Comment by apathy
9 years ago
I'm tempted to point out that you went from zero to Godwin in record time. To assume that Konrad's party affiliation (likely a pragmatic choice at the time) either validates or invalidates his work is a bit absurd. The issue as I see it is one of the modern meaning, which is to say, a tendency to see patterns where none exist.
Nonetheless, let us see whether Konrad's work has been dismantled in more recent studies. A quick trip to PubMed suggests otherwise:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2800156/
Note that I did not claim Konrad's result was fundamental. I stated that if I ignored a fundamental result in my writing, I would be pilloried. Konrad's theory of prodromal schizophrenic ideation beginning with this tendency to see patterns where none exist is perhaps of interests to psychiatric historians, but it is not what I would call fundamental. I would claim that if the perfect term for a concept exists and is established, one should use it.
Apophenia, in its now accepted colloquial meaning, is an exceptionally handy shorthand for what the writer describes. Like other swell ideas (Gaussian processes, natural selection) it is so useful that it has accumulated several names (as a parallel, kriging and clonal evolution are alternate). Either would work fine here.
I didn't say his party affiliation validates or invalidates his theory. I said that a published paper was not able to validate it empirically.
The big issue I have is that it seems impossible to define a general concept of "pattern", such that one could claim it doesn't exist. If such a concept cannot be defined, then it is unclear what the concept actually means. The only thing I can imagine that could possibly fit would be if it meant that a person generates a theory and testable hypothesis that is able to invalidate the theory, and fails to find any supporting evidence when the hypothesis is tested, but still claims that the theory was validated in a way that is demonstrably false. Personally, I don't think psychiatrists are so invested in their patients that they would actually carry out such tests.
The article that you linked primarily recounts a single anecdote where Konrad seems to assume very much about his patient (also, it was unclear about the circumstances; do you know if the anecdote occurred during Nazi rule?). No mention is made of Konrad attempting to verify any if the patient's claims.
What result are you claiming as fundamental? The entire theory seems to be self defeating, as a pattern was suggested that has not been able to be verified.
The fundamental result behind the gambler's ruin is the human tendency to perceive patterns in genuine randomness. Rorschach blots, lotteries, slot machines, most betting endeavors all work because some humans will always find patterns in randomness. The result is easy enough as are the experiments (generate random noise from Uniform(0,1), project it onto a suitable manifold, hire some undergrads or local homeless people to look at them). That's not at all what I claimed Konrad originated. If you want an origin for this type of thing, de Finetti or Laplace or Descartes might be some candidates.
Konrad did give the phenomenon a catchy name and proposed that an increase in this tendency is an initial step in developing schizophrenia. If someone could actually establish this at a neurogenetic level that would be impressive and fundamental; I'm not aware of anyone doing so. I'd expect it to show up in a CNS journal and NIMH or WT to make a big deal if someone did.
The contrast between epiphany and apopheny is so striking, though, and so relevant to this topic, that it annoys me to no end when it is ignored. At the base of all of statistics is a desire to quantify how much of each is present in an observation, experiment, or cyclic series.
As you probably guessed, I am an applied statistician, not a neuroscientist. (I have serious issues with the way statistics are misused in neuroscience, for whatever that's worth). I do not, and cannot, claim that Konrad's theory is fundamental to that field. I do claim that anyone attempting to explain statistical reasoning to a lay public ought to internalize the contrast he proposed. Its setting as a proposed turn towards insanity is just a happy historical note.
>The fundamental result behind the gambler's ruin is the human tendency to perceive patterns in genuine randomness.
I don't think pattern recognition drives most gamblers. There are all kinds of other benefits, perceived or real, that are not accounted for in a purely monetary payoff grid.
I don't know how you can generate random noise. I assume you are using a standard, pixelated display to read this message. Even if a random process was choosing what to display on that screen, there are only a finite number of configurations. Exactly what you are viewing now could be recreated by such a random process.
The problem that hasn't been addressed yet is that "pattern" is not well-defined. If a random display shows a horizontal line pattern, it is still a pattern by some definition (and you would have no way to distinguish it from a "intentionally patterned" display that has the same configuration).
1 reply →
Incidentally, if you are a Popperian, you'll note that the best we can do in the sciences is to disprove (empirically falsify) a theory.
Outside of math, there is (almost?) no absolute proof. The weight of the evidence is all we have.
I believe Popper thought you might be able to find a metric to judge how close to a "truth" one theory might be compared to others.