On Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:56:22 -0800, Christopher Green wrote: >The passage is actually, "when you pull on it, it gets longer," and the >comparison was to Hooke's Law, not explicitly to Newton. It does >appear in Cohen's "The Earth is Round (p<.05)" (p. 1001, first column), >but Cohen was actually quoting a 1969 American Psychologist article >by John Tukey.
This is my third attempt at a response but the previous ones just went on too long and probably would not be of interest to most people so a couple of points: (1) In my opinion, Feynman takes cheap shots at easy targets in psychology. I know of no instance when he used psychological research in psychophysics, psychoacoustics, mathematical modeling of behavior/learning/cognition/etc, and similar areas. As far as I know, Feynman was not a scholar of psychology, so his familiarity with it will tend to be shallow and superficial. He probably did not know that there was a Society for Mathematical Psychology and Journal of Mathematical Psychology. He was probably unaware of NYU's Lloyd Kaufman's work with the physicist Sam Williamson on using magnetic imaging of brain/cognitive function (before fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques became popular). He was probably unaware that Geoff Iverson, a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Adelaide came to NYU to work with Jean-Claude Falmagne on issues in psychophysics and measurement theory, and obtained a PhD in experimental psychology at NYU (a condition I refer to as "multiple dissertation disorder") -- both Geoff and Jean-Claude are now at the University of California-Irvine in their Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences; see: http://www.imbs.uci.edu/imbs_faculty For background on Jean-Claude, see his Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Falmagne I doubt that Feynman knew of any of the sophisticated mathematical psychologists so I think that one should be cautious in taking what he has to say about psychology too seriously. (2) When George Sperling was at NYU (he's now at UC-Irvine), there was a probably apocryphal story that he said in reference to NYU's psychology department: "They don't do science below the 8th floor" (NYU's psychology building is ten stories tall and the experimental/physiological had occupied the 8-10th floor in the last third of the 20th century; circa 1990 the physiological psychologists migrated to NYU's Center for Neural Science which have some of NYU's current crop of math psychologists as co-faculty; social, clinical, and community psychology occupied the floors below the 8th). Now, George was a math psychologist who seemed disdained the rest of psychology (it is rumored that his parents were both psychoanalysts and he learned his disdain early but this too may be apocryphal) and when I audited a graduate course he taught while I was pre-doc fellow at NYU one year, I was completely lost in most of what he covered, especially linear operator theory (for an example, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_%28mathematics%29#Linear_operators ). I didn't feel too badly about not understanding because (a) I was just a visiting fellow, and (b) none of the other graduate students seem to understand it either (another possibly apocryphal story is that George said in a faculty meeting that the students in this class had to be the dumbest students he ever taught). One has to wonder what a conversation between Feynman and George Sperling or Jean-Claude Falmagne or Geoff Iverson or Roger Shepard or Robyn Dawes or other mathematical psychologists would be like. Would he dismiss them as well because, well, they're psychologists? -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] P.S. Jack Cohen's office was on the 5th floor and I believe that he was "unaffiliated", that is, did not below to any particular program area in the psychology department. I believe that he did not have much interaction with the folks on the 8th-10th floor. Graduate students in experimental had to take a year long sequence in math psychology taught by Jean-Claude instead of Jack's year long graduate statistics sequence, at least for the time period 1970-1990. Nonetheless, I have the deepest respect for Jack though in retrospect I think was somewhat weak in some areas (e.g., in understanding of null hypothesis testing; I think most psychologists have a warped understanding of null hypothesis testing, Gerd Gigerenzer notwithstanding, and suggest reading Erich Lehman book on Fisher and Neyman (Egon Pearson actually has a smaller role in the history of statistics); see: http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Neyman-Creation-Classical-Statistics/dp/1441994998 P.P.S. Jack Cohen got his PhD in clinical psychology at NYU in 1950. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=33649 or send a blank email to leave-33649-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
