The things we know that we know ain't so

This fellow sounds like he must be an undergrad, or a non-psychologist.

Thank you for that cogent ad-homimen argument!

No-one believes that the area traditionally defined as Broca's area is the only frontal area involved in language processing or even in Broca's aphasia, and even less for Wernicke's.

Which is why I never said that anyone believed that. It is common for damage to a number of different, often nearby, structures, to cause similar symptoms. It's common for it to be difficult to distinguish symptoms caused by different underlying damage.

In the case of Broca's area and Wernicke's area, however, it's more than that. There is strong evidence that damage to Broca's area does not cause Broca's aphasia (while damage to numerous other areas does); and damage to Wernicke's area does not cause Wernicke's aphasia (though damage to numerous other nearby areas does).

AIUI, different areas of the tongue do have different concentrations of the various sensors. The tongue map taken literally as "you taste salt only here, sweet only here, bitter only there" is wrong, but that the different areas represented are indeed more sensitive.

Thanks for the tip-off about the Tongue Map. I'm afraid it's still being presented as serious knowledge. I'll go to bed slightly wiser tonight.

Nitpick: I would appreciate those things even more with a link. (Upvoted nonetheless.)

By bruise aging do you mean this? Where would one go to verify it has been discredited?

The theory that different areas of the tongue tasted different things - the Tongue Map - has been pretty thoroughly debunked but lived for aboutt a century. This seems like something fairly easily testable.

The wikipedia article makes it look like it's basically true and that a straw man absolute version was "debunked."

I copy citations from other papers. When I can, I copy and paste BibTeX stanzas I find on the Web.

If we see a significant number of instances where the conclusions of a widely-accepted paper are later debunked by a simple test, then we might begin to suspect that something like this is happening.

How so? Could you clarify your reasoning?

• Scientists cite journals with conclusions that are convenient to cite (either because they corroborate their views or define a position to pivot from or argue with) whether or not they have been read. Journals with easily debunked conclusions might equivalently be not read (and thus unexamined) or read (and simply trusted).

• I think that the real test for whether cited publications are read or not is the following: if a publication is consistently cited for a conclusion it does not actually present, then this is evidence of no one actually having read the publication.

I recall in my research that it was very convenient in the literature to cite one particular publication for a minor but foundational tenet in the field. However, when I finally got a hard-copy of the paper I couldn't find this idea explicitly written anywhere. The thing is -- contradicting what I say above, unfortunately -- I think the paper was well-read, but people don't double-check citations if the citation seems reasonable.

That's great! I've wondered why so many mathematical papers (in non-math subject areas) contain misprints and omissions that make their equations uninterpretable. I'm wondering if even the referees and editors read them.

And I have a confession. I didn't read all of the papers I referenced!

Still, we can easily imagine a similar effect arising if the scientists do read the papers they cite, but use the citation lists in other papers to direct their own reading.

Indeed this is commonplace for all academic fields, though I don't see the problem with it, so long as the effect doesn't squash new work.

a question

if referencing is not based on knowledge or perhaps even relevance what does this imply for Google algorithm?

does it not organize search responses according to page links?

There are (bad) interpretations of QM, where they do mean "conscious" observer. This objection is very close to saying that MWI (multiple worlds) is "right", and the others are "wrong".

That may be the case, but it is far from universally acknowledged among practicing physicists. So, it's a bit unfair to suggest this "error", given that many prominent (but wrong) physicists would not agree that it is an error.

Oh, dear. Providing specific examples is a risky business. I still haven't figured out a safe way to discuss a field without making myself less welcome to some of its members.

Yes, this sounds more like a problem with textbooks than with science itself.

Textbooks are often censored for political reasons, such as Japanese textbooks' treatment of Nanjing, or American textbooks' treatment of the Japanese internment camps.

This is hard science though, so this won't suffice as an explanation. I fear that people are attached to superstitions about how the brain works. Maybe people like an inaccurately simplified explanation of the brain that claims that specific, local parts of the brain perform specific functions.

We know that fMRI research is pretty sketchy, but even smart people like Sam Harris seem to rely on it too much.

What could possibly explain the persistence of these kinds of beliefs (from textbook authors no less!)

Well, a fact about what people in the Middle Ages believed isn't properly in the realm of Physics. I'd expect the physicists to be mostly right about the physics they put in their textbooks, and any other stuff in there should be considered highly suspect.

Consider it yet another exercise in skepticism.

Perhaps most people believed the Earth was flat, while most educated people did not.

In fairness, the teacher may have understood that the student was right about kilometers, but was distracted and put-off by how he made his point, which was pretty brutal.

You know, pretty much how people regard me all the time :-P

This letter is not meant to be taken at face value; the writing is clearly ironic. Perhaps something from the Onion.

I think the criticism of "forensic science," generally in the linked Popular Mechanics article is overblown. Much forensic science is very good.

Fingerprints can be matched by computer. The only real dispute there is partial print matches. There was a scandal regarding very poor fingerprinting techniques; there have also been a couple of incidents of outright fraud. But if the prints match, dude, it's you. And there are many competent fingerprint examiners. I've never seen a computer mismatch out of thousands of examples.

I have some expertise in collision reconstruction. It's certainly true that some techniques used are not as good as others; expressing solid confidence in pedestrian throw is probably a bad idea. But collision reconstruction based on critical speed scuff marks and various other methods are solid physics.

Forensic accounting is valid science. Forensic chemists test for drugs and alcohol with very high accuracy. Properly done ballistics testing is good science. Hair sample comparisons are good science, if not oversold. DNA is good science, but not if you screw up your Bayesian analysis.

Some people testify to silly things. Some people make mistakes. Some people are willing to say things they know aren't true. Some scientists are underqualified. Some fields - like forensic odontology - lack the rigor of others, and should not be allowed in court barring a prior showing that the person can do what they say they can do.

But the idea that forensic science is "mostly created by cops who were guided by little more than common sense" seems quite misguided to me.

I have had the unfortunate experience to watch, not once, but twice the misuse of forensics to convict someone, in direct opposition to not one, two or three witnesses to the contrary, but four or five people who had testified that a person could not have committed a crime... Yet, the CSI Effect was in full play, and it was not until the arrest of the actual criminal in the first case and DNA exoneration in the second that the people involved were acquitted (and in one case, released. Thankfully after a very short stay in county jail, before they were moved to an actual prison).

My family also has a larger number of lawyers than normal, and this was something that was driven into us at an early age "Forensics are a bunch of BS for the most part". Now, that lesson was also tempered with another side "Forensics are a bunch of BS, Unless they help out your case"

Why was crystal healing brought up? What context? This is fascinating.

Why would you be surprised to find abject nonsense in a Women's Studies textbook?

Common sense works surprisingly well in some cases: even as a child I didn't believe the "10% of your brain" thing... think about it: the only way they could know this is if someone had 90% of their brain removed and wasn't affected... and that doesn't seem nearly as likely as people wanting to believe that everyone has vast untapped potential.

And let's not even get started on how/why evolution would provide us with 10x the brainpower we need... is there any precedent for that in evolution? Can cheetas run 10x faster than they normally do just by trying a little harder? Can seals hold their breath 10x longer than normal?

Love that book. Recommended.

There are some useful corrections there but I disrecommend it because Loewen's history is ignorant of economics.

You haven't spent much time editing Wikipedia, I take it.

Great idea in theory, in practice someone will revert the entry back to the common knowledge version in short order. Wikipedia's ban on original research, as well as fairness-of-viewpoint and notability restrictions, make it hard to use as such a vector.

If the updated knowledge becomes widespread, THEN wikipedia will be useful as a place to quickly check up on it. It will be a better indicator of update spread than anything else.

The topic introduced by this post is "things we know that we know ain't so". It is a good place to discuss widely-held beliefs disseminated despite solid evidence that falsifies the underlying hypothesis.

AGW seems to belong in a different category altogether, "things claimed by a majority of scientists that a vocal minority disputes". It is an ongoing controversy.

To turn this post into a soapbox would lessen its value. While the AGW controversy may have its place on LW, let me suggest that it should be the object of an appropriately researched top-level post, not opportunistic potshots.

Now I'm surprised by this. AFAIK it is a real possibility that we end up like Venus: a self-reinforcing heating up of the planet until life as we know today is no longer possible. If a certain threshold is reached the process is basically irreversible. The hotter it gets the more the permafrost regions melt up, and the frozen biomaterial there generates more CO2 to accelerate the process. Additionally there are gigantic frozen Methane reserves in the oceans that will also start to bubble up(in fact they are already bubbling up) and increase the warming even further, and Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.

So why do you think that this cannot happen on earth?

Truth value of "global warming has a serious chance of destroying the world" statement is entirely unverifiable to an average person. The media are saying it's true, quoting many leading scientists and politicians. By what mechanism do you suggest people reach an alternative conclusion?

There's outside view, but it's not accepted even here, as many have the same world-destroying beliefs about AI, and countless other subjects.

I think when they say "the world" they mean "our world", as in "the world we are able to live in", and on that front, we're probably already screwed.

Kuhn's paradigm shifts deal with the problem of diffusing new scientific theories. But I think it's a different issue. Kuhn claims that paradigm shift is difficult because people on different sides of the shift speak in incommensurate terms, and so can't understand each other. In the case of Broca's/Wernicke's areas, there's no problem communicating between different paradigms or even vocabularies.

To what problems are you referring? Academics can edit Wikipedia like anyone else.

The question is whether he said he invented the Internet. He didn't.

it's quite a success that you don't have to pay additional money to send a megabyte to another continent than you have to pay to send it to your neighbor while you have to pay more when you make a phonecall

Is it a success? If sending a megabyte to another continent costs more, then it's plausible that things would work better if the sender actually pays that cost. We may not know what we're missing.