Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

  • 58 Posts
  • 108 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 28th, 2022

help-circle





  • Ethically speaking, we should not be experimenting on humans, even with their explicit consent. It’s not allowed by any credible review board (such as the IRB) and in many countries you can be held legally liable for doing experiments on humans.

    With that being said, there have been exceptions to this, in that in some countries we allow unproven treatments to be given to terminal patients (patients who are going to die from a condition). We also generally don’t have repercussions for folks who experiment on themselves because they are perhaps the only people capable of truly weighing the pros and cons, of not being mislead by figures of authority (although I do think there is merit of discussing this with regards to being influenced by peers), and they are the only ones for which consent cannot be misconstrued.


















  • Honestly I would argue we need to expand our definition of what a mental illness is, in order to help these folks get treatment before they go and shoot a bunch of people.

    With that being said I think it’s important to call out this distinction for two major reasons. For one, it shines a light on the fact that someone having any mental illness does not mean they are going to go on a mass shooting. For two, it also shines a light on the fact that the people who do break in this way aren’t understood well - if they don’t classify neatly into the existing mental illnesses we have, we by definition do not have good research on the subject. Do patterns exist among this population of mass shooters that we can identify? Are there specific ways that they think which are maladjusted and can be corrected through existing education and mental health offerings? Might they belong to a larger group of illness which also includes other folks who are suffering in other ways, where studying this group might shed light on other folks who need help?


  • But they do exist, and while it’s great to be optimistic about a future in which they don’t exist, it’s also counterproductive to advocate against a better future which is much more likely to exist.

    How about, in addition to attempting to publish null results in existing journals, you also publish them in free online federated databases? Or better yet, work to establish a federated database which focuses on publishing null results to serve as a repository for articles which seem to struggle with getting published, so that scientists can draw upon it as a useful resource.


  • Great thought process! Yes, fMRI imaging is very vulnerable to p-hacking, which is more or less what the dead fish paper is pointing out (even when properly calibrated, it’s a problem with how noisy the raw data is in the first place). By classifying broad patterns, however, you eliminate some of the noise that the dead fish paper is showing can be problematic by abstracting away from whether micro structures meet statistical probability for being activation and move that to the more macro. While the dead fish paper may have shown activity in specific areas, if you were then to look at activity across larger portions or the entire brain, you would detect no statistical difference with rest (or dead fish, in this case).

    Furthermore, this study doesn’t stop there- it asks the question of whether these groupings tell us anything about these groups with regards to treatment. Each group is split up into subgroups based on treatment modality. These different treatments (therapy, drugs, etc.) are compared from group to group to see if any of these broad groupings by the fMRI machine make any kind of clinical sense. If the fMRI grouping was complete bogus and p-hacked, the treatment groups would show no difference between each other. This two step process ensures that bogus groups and groups which do not have any difference in clinical treatment outcomes are lost along the way via statistical rigor.