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Scientific Fraud?
My paper | JM a PhD Student

Posted on 01/15/2004 1:33:08 PM PST by Phd Student

Science oR Fraud?

Dr. David S. Touretzky’s line of research is “Cognitive Science” in the area of how the rat brain functions. A little background:

“Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than sixty universities in North America and Europe have established cognitive science programs and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science. Attempts to understand the mind and its operation go back at least to the Ancient Greeks, when philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle tried to explain the nature of human knowledge. The study of mind remained the province of philosophy until the nineteenth century, when experimental psychology developed. Wilhelm Wundt and his students initiated laboratory methods for studying mental operations more systematically. Within a few decades, however, experimental psychology became dominated by behaviorism, a view that virtually denied the existence of mind. According to behaviorists such as J. B. Watson, psychology should restrict itself to examining the relation between observable stimuli and observable behavioral responses. Talk of consciousness and mental representations was banished from respectable scientific discussion. Especially in North America, behaviorism dominated the psychological scene through the 1950s. Around 1956, the intellectual landscape began to change dramatically. George Miller summarized numerous studies which showed that the capacity of human thinking is limited, with short-term memory, for example, limited to around seven items. He proposed that memory limitations can be overcome by recoding information into chunks, mental representations that require mental procedures for encoding and decoding the information. At this time, primitive computers had been around for only a few years, but pioneers such as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon were founding the field of artificial intelligence. In addition, Noam Chomsky rejected behaviorist assumptions about language as a learned habit and proposed instead to explain language comprehension in terms of mental grammars consisting of rules. The six thinkers mentioned in this paragraph can be viewed as the founders of cognitive science.”

From The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

MONEY

The possibilities for federal funding were staggering for a field which purported to be able to decode the human mind. Funds were rapidly made available, not only from those branches of government seeking advancements in mental health but also from military and intelligence organizations. Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University boasts one of the better financed programs.

“SCIENCE”

CMU’s Dr. Touretzky is an inheritor of the much criticized (and even discredited) bases of the behaviorist approach mentioned above, both in practice and philosophy. In practice, his “primary research interest is understanding how space is represented in the rodent brain,” in his words.

Philosophically, Touretzky is mind-negating in the extreme, proceeding from the notion that, in his words, “humans are just a bunch of tissues.”

And so he turns to the study of the rat brain as his contribution to the development of Artificial Intelligence. “Studying the place cell system will give us insight into how brains compute complicated things, and that in turn will better prepare us to understand monkey brains and, eventually, human brains.” Fortunately for those who find it chilling to have a “scientist” who believes humans are just a bunch of tissues performing such experiments on us, Dr. Touretzky’s actual successes are negligible.

Picking up the failed and abandoned experiments of Pavlov’s and Skinner’s bells and boxes and their attendant philosophies, Touretzky adds a current AI approach to these old ideas, and voila, it looks like actual science. He’s managed to carve out a lucrative niche for himself and his university, despite the outrageous cost in dollars of his debatable “results.”

And there is plenty of work for him to do among the rats. Noting that “cognitive neuroscience assertions are tentative and constantly subject to rigorous experimental tests, which they sometimes fail, forcing the theories to be revised,” he studies in mind-numbing detail the intricate neural responses of rodents to attempt to quantify how they learn, and writes about them ad nauseam in arcane engineering and neuro-scientific detail designed to impress the initiated and overwhelm the layman. More likely, his writings are designed to deceive potential government and science foundation grantors into thinking something of value is actually being done.

The layman reading his research papers and taking the trouble to sift through obligatory academic structure, and plenty of jargon, mathematics and graphs to satisfy the requirements of “scientific study,” may note such stunning findings as “It’s not clear that rats have dreams the way people do.”

Significantly, Touretzky states, “Pomposity and mediocrity are measured by the ability to string long phrases together without saying anything worthwhile.” This could be a review of much of his published work in a nutshell.

PERSPECTIVE

After numerous years and millions of dollars - particularly taxpayers’ dollars nothing has been accomplished.

At a time when nearly 20 percent of American children live below the federal poverty line, Dr. Touretzky is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to establish how rats perceive space.

THE TURING TEST

The Turing Test has been at the heart of many discussions in AI, philosophy and cognitive science for the past 50 years, and has been subject to different kinds of criticism. The test is described as follows: The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B. This test has been derided by some leaders in the field of AI as encouraging the development of “artificial con artists” able to meet the requirements of the test without actually making any progress forward in defining artificial intelligence much less accomplishing it. THE TOURETZKY TEST Can a researcher fool a grant donor into thinking worthwhile work is being done at the cost of millions of dollars by the use of pomposity and mediocrity in managing to string long phrases together without saying anything worthwhile. These what Dr. Touretzky’s “research” papers are all about. Can researcher A, cause grantor B, to believe that pompous and mediocre research paper C is worth millions of dollars while being actually a mere academic exercise in draining funds from the taxpayer, with no legitimate result?


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: touretzky

1 posted on 01/15/2004 1:33:08 PM PST by Phd Student
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To: Phd Student
OK
2 posted on 01/15/2004 1:41:41 PM PST by Tijeras_Slim (Death before dhimmi.)
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To: Phd Student
INTREP - SCIENCE
3 posted on 01/15/2004 2:47:04 PM PST by LiteKeeper
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To: Tijeras_Slim
I feel the urge to unearth a slide rule reading that.
4 posted on 01/15/2004 6:43:08 PM PST by cyborg
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To: Phd Student
Anything discredited by Noam Chomsky is OK in my book.
5 posted on 01/15/2004 6:49:41 PM PST by js1138
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To: cyborg
I feel the urge to unearth a slide rule reading that.

Now what would a young thing like you know about slide rules? :)

6 posted on 01/16/2004 5:21:28 AM PST by Tijeras_Slim (Death before dhimmi.)
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To: Tijeras_Slim
I have an abacus :-)
7 posted on 01/16/2004 6:17:56 AM PST by cyborg
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