Six Signs of Scientism

As the English word “scientism” is currently used, it is a trivial verbal truth that scientism—an inappropriately deferential attitude to science—should be avoided. But it is a substantial question when, and why, deference to the sciences is inappropriate or exaggerated. This paper tries to answer that question by articulating “six signs of scientism”: the honorific use of “science” and its cognates; using scientific trappings purely decoratively; preoccupation with demarcation; preoccupation with “scientific method”; looking to the sciences for answers beyond their scope; denying the legitimacy or worth of non-scientific (e.g., legal or literary) inquiry, or of writing poetry or making art

In Search of Legitimacy in Post-revolutionary China: Bringing Ideology and Governance Back In

The contemporary politics of China reflect an ongoing effort by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to claim the right to rule in light of the consequences of economic development, international pressures, and historical change. China stands out within the Asian region for the success the regime has achieved in this effort. By focusing on the changes in China’s elite discourse during the reform period and particularly during the last decade, this paper aims to elaborate on the relative importance of various sources of legitimacy as they shift over time, as well as on their inherent dilemmas and limitations. There is evidence of an agile, responsive, and creative party effort to relegitimate the postrevolutionary regime through economic performance, nationalism, ideology, culture, governance, and democracy. At the same time, the paper identifies a clear shift in emphasis from an earlier economic-nationalistic approach to a more ideological-institutional approach.regime legitimacy, China, Chinese Communist Party, performance, nationalism, ideology, culturalism, governance, democracy

People should be allowed to do what they like’: Autistic adults’ views and experiences of stimming

This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Data from participants who consented will be deposited in the UK Data Service, in 2019.‘Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements’ are characterised as core features in the diagnosis of autism, yet many autistic adults (and the neurodiversity movement) have reclaimed them as ‘stimming’. Supported by a growing body of scientific research, autistic adults argue that these behaviours may serve as useful coping mechanisms, yet little research has examined stimming from the perspective of autistic adults. Through interviews and focus groups, we asked 32 autistic adults to share their perceptions and experiences of stimming, including the reasons they stim, any value doing so may hold for them and their perceptions of others’ reactions to stimming. Using thematic analysis, we identified two themes: stimming as (1) a self-regulatory mechanism and (2) lacking in social acceptance, but can become accepted through understanding. Autistic adults highlighted the importance of stimming as an adaptive mechanism that helps them to soothe or communicate intense emotions or thoughts and thus objected to treatment that aims to eliminate the behaviour.Wellcome TrustLeverhulme Trus

A sensorimotor control framework for understanding emotional communication and regulation

JHGW and CFH are supported by the Northwood Trust. TEVR was supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Early Career Fellowship (1088785). RP and MW were supported by the the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Systematic review and economic modelling of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of non-surgical treatments for women with stress urinary incontinence

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Money, self-focus, and politics

This paper-based dissertation is structured in two parts. A synopsis provides a theoretical frame, summarizes the empirical findings, and connects and embeds them into the literature. The second part consists of the empirical findings reported in four articles as appendices A to D. Because the articles were written for publication and changed due to various suggestions of reviewers and editors, each of the articles form independent reports that may have content- related redundancies (overlaps) and excursions that might not directly relate to the topic of this dissertation. Especially our third report (Appendix C) was written to a broad audience and with a broader implication and therefore entails examples from other fields and a large theoretical part. The synopsis starts with an overview on priming in social psychology in order to point out the historical development of the field and the challenges that it faces nowadays. This overview is intended to demonstrate the general state of the field and to show that money priming - as one field of priming in social psychology – faces similar challenges as the field in general. The overview on priming is followed by an overview on money priming, its proposed underlying mechanisms and recent critiques. I then follow with a description of some initial studies (not reported in greater detail) to show how this led me to my research program. To introduce my research I also explain in more detail the research by Caruso, Vohs, Baxter, and Waytz (2013), because the incoherencies of this paper inspired the research that resulted in my three subsequent articles (Appendix A-C). A description of the key findings of the studies (see below) together with some comments, conclusions, and implications for the field that did not necessarily make their way into the respective articles, form the main part of this synopsis. I end with a general discussion that connects the individual findings and articulates implications of this research for the field. VIIThe second part consists of eleven studies that are reported in more detail. The first three studies deal with the subjective standing in the social hierarchy as an important moderator for effects of money priming (Appendix A). Then, a meta-analysis of seven studies that tests whether money primes change political views is reported. It reveals tentative evidence that the subjective standing in the social hierarchy moderates this effect as well (Appendix B). Appendix C is a theoretical paper on non-significant replications in which an exploratory study with German psychology students indicates that they tend to overinterpret the evidence of non-significant replications. Appendix D is a preregistered report that entails a pilot study. Here we describe a specific preregistered study, which we propose in order to test whether money primes affect the self-focus of a person or not

Artificial Intelligence Is Stupid and Causal Reasoning Will Not Fix It

Artificial Neural Networks have reached “grandmaster” and even “super-human” performance across a variety of games, from those involving perfect information, such as Go, to those involving imperfect information, such as “Starcraft”. Such technological developments from artificial intelligence (AI) labs have ushered concomitant applications across the world of business, where an “AI” brand-tag is quickly becoming ubiquitous. A corollary of such widespread commercial deployment is that when AI gets things wrong—an autonomous vehicle crashes, a chatbot exhibits “racist” behavior, automated credit-scoring processes “discriminate” on gender, etc.—there are often significant financial, legal, and brand consequences, and the incident becomes major news. As Judea Pearl sees it, the underlying reason for such mistakes is that “... all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” The key, as Pearl suggests, is to replace “reasoning by association” with “causal reasoning” —the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena. It is a point that was echoed by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in a recent piece for the New York Times: “we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets—often using an approach known as ‘Deep Learning’—and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space, and causality.” In this paper, foregrounding what in 1949 Gilbert Ryle termed “a category mistake”, I will offer an alternative explanation for AI errors; it is not so much that AI machinery cannot “grasp” causality, but that AI machinery (qua computation) cannot understand anything at all