20 August 2012

What If Someone Else Wrote Lord of The Rings?

Explorations about how the fantasy epic might have been written in the hands of the likes of Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway, and Oscar Wilde are linked here.

4 comments:

Ivana Fulli MD said...

Since neuroskeptic keeps censoring and delating my comments those days I send it the one for you there.(NS delete on that post a comment of mine stating that Of course replicability was not enough because you need to start with an intelligent idea but by defect a sexy one can do but ethics should prevent using as research material psychology student bribed with university credit for being guinea pigs (just to give you the general meaning).

This really is kindly meant and of course you can rightly delete it there as out of topic!

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2733981550095578188&postID=6618721415047067322

Ivana Fulli MD said...

Dear Andrew,

Broadly speaking, I am on your side on that post and i am grateful to neuroskeptic for letting you express your opinion slightly out of topic- or putting the problem in perspective...

But be careful when you write things like:

///(...) non-diagnostic symptoms that are part of the syndrome (...)///

For a lawyer or you average neuroscientist I cannot answer; but for any MD it sounds rather difficult to accept the notion of "non-diagnostic symptoms" being part of a medical syndrome".

May be you meant " non pathognomonic symptoms "

Nb: This is just a friendly remark since I like people with the courage to marry for love outside their own culture .Reasonable busy people know when they are just writing a comment on sb's blog and not writing a blog post and they write in a hurry.

28 August 2012 08:32



Ivana Fulli MD said...

Anonymous Ivana Fulli MD said...

Andrew,

"Replication and replicability aren't so terribly important when the hole discipline is lost in the wilderness and using methods that have far too low resolution to capture what is going on in a complex world."

How can a USA lawyer imply that giving public or benefactor money to fraudsters is no sin ?

The "bestest best best" (Eric Charles 26 08 12 at 00:10 )are rare by definition and neurosciences in general are lacking good innovative ideas but at least you can expect integrity as a minimum in a profession that claim to be scientific because they use stats!

28 August 2012 12:52

You are indeed inspiring and checking to see if our Neuroskeptic has censored my last comment is an incitation.

No offense intented though since my eldest son, Samuel Fulli-Lemaire , a law PhD candidate, is a great admirer of USA lawyers and I trust his superior intelligence he took from his father!

andrew said...

"for any MD it sounds rather difficult to accept the notion of "non-diagnostic symptoms" being part of a medical syndrome".

I may be skipping a logical step and stretching the definition of syndrome here.

What I mean to say is that DSM disorders mostly correspond to one or more specific biophysical or psychological conditions with a common etiology. But, only a few of the observable aspects of any given DSM disorder (i.e. the symptoms of an underlying DSM disorder) are used by the DSM for the purpose of determining that someone has that DSM disorder.

Many of the specific conditions that give rise to symptoms that fit the diagnostic criteria for a DSM disorder are not the diagnostic symptoms that the DSM uses as criteria to determine if someone actually has that DSM disorder. For example, perhaps a failure to pass the infamous "marshmello test" as a preschooler is an observable symptom that accurately predicts juvenile and adult ADHD, even though it is not one of the criteria used by the DSM to define whether or not someone has ADHD. Similarly, it wouldn't be surprising if some subtle thing, like pupal dialation speed was actually highly diagnostic of ADHD even though it wasn't part of the DSM definition.

These symptoms are what I am calling "non-diagnostic symptoms" in the literal sense that they are not criteria used to diagnose the DSM disorder by are often expressed as symptoms by people who have the DSM disorder.

While most DSM disorders are, strictly speaking, syndromes, since they are defined by their symptoms, rather than their root cause (the way most physical diseases are defined) which is rarely well understood, I suppose that it isn't entirely correct to call a non-diagnostic symptom of one or more of the underlying conditions that have a common etiology to be part of the syndrome that is a DSM disorder itself (simply as a matter of definition and a fussy use of language).

But, my basic notion is that there exist observable symptoms that are not included in the DSM as diagnostic critera that are at least as accurate (if not more) a means of diagnosing the problems that psychiatrists were trying to get at when the defined a DSM disorder in the first place (or at least one of its subtypes) than the ones currently used. In any model of abnormal psychology in which DSM conditions are predominantly biologically based, this is almost necessarily true.

andrew said...

"How can a USA lawyer imply that giving public or benefactor money to fraudsters is no sin?"

Have you been deceived by television into thinking that in the USA lawyers only represent the "good guys"? Lawyers are less prone to black and white thinking than almost any other profession. While we have our own legal ethics, we are an essentially ammoral profession.