[FRIAM] is this true?

[Nick Thompson]

And this gives me an opening to report the conference presentation title I am the proudest of. It was on experimental elicitation of emotional vocalizations In crows:

 

CAWS AND AFFECT IN THE COMMUNICATION OF THE COMMON CROW.   

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2019 12:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] is this true?

 

In my mind "affect" as a noun means behavior determined by a mood or feeling complex.  For example, "He has flat affect".

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

 

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 11:49 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

And, just to be as clear as I can, it's not lost on me that there's a common confusion between "affect" and "effect".  However, I tend to think linguistic confusion is often an indicator for an underlying conceptual ambiguity.  When I say "effect on the brain", I do NOT mean "affect on the brain".  I mean something more linear, cause-effect.  So, it seems reasonable to hear "the affects of talk therapy on the brain" as a behavioral measure.  But it seems more analytic/synthetic to say "the effects of talk therapy on the brain".  That is a more constructive (constructionist? constructivist?) measure.  The former is more consequentialist, the latter is more axiomatic.

And the reason I believe the original author meant the latter is because the actual words were "changes the brain in similar ways".  "Way" being more of a constructive concept than, say, "destination".

Technical writing has (painfully) verbose ways to handle this ambiguity.  But since we're discussing snarkiness, we shouldn't need to point out that people *always* prefer pithy snark to technical verbosity.  This is why bullsh¡t is more efficient than the truth.

On 3/13/19 10:23 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> The idea that the path of least resistance *names* the end result is interesting.  But it's definitely NOT what *I* mean when I hear "similar effects on the brain".  What I mean is along the same lines of the 3 links I posted:
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/27/health/behavior-like-drugs-talk-therapy-can-change-brain-chemistry.html
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-018-0128-4
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5957509/
> 
> Patterns in PET scans (glucose uptake?) and the like are "effects on the brain" (and other parts of the body, it should go without saying).  The "effect" is what we observe on the sliced out part of the object, not the whole organism. Maybe it would help to talk about the liver?  When I talk about alcohol's "effect on the liver", I'm not talking about alcoholics over-sharing in church basements.  Similarly, if I say, "slamming my hand on the table had an effect", the "effect" I'm talking about is that my hand start to hurt, not how the other people in the room react.  And I believe that's how the author was using the word "effect" when they made their unjustified claim that talk therapy has similar effects to drug therapy.  But I could easily be wrong about that, too.
> 
> 
> On 3/13/19 10:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> Ok.  I should stop being snarky and try to answer my own damned question.  I think we parse things into "brain" effects and "therapy" effects depending on the lability of behavior with respect to the manipulation we are contemplating.  Let's say the symptom is Thompson's Snarkiness.  Let's say it could be cured either by a 25 cent pill or ten thousand hours of therapy.  We would call this a brain effect.  On the other hand, let's say it could be cured by a ten thousand dollar course of pills or one hour of therapy. We would call this a therapy effect.  These attributions would apply even if it could be demonstated that they all acted on precisely the same part of the brain.  
>>
>>  Am I wrong about that?  
> 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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