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I think I will forever be bitter about an argument that I had with a professor in college about statistical significance. There was a study with 12 (or some oth

I think I will forever be bitter about an argument that I had with a professor in college about statistical significance. There was a study with 12 (or some other tiny N) people who were told to click a button when they saw some change as a laser was moving in a circle. They were then asked to go back and pick the place where the laser was when they observed the change. The study found that people remembered clicking the button 10ms (or some other tiny value) before they actually did. This was clearly grounds for all of us to question whether humans had free will at all, because the result was statistically significant after all! When I challenged the professor on this, I was told that I should take a statistics class. I think that professor still turns me off from philosophy to this day. This happened in a philosophy class

Waterluvian 8y ago
Maybe this professor knows it but has found themselves stuck for the rest of their life in this career.
layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
How is this experiment related to free will at all? Sounds to me like something about sensory/motor latency.
- penagwin 8y ago
  Yeah I would've done the one were you have everyone in the room close their eyes and think of a "random" number, write it down, then compare the distribution. Results like those are what make me question free will (My mind "weighted" my answers in ways I can't control).
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    How does being a bad random number generator mean that we don't have free will? I don't see these two as contradictory.
    - penagwin 8y ago
      At least when I did it in class we had lots of certain numbers, essentially none of certain numbers. A lot of them lined up with common "lucky" or "unlucky" numbers, even if everyone said they didn't pick it for that reason. To me that shows us how outside forces influence our thoughts. Did I want to buy this garbage bag because it's a good value, has a good design, or because I've heard "DONT GET MAD, GET GLAD!!" 1000 times? Every thought we have is affected by our experiences, and many experiences can be controlled - they call these advertisements. I find this topic fascinating. I suffer from depression, and my thoughts during a major depressive episode can be the stark opposite from when I feel well (Let's say it's about suicide). How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences?
      - solipsism 8y ago
        How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences? You don't have actually free will, if by free you mean "uninfluenced by anything". There's no evidence that such a thing exists, and anyone who claims such a thing invariably appeals to supernatural or hand-wavy explanations. Note that many thinkers who claim free will exist actually are saying "what most people mean by 'free will' does exist", and usually that means "an agent capable of making choices without outside influence". This idea is compatible with determinism, so these people are called compatibilists.
        bellerose 8y ago
        How is being an agent capable of making choices without outside influence compatible with determinism? My understanding is nobody can ever be an agent capable of making choices without outside influence. A person is fundamentally influenced at birth by external forces and moulding the person by deterministic process without the person having any real control. Furthermore one could only say they had free will if before life one agreed to take role of birth as a specific person and with knowing how life will play out till the end. Compatibilists are people who don't understand determinism because free will doesn't work with determinism. /hard determinist.
abtinf 8y ago
Dave Rubin recently had an interesting interview with Onkar Ghate, an objectivist philosopher, about free will. You might enjoy it and it might rekindle your interest in philosophy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rvush0oW-cw https://youtube.com/watch?v=rvush0oW-cw IIRC, this interview with neuroscientist Dale Stevens dives into the claims (similar to your example) from the past few years where scientists try to disprove free will: https://youtube.com/watch?v=X6VtwHpZ1BM https://youtube.com/watch?v=X6VtwHpZ1BM
BucketSort 8y ago
It's funny because statisticians are among the loudest critics of how easily statistics can be abused. I encourage you not to be turned away from a whole field because one bad representative. Professors are humans too and say a lot of dumb things. Very few are their field incarnate.
- EGreg 8y ago
  What do Bayesians say these days btw? I still find Bayes to be more grounded and less “pie in the sky” than frequentists.
  - pas 8y ago
    It all depends on your priors what they say. :) But seriously, you can have the most pathological prior distribution, so you can then stick with it forever. (Let's say your prior predestines you to always find that whatever the new piece of data you get is so unlikely that it's more likely that it's an error/conspiracy than a real piece of data that you have to do belief update on.) So, instead of coming up with a significance level, you have to estimate the chance of observing a null result, which determines how much new data moves your posterior distribution. The "advantage" of the Bayesian approach is that - in theory - you can incorporate every tiny little bit of data into your model (distribution). The disadvantage is, that it's very susceptible to various biases (through a biased prior).
  - skj 8y ago
    Bayesian statistics are mathematically perfect, as long as your priors are true. Unfortunately, they are not.
    - EGreg 8y ago
      I think it’s the opposite. Your confidence intervals are only true if your distribution is true. But how can it be that perfect? At least Bayesians adjust their knowledge like scientists.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
arthurcolle 8y ago
Reminds me of my last Google interview where, upon not being able to conjure up the complete solution to a puzzle solver in 25 minutes, the interviewer's response to my question of "well I thought the interview would be on actually implementing data structures & algorithms as opposed to using DS&A to solve puzzle challenges, do you have any recommendations on how to get better at these puzzles challenges?" to which he replied "yeah definitely study data structures and algorithms." .... like riiight, thanks for that useful nugget of information - I'll be sure to ask for a refund for all that college tuition since I've obviously never ever heard heard of those data structures and algorithms since I couldn't solve a problem in an arbitrary time span. Sorry, not trying to diverge from the topic at hand, but it was the same kind of ridiculous response that is so disconnected from the frame of reference of the question that I couldn't help but share. I should have had him solve a captcha for me, still not convinced that it wasn't just a reverse turing test. I can't stand when people give flippant responses to fair questions - I can totally imagine your frustration in your case.
- killaken2000 8y ago
  They might not even know the answer themselves and have a solution in front of them that they are comparing yours to. Then they just said the first thing that came to their mind rather than that they don't know.
jobigoud 8y ago
Your description almost matches an experiment done in EEG research called the Libet experiment [1], although it's a bit different than how you describe it I'm confident this is what you are referring to. They find that when you perform an action, there is a EEG spike [2] in the motor cortex well before you actually consciously decide to perform the action. The experiment is conducted with a dot running around a circle and the subject has to tell when (as per where the dot was) he decided to act. The EEG potential is seen prior to that decision moment. This is related to free-will as it is as if the decision of acting is not coming from your conscious self but from a deeper layer. [1] Libet experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjCt-L0Ph5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjCt-L0Ph5o [2] Bereitschaftspotential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereitschaftspotential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereitschaftspotential
- deleted 8y ago
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- worldsayshi 8y ago
  Perhaps I'm missing the point here but why does this say anything about free will? Of course you can't make split second conscious decisions. But you've still made a conscious decision to prime your subconscious facilities to act in a certain way. The consciousness is super slow. It doesn't make sense to have it "do" anything. But it's good for making executive decisions. The CEO doesn't make the product.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    That's pretty much my line of thought. If I decide to bicycle somewhere, I'm certainly not consciously thinking through most of the act of actually cycling, but I have no doubt that the "uuugh, this is going to suck but I need the exercise" decision happened on a conscious level.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - azernik 8y ago
    It meshes with certain other results, for example on timing of predictions (http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindless-robot-with-no-free-will http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindles...), and most interestingly on split-brain patients (http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabulate-stories-which-builds-a-meaningful-narrative-for-our-life http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabul...). In the latter case, split-brain people would make choices based on information only available to their right brain, then when asked to explain them would unconsciously invent an explanation for that choice which was based only on information from their left brain. I'm not sure philosophically whether our inability to understand our decisions undermines our free will, but it certainly undermines any ability to consciously prime ourselves to make certain decisions - hard to have that feedback loop when you don't even know what decision you made!
dekhn 8y ago
This is a well known experiment that has deep implications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will see Libet experiment among others). It doesn't question free will directly. Making decisions without being consciously aware doesn't contraindicate free will. Personally, I side with Dennett (as always). Also, many studies have n=12 and still have statistical power.
- ohazi 8y ago
  I imagine that it takes longer for your vision system to generate a useful output than whatever is responsible for telling you that you just stubbed your toe. If signals like touch, smell, sight, etc. arrived at the input to your perceptual system immediately, you'd get a bunch of inputs for the same event at different times, and it would probably be difficult for your perceptual system to make sense of of them. I think the only thing the spinning wheel experiment shows is that the brain has some sort of perceptual delay/compensation mechanism that's probably there to account for these differences in input processing times. And it probably backdates the "timestamp" of the event so that things that rely on short time intervals (e.g. control tasks like balancing) still work reliably. I don't know why anybody would think this says anything about free will. Philosophers are weird.
  - mr_toad 8y ago
    > I don't know why anybody would think this says anything about free will. If some decisions that we think are made consciously are actually unconscious, then how do we know that any decisions we make are really conscious decisions? What if our consciousness makes no decisions, and is just a figment of our imagination.
matthewwiese 8y ago
I'm sorry an incompetent professor left such a bad taste in your mouth, and on the field as a whole. What's strange to me, is that my interpretation of the results of such an experiment wouldn't even lead to your professor's conclusion. The takeaway being the fallibility of sensory perception, where I might then prompt the class for a discussion of their intuitive refutations of empiricism before diving into the literature. Unfortunately, being a philosophy major myself, I know all too well that a crap teacher can totally ruin a philosophy topic (let alone a topic of any subject). From my 4 years in philosophy classes of varying levels of difficulty, the common denominator between a fruitful time spent in class has been the willingness of the professor to engage with their students. Whether it's logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, &c, the principal property of a quality professor is his/her dialectical ability. Hell, that's how philosophy & theology was taught in the first universities! The professor would profess and then the students would engage their master in the subject at hand.
- openfuture 8y ago
  TIL: profess /prəˈfɛs/ verb 1. claim that one has (a quality or feeling), especially when this is not the case. "he had professed his love for her only to walk away" synonyms: declare, announce, proclaim, assert, state, affirm, avow, maintain, protest, aver, vow; 2. affirm one's faith in or allegiance to (a religion or set of beliefs). "a people professing Christianity" synonyms: state/affirm one's faith in, affirm one's allegiance to, make a public declaration of, declare publicly, avow, confess, acknowledge publicly "in 325 the Emperor himself professed Christianity"
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    Brief etymology of "professor": From Latin "profiteri", to the form "profess-" meaning "declared publicly", and to "professor", then to Late Middle English as "professor". So a professor's practice is probably closer to definition 2: "make a public declaration of" whatever one's skill or knowledge of a particular art might be.
- baddox 8y ago
  Genuine question. What about the professor's statements were inaccurate or incompetent? Is the sample size really too small? Is the claimed conclusion about free will invalid? Or is the criticism just the dismissive tone toward the student?
bpchaps 8y ago
Hm. I used to do competitive air rifle shooting (fwiw top five in the nation at the time), and this experiment comes close to the sort of training that I would do with my coach. He would act as a spotter and after every single shot, would ask me where my shot was (eg, 9pt at 4o'clock). We did this probably 300 times in the course of my training. Despite the "jitter", it was something that could eventually be done with surprising consistency after a while of training this way. It would be a completely different matter if the training was done on a new shooter (who were never, ever good when they first start). The training was also complete ineffective if I had caffeine, or wasn't in the right mood. My guessing ability would then effectively match what was seen in this test. I'm not sure how this test would have proven anything, especially with such a small sample size. As another poster mentioned, this very much sounds like a test for sensory motor latency, which is absolutely a nontrivial thing for this sort of test. If the test you described was done against trained shooters, I'd imagine the conclusion would likely be the opposite.
quickthrower2 8y ago
The people with free will refused to do the experiment.
draw_down 8y ago
That sounds like a N = 1 to me. You need more data. :)

Waterluvian 8y ago

Maybe this professor knows it but has found themselves stuck for the rest of their life in this career.

layoutIfNeeded 8y ago

How is this experiment related to free will at all? Sounds to me like something about sensory/motor latency.

penagwin 8y ago
Yeah I would've done the one were you have everyone in the room close their eyes and think of a "random" number, write it down, then compare the distribution. Results like those are what make me question free will (My mind "weighted" my answers in ways I can't control).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  How does being a bad random number generator mean that we don't have free will? I don't see these two as contradictory.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    At least when I did it in class we had lots of certain numbers, essentially none of certain numbers. A lot of them lined up with common "lucky" or "unlucky" numbers, even if everyone said they didn't pick it for that reason. To me that shows us how outside forces influence our thoughts. Did I want to buy this garbage bag because it's a good value, has a good design, or because I've heard "DONT GET MAD, GET GLAD!!" 1000 times? Every thought we have is affected by our experiences, and many experiences can be controlled - they call these advertisements. I find this topic fascinating. I suffer from depression, and my thoughts during a major depressive episode can be the stark opposite from when I feel well (Let's say it's about suicide). How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences?
    - solipsism 8y ago
      How can I truly have "free will" if my decisions are so dependent on external influences? You don't have actually free will, if by free you mean "uninfluenced by anything". There's no evidence that such a thing exists, and anyone who claims such a thing invariably appeals to supernatural or hand-wavy explanations. Note that many thinkers who claim free will exist actually are saying "what most people mean by 'free will' does exist", and usually that means "an agent capable of making choices without outside influence". This idea is compatible with determinism, so these people are called compatibilists.
      - bellerose 8y ago
        How is being an agent capable of making choices without outside influence compatible with determinism? My understanding is nobody can ever be an agent capable of making choices without outside influence. A person is fundamentally influenced at birth by external forces and moulding the person by deterministic process without the person having any real control. Furthermore one could only say they had free will if before life one agreed to take role of birth as a specific person and with knowing how life will play out till the end. Compatibilists are people who don't understand determinism because free will doesn't work with determinism. /hard determinist.

abtinf 8y ago

Dave Rubin recently had an interesting interview with Onkar Ghate, an objectivist philosopher, about free will. You might enjoy it and it might rekindle your interest in philosophy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rvush0oW-cw https://youtube.com/watch?v=rvush0oW-cw IIRC, this interview with neuroscientist Dale Stevens dives into the claims (similar to your example) from the past few years where scientists try to disprove free will: https://youtube.com/watch?v=X6VtwHpZ1BM https://youtube.com/watch?v=X6VtwHpZ1BM

BucketSort 8y ago

It's funny because statisticians are among the loudest critics of how easily statistics can be abused. I encourage you not to be turned away from a whole field because one bad representative. Professors are humans too and say a lot of dumb things. Very few are their field incarnate.

EGreg 8y ago
What do Bayesians say these days btw? I still find Bayes to be more grounded and less “pie in the sky” than frequentists.
- pas 8y ago
  It all depends on your priors what they say. :) But seriously, you can have the most pathological prior distribution, so you can then stick with it forever. (Let's say your prior predestines you to always find that whatever the new piece of data you get is so unlikely that it's more likely that it's an error/conspiracy than a real piece of data that you have to do belief update on.) So, instead of coming up with a significance level, you have to estimate the chance of observing a null result, which determines how much new data moves your posterior distribution. The "advantage" of the Bayesian approach is that - in theory - you can incorporate every tiny little bit of data into your model (distribution). The disadvantage is, that it's very susceptible to various biases (through a biased prior).
- skj 8y ago
  Bayesian statistics are mathematically perfect, as long as your priors are true. Unfortunately, they are not.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    I think it’s the opposite. Your confidence intervals are only true if your distribution is true. But how can it be that perfect? At least Bayesians adjust their knowledge like scientists.
jrochkind1 8y ago

arthurcolle 8y ago

Reminds me of my last Google interview where, upon not being able to conjure up the complete solution to a puzzle solver in 25 minutes, the interviewer's response to my question of "well I thought the interview would be on actually implementing data structures & algorithms as opposed to using DS&A to solve puzzle challenges, do you have any recommendations on how to get better at these puzzles challenges?" to which he replied "yeah definitely study data structures and algorithms." .... like riiight, thanks for that useful nugget of information - I'll be sure to ask for a refund for all that college tuition since I've obviously never ever heard heard of those data structures and algorithms since I couldn't solve a problem in an arbitrary time span. Sorry, not trying to diverge from the topic at hand, but it was the same kind of ridiculous response that is so disconnected from the frame of reference of the question that I couldn't help but share. I should have had him solve a captcha for me, still not convinced that it wasn't just a reverse turing test. I can't stand when people give flippant responses to fair questions - I can totally imagine your frustration in your case.

killaken2000 8y ago
They might not even know the answer themselves and have a solution in front of them that they are comparing yours to. Then they just said the first thing that came to their mind rather than that they don't know.

jobigoud 8y ago

Your description almost matches an experiment done in EEG research called the Libet experiment [1], although it's a bit different than how you describe it I'm confident this is what you are referring to. They find that when you perform an action, there is a EEG spike [2] in the motor cortex well before you actually consciously decide to perform the action. The experiment is conducted with a dot running around a circle and the subject has to tell when (as per where the dot was) he decided to act. The EEG potential is seen prior to that decision moment. This is related to free-will as it is as if the decision of acting is not coming from your conscious self but from a deeper layer. [1] Libet experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjCt-L0Ph5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjCt-L0Ph5o [2] Bereitschaftspotential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereitschaftspotential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereitschaftspotential

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
worldsayshi 8y ago
Perhaps I'm missing the point here but why does this say anything about free will? Of course you can't make split second conscious decisions. But you've still made a conscious decision to prime your subconscious facilities to act in a certain way. The consciousness is super slow. It doesn't make sense to have it "do" anything. But it's good for making executive decisions. The CEO doesn't make the product.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  That's pretty much my line of thought. If I decide to bicycle somewhere, I'm certainly not consciously thinking through most of the act of actually cycling, but I have no doubt that the "uuugh, this is going to suck but I need the exercise" decision happened on a conscious level.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- azernik 8y ago
  It meshes with certain other results, for example on timing of predictions (http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindless-robot-with-no-free-will http://www.kurzweilai.net/more-evidence-that-youre-a-mindles...), and most interestingly on split-brain patients (http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabulate-stories-which-builds-a-meaningful-narrative-for-our-life http://www.powerofstories.com/our-brains-constantly-confabul...). In the latter case, split-brain people would make choices based on information only available to their right brain, then when asked to explain them would unconsciously invent an explanation for that choice which was based only on information from their left brain. I'm not sure philosophically whether our inability to understand our decisions undermines our free will, but it certainly undermines any ability to consciously prime ourselves to make certain decisions - hard to have that feedback loop when you don't even know what decision you made!

dekhn 8y ago

This is a well known experiment that has deep implications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will see Libet experiment among others). It doesn't question free will directly. Making decisions without being consciously aware doesn't contraindicate free will. Personally, I side with Dennett (as always). Also, many studies have n=12 and still have statistical power.

ohazi 8y ago
I imagine that it takes longer for your vision system to generate a useful output than whatever is responsible for telling you that you just stubbed your toe. If signals like touch, smell, sight, etc. arrived at the input to your perceptual system immediately, you'd get a bunch of inputs for the same event at different times, and it would probably be difficult for your perceptual system to make sense of of them. I think the only thing the spinning wheel experiment shows is that the brain has some sort of perceptual delay/compensation mechanism that's probably there to account for these differences in input processing times. And it probably backdates the "timestamp" of the event so that things that rely on short time intervals (e.g. control tasks like balancing) still work reliably. I don't know why anybody would think this says anything about free will. Philosophers are weird.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  > I don't know why anybody would think this says anything about free will. If some decisions that we think are made consciously are actually unconscious, then how do we know that any decisions we make are really conscious decisions? What if our consciousness makes no decisions, and is just a figment of our imagination.

matthewwiese 8y ago

I'm sorry an incompetent professor left such a bad taste in your mouth, and on the field as a whole. What's strange to me, is that my interpretation of the results of such an experiment wouldn't even lead to your professor's conclusion. The takeaway being the fallibility of sensory perception, where I might then prompt the class for a discussion of their intuitive refutations of empiricism before diving into the literature. Unfortunately, being a philosophy major myself, I know all too well that a crap teacher can totally ruin a philosophy topic (let alone a topic of any subject). From my 4 years in philosophy classes of varying levels of difficulty, the common denominator between a fruitful time spent in class has been the willingness of the professor to engage with their students. Whether it's logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, &c, the principal property of a quality professor is his/her dialectical ability. Hell, that's how philosophy & theology was taught in the first universities! The professor would profess and then the students would engage their master in the subject at hand.

openfuture 8y ago
TIL: profess /prəˈfɛs/ verb 1. claim that one has (a quality or feeling), especially when this is not the case. "he had professed his love for her only to walk away" synonyms: declare, announce, proclaim, assert, state, affirm, avow, maintain, protest, aver, vow; 2. affirm one's faith in or allegiance to (a religion or set of beliefs). "a people professing Christianity" synonyms: state/affirm one's faith in, affirm one's allegiance to, make a public declaration of, declare publicly, avow, confess, acknowledge publicly "in 325 the Emperor himself professed Christianity"
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  Brief etymology of "professor": From Latin "profiteri", to the form "profess-" meaning "declared publicly", and to "professor", then to Late Middle English as "professor". So a professor's practice is probably closer to definition 2: "make a public declaration of" whatever one's skill or knowledge of a particular art might be.
baddox 8y ago
Genuine question. What about the professor's statements were inaccurate or incompetent? Is the sample size really too small? Is the claimed conclusion about free will invalid? Or is the criticism just the dismissive tone toward the student?

bpchaps 8y ago

Hm. I used to do competitive air rifle shooting (fwiw top five in the nation at the time), and this experiment comes close to the sort of training that I would do with my coach. He would act as a spotter and after every single shot, would ask me where my shot was (eg, 9pt at 4o'clock). We did this probably 300 times in the course of my training. Despite the "jitter", it was something that could eventually be done with surprising consistency after a while of training this way. It would be a completely different matter if the training was done on a new shooter (who were never, ever good when they first start). The training was also complete ineffective if I had caffeine, or wasn't in the right mood. My guessing ability would then effectively match what was seen in this test. I'm not sure how this test would have proven anything, especially with such a small sample size. As another poster mentioned, this very much sounds like a test for sensory motor latency, which is absolutely a nontrivial thing for this sort of test. If the test you described was done against trained shooters, I'd imagine the conclusion would likely be the opposite.

quickthrower2 8y ago

The people with free will refused to do the experiment.

draw_down 8y ago

That sounds like a N = 1 to me. You need more data. :)