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Great article, but I think I'm missing something. Several times through it I thought: "ok, but what about obvious explanation?". Examples: People who live i

by BoppreH 12y ago

Great article, but I think I'm missing something. Several times through it I thought: "ok, but what about obvious explanation?". Examples: People who live in consistently loud environments often experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones. But did they prove correlation or causation? To me most things that make noise also cause stress. Construction work makes lots of noise and changes your routine. A failing piece of hardware brings me technical headaches along with the noise. The article implies it's the noise itself that caused that. “In the absence of sound, the brain often tends to produce internal representations of sound.” When I think of a song, I can hear it in a very similar way to actual songs. Isn't this fairly well known? Same thing with the abrupt silence increasing attention. That seems... obvious? There seemed to be a type of background brain activity that was most visible, paradoxically, when the test subject was in a quiet room, doing absolutely nothing. First thing I would do is attribute this to the internal monologue, but I see no mention of that. When I'm by myself I'm definitely thinking harder than when listening to music. It's hard to actually do nothing, as people who meditate can tell you. Yet it's talked like it's entirely subconscious activity. I enjoyed reading this piece, and did learn a few things, but it frustrates me to no end when they gloss over stuff like this. Maybe they are not as obvious as I thought, or I missed something that clearly proves them wrong, but my feeling is that the article ignores common sense in a few spots.

nyrulez 12y ago
Correlation vs causation has sort of become a cultural trapdoor to all new claims. In reality, it is very hard to find the actual cause of many things we take for granted. Its often that the first event that sets off the chain of events is mentioned as the cause itself. Sometimes even if one doesn't know the mechanism, as long as you can reliably reproduce or predict the same, its seen as good enough for practical purposes, if not for textbook teaching. For example, not drinking water for a day tends to make me thirsty. Thats a correlation. Is it the cause? Not really. It just sets off a chain of events, which triggers dehydration, and eventually neuro chemical triggers of thirst somewhere in my brain centre.Even that centre is probably not well understood. But we still say "not drinking water causes thirst". it may be possible to mess with that circuitry to avoid these feelings. In fact a lot of neurological drugs prey on this fact. Causality is a very philosopical subject. But I would argue that for most practical purposes, reproducibility and predictability are often good enough to be useful, even if mechanism is currently unknown. See manipulation theories in causality (along with some intro on causality calculus) if you really want to dig deep into the beast known as causality.

by BoppreH 12y ago

nyrulez 12y ago

Correlation vs causation has sort of become a cultural trapdoor to all new claims. In reality, it is very hard to find the actual cause of many things we take for granted. Its often that the first event that sets off the chain of events is mentioned as the cause itself. Sometimes even if one doesn't know the mechanism, as long as you can reliably reproduce or predict the same, its seen as good enough for practical purposes, if not for textbook teaching. For example, not drinking water for a day tends to make me thirsty. Thats a correlation. Is it the cause? Not really. It just sets off a chain of events, which triggers dehydration, and eventually neuro chemical triggers of thirst somewhere in my brain centre.Even that centre is probably not well understood. But we still say "not drinking water causes thirst". it may be possible to mess with that circuitry to avoid these feelings. In fact a lot of neurological drugs prey on this fact. Causality is a very philosopical subject. But I would argue that for most practical purposes, reproducibility and predictability are often good enough to be useful, even if mechanism is currently unknown. See manipulation theories in causality (along with some intro on causality calculus) if you really want to dig deep into the beast known as causality.