Eray said:
Don't be ridiculous. You are trolling.
Check your mind out.
Cheers,
Computer Scientists: The "Crab People" of Neuroscience and "AI"?
No, I think he's basically right. Where he's wrong is just in not saying
that it should be behaviour analysts (not "psychologists"). Certainly,
up to the 1980s in neuroscience, it was the research scientists who gave
the computer department instructions (they didn't like it much but they
complied - where I worked, the scientists wore white coats <g>). The
computer people, skilled though they were, were there in a technical
capacity (and I can see how it would have been resented, as they would
take the user-requirements and have to code it). They felt they were
writing the theory, and to an extent, they were of course. But note how
that was driven by empirical scientific research. It was not sui
generis. The hard part is getting to the stage where you even know there
is a problem and can articulate it so that it can be programmed, even in
scientific ordinary language. The computer people ("crab people" get the
allusion?) were more like lab technicians than scientists. Even then,
there was a bit of "the stationary section taking over the office"
syndrome. That seems to be largely what has insidiously happened over
the years though.
This does not deny the important contribution which computer science and
engineering makes, but it has to be remembered that empirical scientists
have always "programmed", be that in chalk and talk theory construction
(modelling), or in writing code in FORTRAN etc in the early days to
control equipment or run statistical analyses. Whilst researchers will
use multi-variate statistics (both descriptive and inferential) to
analyse data, many in "AI" and "Computational Neuroscience" seem to have
fallen into the trap of believing their own hype when they "cognitivize"
these routines (as ANNs for example).
In most cases they *are* providing a service in what is today called,
(perhaps misleadingly, for little more than "politically correct"
reasons) "multidisciplinary research", but it is just a bizarre form of
grandiose egotism to assert that computer scientists are running, or
leading these disciplines. To say that the lead must come from behaviour
and "Behaviour Analysis", is not to give honorific *personal* status to
the *people* doing the behavioural work, it's just to say that that
*work* must guide neuroscience and the computational modelling and
engineering (as in fact it does). We have been through this before in
some detail within comp.ai.philosophy over the years. The consequence of
not getting your priorities right over this is, as Scott rightly says,
that you are likely to end up with people who really know next to
nothing about behaviour, trying to do things that they just don't
understand.
Sometimes - it looks like the lunatics i.e. the computer
scientists/technicians (and I only refer to those "lunatics" who think
they *do* run the show) really are running the asylum ("cognitive"
neuroscience/AI). If you think this through carefully (which *you*
specifically need to do) you'll see that your failure to grasp this,
accounts for many of the other silly things that you end up saying.
[Note, Behaviour Analysis - *not* psychology. Most of "psychology" is
cognitive and that's not the place to take the cues from either.]
.