Roger Watt

My granddaughter recently enrolled me in the Kicky Moo Club (as an amateur me member).

Take care.

Incidentally, have you seen Braitenberg's book Vehicles? He talks about the downhill law of synthesis (making a model) and the uphill law of analysis (understanding a model).

Anyway, sorry for such a long thread. Old age seems to have robbed me of any ability I had to be succinct.

My own big take home from your paper is that we need to retrieve conceptual clarity and that being seduced by the apparent explanatory power of models (simulations) is a step away not a step towards it.

I would argue, but with less background knowledge, that the same trajectory affected all of cognition. Computer models are relatively easy to do and common, computational theories are very difficult. Plus computer models although easy to make, are very difficult to analyse/understand.

The computational theory ought to have been about the value of symmetry detection for seeing. But that step was simply assumed and models were developed that behaved like people in psychophysical experiments. The link to actual seeing never considered.

It morphed into the term computational model - a model you can do on a computer. And that quickly lost the idea that you are theorising about a goal. The example at the time that, for me, captured what was happening was the idea of a computational model for symmetry detection.

For Marr, computational theory was a way of identifying a theory with a specific computational goal. If the goal is edge-detection, then the theory is such and such. But the term computational became v. fashionable very quickly leading to a wild overuse and changed meaning.

Thanks again for this, Olivia. I've read the first paper. Very insightful indeed. There's lots I could add and a few questions, so I'll email you rather than use up bandwidth here.
I absolutely like your Act 2 comments which are the ones the disciplines involved should embody.

Akin to that, recently wrote this:
"Our opinion is that teaching NHST as a mechanism to find significance without teaching how NHST works to produce a full literature is as impoverished as teaching musical scales and arpeggios without mentioning songs and dances."

You’re the only person who can do your research. You’re the expert.

Many happy returns!

Will do. Many thanks indeed.

This is a comment I'm going to think about for some time.
Why don't they? It seems so obvious. Only if you know how something works can you plan to improve it.

To say that Amy has the shortest name a storm can have, she’s lasting a very long time.

No. Just honest.

A different world. But, to be fair there were lots of parts of that world that were awful.

😀 Thank you. I wanted you-centric.

I should also have said that there were only 6 of us on the course. My other main course, Mathematical Psych, I was the only student which made lectures interesting (back row or front row?).

Can you point me to something to read on computationalism?
My out-of-date knowledge pretty much never got beyond Marr and my own twist on that. The term "computational" seems to have lost nearly all of its meaning since then.

😀 which is fairly old social psych.
It does have as its idea that the basic phenomenon we ought to study is two or more people not the sole person on their own. That's an enormous step forward for most of cognition.

**of the Logogen model of language. We used to take his class in the Little Rose pub round the corner from the Psych Lab. No visual aids, no handouts, no formal learning outcomes, but I remember almost everything he took us through.

When I was a grad reading Psych at Cambridge, 1970s, neuroscience by lesion studies was the big exciting thing that journals were full of. And one of the lecturers, John Morton**, used to delight in telling us all that there was nothing useful to Psychology gained by knowing "where" in the brain.

Gonae no apologise!

When MRI became affordable to neuroscience, there was a slightly wicked story told that neuroscience had solved the question of colour perception because, hey, V4 in striate cortex changes colour when people do colour naming.

Your work is impeccable, important and so timely.

I remember when GLM became useable, 1980s, and we talked in private about whether it was going to lead to impoverished theories because it could so easily dominate how we thought.

I'll add next a little anecdote of that sort that may amuse you.

Excellent. You have become my radar...

This gives me much hope for the future of Psychology.
Over my career, I've seen many tech fads come and go (or often not go), each displacing the basic effort of theoretical clarity by something that works off laziness.
Here, the latest fad is being shown for what it is very early in its lifetime.

Twenty words that just stopped me in my tracks.
I will flood with tears - soon when I'm able to. Not for me, but for some very close to me.

No.

I rather imagine it’s the decision the government wanted though.