:
Definition: Neural computing is the study of networks of adaptable nodes which, through a process of learning from task examples, store experiential knowledge and make it available for use.
This definition is such that the neural nets of the living brain are included in the field of study.
(Aleksander, I. & Morton, H. An introduction to neural computing. (p. 1))
You can't go from Neural Network is Turing Complete to human brain is a Neural Network, therefore the human brain is Turing Complete.
So we know that the brai
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I thought by the Church-Turing thesis all Turing complete computers were equivalent. What difference does analog or digital make?
Not entirely true. First, Turing machines are sequential. There are many cases of parallel computation that cannot be expressed by a Turing machine or as term normalization in untyped lambda calculus. Take for example A parallel-OR B: it will return true when A returns true even if B never terminates. You cannot express this sequentially. Second, analog neural networks with "real" real numbers are "super-Turing" (aka hypercomputers), i.e. computational machines that can solve tasks that a Turing machine can
Re:"mind as software" (Score:1)
I would like to provide a counterpoint position. Borrowing echoes of "soul in the machine", let's call the body below the neck as basically "hardware". Skipping for the moment the folks with special needs, we all have quasi-comparable hardware. At our best we tweak the opportunities between short folks going for horse jockeys or maybe swimming, while the stocky types go for construction or he military (to use random examples.)
But all the excitement is in the mind. It's like a play of operating systems and d
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Of course, it's just as likely he was purposefully dumbing it down out of habit...
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I'm a computational neuroscientist. I view the mind as software.
Then why the hell do programmers spend 90% of their time doing 1) user interface code, 2) error validation and 3) doing stuff to accommodate various usage patterns? In other words, if humans truly grok software, and human/computer interaction is basically just a matter of finding a common language, why do programmers have to make the software to serve human needs and human limitations? Why do humans keep not getting or disregarding the software? Why do people make mistakes while using the software? And most
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Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.
You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! If they listed midgets and goatse.cx too high up people would have an aneurysm :-)
(Very much tongue in cheek. I agree that this "science" is nothing of the sort).
Re:Fake "Science" (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry kids, it is arguable that some disciplines are utterly useless, or that some disciplines attract smarter people than others; and it is definitely the case that strict segmentation between them is counterproductive; but it is rarely the case that your neighbor's discipline is just a pitiful subset of yours, engulfed in darkness and just waiting for you to enlighten them...
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That doesn't stop the engineers and IT folks on Slashdot. Hell, it doesn't even slow them down.
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I qouls actualy argue that engineer and IT folks dont usually fall into this category. They/We/I may overesitmate their knowledge of a subject, but they dont actually try to boild down psychology into IT. Making correlations is not the sam thing.
Very good point (Score:2)
And it applies to many of the "scientists" touted by global warming deniers. An astrophysicist, for example, may think he/she has spotted a flaw in the interpretation of the data, and will announce loudly that he/she has "disproved" AGW while failing to see the fatal flaw in his own interpretation.
This is of course not true of the pure sellouts, who simply repeat the scripts provided by their paymasters: "We have no conclusive proof that cigarettes cause lung cancer, Senator."
Re:Fake "Science" (Score:4, Informative)
The "father of neuroscience", Ramon Y Cajal [wikipedia.org], had quite a colorful background. He had skill in art, which probably helped him record his observations and study neural cells, and in his professional career started out studying inflammation and cholera before moving into neurobiology.
It doesn't appear to be limited to biology either. I've heard there are well-respected economists who were physicists in previous professional lives. To take it even further, even in music, genre-crossing usually has interesting results, like Richard Cheese, who does lounge-singing covers of pop songs, or that bluegrass cover of Snoop Dog's Gin and Juice.
I'd submit that changing fields can often be productive, bringing a new way of looking at things to the field. Assuming the field is simple is the real problem, but that's a pitfall whether you're switching fields or staying in your own field.
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Part right, part true. Never underestimate your neighbor, always be careful with what you don't know you don't know.
With that said, some disciplines are in the dark ages, this is proven when 20 years ago the first computer generated research articles got accepted in humanities and sociology journals. Computers still can not pass a comparison to a 8 year old kid (Turing test), but they have successfully demonstrated being indistinguishable from a serious researcher in one of the bullshit sciences.
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What are you talking about? Some disciplines are a subset of others, that is an unavoidable fact. Now it can happen that an specialist can have better insight about his specialty than a generalist, this is not the case of the lesser disciple being better, equal nor even different than the greater discipline, it is still a subset of what the generalist should know, It is not the fault of the greater discipline that some specific adherents aren't up to date with it.
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AOL (Score:2)
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They aren't the users, they're the producers!
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dude please, no use of "tongue in cheek" in the same comment as "goatse"...
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I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to throw in my conjecture anyway. What about some other considerations:
Is it true that simply the most searched for terms are what the most people are actually looking for? For example, if something is easy to find, why bother doing any searching? Thus the most searched terms could be the ones that people are just most dissatisfied with in what they find. Another example, does 'cheating wives' mean that men are actually desiring to cheat on their wife or fantasize about havi
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Another example, does 'cheating wives' mean that men are actually desiring to cheat on their wife or fantasize about having sex with a cheating wife?
Like many mammals, male humans are wired to try and mate with as many females as possible, while also defending his breeding stock from being impregnated by rival males.
Like many mammals, female humans are wired to try and mate with only the "best" male candidate, and to "trade up" when a more suitable mate comes along.
So yeah, "cheating wives" makes perfect sense in light of the natural mating habits of our species. Of course the religious nutjobs will be on here screaming about free will and all that jazz
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Like many mammals, male humans are wired to try and mate with as many females as possible, while also defending his breeding stock from being impregnated by rival males.
Like many mammals, female humans are wired to try and mate with only the "best" male candidate, and to "trade up" when a more suitable mate comes along.
So yeah, "cheating wives" makes perfect sense in light of the natural mating habits of our species.
Even if we take a strict biological view, this only implies that people will cheat - it doesn't imply that cheating sex will be more attractive to people than non-cheating sex. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, why would a female in a relationship with someone else be viewed as more attractive than a single female, assuming all other factors are equal?
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Please mod parent "Insightful"
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Or, put another way, their data came from AOL...so we now know the sexual preferences of the elderly and the mentally challenged...whee!
For the purposes of today's discussion (this being Slashdot and all), it's a pretty good start.
You don't know what you are talking about (Score:5, Interesting)
From http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/05/17/the-neuroscience-behind-sexual-desire-authors-of-a-billion-wicked-thoughts-answer-your-questions/ [freakonomics.com]:
So, well done spreading that particular line of FUD.
I’m not saying that these researchers did everything right (they almost certainly did not), but really, what sort of methodology *would* these people like to see? It is basically impossible to do *any* research in this area, as has been stated repeatedly both in the book and in the discussions online, due to how politically and emotionally charged these issues are. It’s like complaining that scientists using telescopes to find planets with habitable atmospheres are doing bad science because they aren’t there scooping up samples of the atmosphere to check its actual composition.
It’s also totally unclear to me as to what these people are complaining about since there is absolutely no mention of what the problem is in either of the two journals you linked to. As far as I can tell, it seems some people believe the entire book is based on a single survey posted to LiveJournal, which is great for their egos but entirely non-factual.
Atrocious, indeed.
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Indeed, that's the problem with keyboards today is so many porn related searches require two hands.
Accordingly I am designing a porn layout for keyboards allowing the most efficient one-handed typing speeds. Currently I can search for porn at 152 words per minute, however all other typing is down to 9 words/minute. Further optimization may be less than useful.
Pug
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http://www.onehandedkeyboard.com/ [onehandedkeyboard.com]
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Lies! You can't type out "horse" with one hand!
The other ones I don't know about.
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Re:Fake "Science" (Score:5, Interesting)
This "study" was an idiotic exercise in which a couple of junior researchers mined search terms to reinforce their culturally formed and far from unbiased notions about sexuality. All the crap about men searching for cheating wife porn (I believe "cuckold" porn is a popular current term for it) because of jealousy being hardwired and competition triggering arousal was especially telling--these guys are parroting outdated "conventional wisdom" (i.e., assumptions based on post-facto theory rather than formed from evidence-based research) and nothing more. The real work is being done by folks like the authors of _Sex at Dawn_:
http://www.sexatdawn.com/ [sexatdawn.com]
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm. So, men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago when agriculture changed a hunter-gatherer society of communally shared lives (mating included) into a hierarchical society of enforced order and scarcity (mating changed into a scarce resource like everything else).
In other words, today we have external software (a legacy of early subsistence-farming civilization) installing a chimp-like sexuality of scarcity and aggression and competition into our heads, when our native OS is more bonobo-like and tells us we want to share sex partners.
And we can actually validate this theory, because we have extensive records of contact with "stone age" tribes some of whom are still around today, and true monogamous marriage is almost unheard-of. Most tribes practicing their ancestral ways without Western influence have marriage--but almost never exclusive marriage where partners are expected to be "faithful." Women are usually expected to be promiscuous, and many tribes have "partible paternity"--the belief that every man a pregnant woman has sex with contributes semen towards making the baby, and that if a woman is not promiscuous enough she's not giving the baby a big variety of helpful traits from the fathers, or that the baby could miscarry from lack of continued semen contribution. Some uncontacted tribes literally have had no idea that sex even causes pregnancy, because from the moment females are physically developed enough to have sex they're doing so, often with multiple partners over time, so that the connection between sex and pregnancy isn't clear to them.
Point being, if you want to really learn about human sexuality, read _Sex at Dawn_ and ignore this other crap.
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men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
Are you really making the argument that if something is "the norm" for tens of thousands of generations (your words) it will neatly stay out of our genome?
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You can't have 10s of thousands of generations in 10,000 years. maybe for field mice, or some other small mammal but, we generally recognize human generations as being about 20 years.... so, 10,000 years is more like 500 generations.
Also... um... do you really think monogamy has been so strictly practiced that it really would be considered the "dominant strategy"? What family of any size doesn't have one or two "serial monogamists" (on his 4th wife is he?) or know someone who found out that they had adult s
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You can't have 10s of thousands of generations in 10,000 years.
Of course.
That's my point. It got encoded in our genes up to 10,000 years ago when the 'norm' changed.
Human tribes roamed the planet for millions of years - that's 60+ thousand generations per 1 million years.
Even if we restrict our thinking to the homo sapiens species alone then it roamed the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, 6000+ generations per hundred thousand years.
That was plenty of time to get 'social norms' partially encoded in genes.
The last 10,000 (600 generations) was not (nearly) eno
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men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
The part about men being naturally wired for sexual jealousy is the mistake--modern thinking dictating their conclusions based on present customs, rather than starting from the anthropological past and working forward without bias. Jealousy isn't hardwired in our sexual software; it's a modern overlay, and not a positive emotion but a negative one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jealousy [wikipedia.org]
It was normal in prehistory for us to watch the women we sleep with have sex with other men and NOT be jealous, but be purel
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I don't buy the idea that men are turned on by women having sex with other men because it's 'how we evolved' idea.
'Cheating wives' is popular, I would guess, with married men because they can fantasize about having an affair with a 'cheating wife' supposing that she will keep the fun secret because she doesn't want to be caught either. Married women can fantasize about being the 'cheating wife'. Unmarried men can suppose that they might have a relatively string-free tryst with a 'cheating wife' who is onl
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The real work is being done by folks like the authors of _Sex at Dawn_:
http://www.sexatdawn.com/ [sexatdawn.com]
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm.
Let me guess, they invented a time machine and frequently travel back and forth to confirm their claims, and that is the reason why you are citing their claims as a good example of scientific methodology.
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Some uncontacted tribes literally have had no idea that sex even causes pregnancy
So how do you know this?
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Thanks for a sensible and well-informed post. It amazes me how people start ridiculing the only one in the discussion who actually provides some basis for their arguments, just because it contradicts their prejudices.
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Thanks for the insightful comment. I was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time a couple decades ago, and this sounds very likely.
Here are some tangential things I wrote just now in some email discussion related to this, branching out from these ideas to thinking about the evolution of human cognition in general.
===
First, some comments I wrote as I discussed this with someone else, who wrote first about women using beauty to be upwardly mobile in power and money:
Yes, women can convert beauty t
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What I read was, "Scientists discover now what males and females know since the invention of fuck."
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I understand how you feel. We are just jealous we didn't think of it first - a reason to search every kind of pron!