

Should Psychological Neuroscience Research Be Funded? - gwern
http://popsych.org/should-psychological-neuroscience-research-be-funded/

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im3w1l
Let me formulate another thought experiment. We want to investigate the
subjective experience of heat. Subjects are to put their hands into water
heated or cooled using various procedures and rate how hot it is on a
subjective scale. If we are ultimately only interested in the subjective
experience, could a thermometer really add anything?

There is one interesting property of the thermometer, it is very good at
predicting how someone would rate it. Because of "survey variance", the
thermometer reading is a better predictor of _subject b 's_ rating, than the
rating _subject a_ gives.

Because the thermometer reading is a better predictor of the subjective
experience, I would say that it is better at capturing the underlying
phenomenon.

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CognitiveLens
Yes, it should be funded, but not without consideration of alternatives for
particular measures. There is a _lot_ of bad, expensive neuroscience work -
much of it yields no significant result - but there are also important results
that are unavailable by other means. It's good to inject caution but the
potential for great advances in understanding how the mind works is still
there.

