Ben Goertzel wrote:
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/engineering/extranet/research-groups/neuroengineering-lab/
There are always more papers that can be discussed.
OK, sure, but this is a more recent paper **by the same authors,
discussing the same data***
and more recent similar data.
But that does not change the fact that we provided arguments to back up our
claims, when we analyzed the original Quiroga et al paper, and all the
criticism directed against our paper on this list, in the last week or so,
has completely ignored the actual content of that argument.
My question is how your arguments apply to their more recent paper
discussing the same data
It seems to me that their original paper was somewhat sloppy in the
theoretical discussion accompanying the impressive data, and you
largely correctly picked on their sloppy theoretical discussion ...
and now, their more recent works have cleaned up much of the
sloppiness of their earlier theoretical discussions.
Do you disagree with this?
Nope, don't disagree: I just haven't had time to look at their paper yet.
It's not very interesting to me to dissect the sloppy theoretical
discussion at the end of an experimental paper from a few years ago.
What is more interesting to me is whether the core ideas underlying
the researchers' work are somehow flawed. If their earlier discussion
was sloppy and was pushed back on by their peers, leading to a clearer
theoretical discussion in their current papers, then that means that
the scientific community is basically doing what it's supposed to
do....
That is fine.
But when evaluating our particular critique, it is only fair to keep it
in its proper context. We set out to pick a collection of the most
widely publicized neuroscience papers, to see how they looked from the
point of view of a sophisticated understanding of cognitive science.
Our conclusion was that, TAKEN AS A WHOLE, this set of representative
papers were interpreting their results in ways that not very coherent.
Rather than advancing the cause of cognitive science, they were turning
the clock back to an era when we knew very little about what might be
going on.
If Quiroga et al do a better job now, then that is all to the good. But
Harley and I had a broader perspective, and we feel that the overall
standards are pretty low.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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