Cosima posted:

6 year old puppetmaster

Eponine posted:

Does it make psychology majors more or less annoying?

My Lovely Horse posted:

I kind of want to try this. Is it terribly unethical? Does it become unethical if I don't actually work in a kindergarten?

Such Fun posted:

In case you weren't joking:
Unwilling or unknowing participation in any scenario is to a varying degree unethical. Wanting to program other people without their consent is heinous, and shouldn't be a moral dilemma to anybody who's not psychopathic or a nazi scientist.

That kindergarten story was 100% stdh though, fortunately.

Cosima posted:

6 year old puppetmaster

Dogfish posted:

On the other hand, conditioning kids by offering them rewards for good behaviour and creating negative associations for bad behaviour is pretty standard practice. Messing with little kids' minds just to see what happens is unethical; potty training treats are not.

Dienes posted:

That's operant conditioning, not Pavlovian conditioning. So they didn't even get the most basic thing correct in their bullshit story.

Dogfish posted:

My alma mater renamed the Psychology department to "Behavioural Neurosciences" because it sounds fancier and sciencier.

Stroop There It Is posted:

Nope. Operant conditioning would be if the children learned that they themselves knocking on a table would get them snacks. This story is exactly analogous to Pavlov's dogs--they associate the externally generated auditory stimulus with a food reward. Still didn't happen, of course.

Dienes posted:

No. Pavlovian conditioning is tied to reflexes, not rewards. "Looking at their cubby" is not a biological reflex. If the kids salivated at the knocking, it would be Pavlovian conditioning. The knock in this case would be an antecedent for the students to move to their cubbies to get snacks, the snacks being the reward. The knock would be a discriminative stimulus signalling snacks are available (or at the most a CMO-S); you are forgetting half the contingency. Sorry you failed your students.

Doesn't matter, though. Even if he was trying to condition a reflex (and he isn't), its practically impossible under the conditions he describes. Non-salient stimuli, low number of trials, long temporal relations, weak stimulus-stimulus contingency. He basically read a snippet of an over-simplified account of Pavlov in a psych class and spun up this bullshit not knowing any better.

quote:

okay story time:

my professor (lovely man, married to our TA, 5'2", about as intimidating as a muffin) is a dendrologist by trade, so he studies trees. it was about three hours into our social sciences course, last lecture before exams, everyone was frazzled and exhausted, so he told us about his most exciting/in-depth research to date to cheer us up.

(the few of us who actually showed up were like “ok sir im sure its fascinating” but in our minds we were totally like its trees what. is. exciting. about trees. You might be wondering the same thing - the acorns? the leaves? the roots? BUT NO. IMMA FUCKIN TELL YA.)

ANYWAY we settle in, he had a few pictures loaded up from his field work (we were chuckling at this point…. ‘hehehe field work’ i giggled to my frend. its trees.) and began to tell his tale. it’s long, imma warn you, but……. god. just read it.

theres an species of tree called the cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata, if ya wanna get all Latin-y). its super endangered, in our region there’s only ~280 that are registered by the government, yadda yadda yadda. my prof thought that was tragic (i know) but also strange, because when he was writing his thesis about local trees years ago, he kept coming across cucumber trees in really random places. we’re talking like backyards, independently-owned nurseries, etc. WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE because, according to tree law (i know) it is very strictly protected by the government, and thus super “illegal to possess, transport, collect, buy or sell any part of a living or dead member of a listed species if it originates from wild sources.” essentially, the govt takes control over growing the trees and anyone who independently raises them is breaking the law (i know)

so he’d ask people “do you have a permit for these trees?” and they were like “uh no, it’s just a tree someone sold me, i think it looks nice, are you gonna arrest me?” so he’d be like “nah nah nah just tell me who sold it to you”

eventually, months/years later, someone did, and turns out it was like this underground sort-of illegal tree dealing club (i know). so my prof went, got a bit of funding from the government, who were getting pissed at independent cucumber tree numbers, and THIS IS WHERE IT GETS INTO THE GOOD poo poo I STG.

he infiltrates the tree trafficking organization. he buys a cucumber tree from an independent nursery, raises it for months, ensures he gets noticed by the traffickers, and then INFILTRATES it and convinces its leader to LET HIM JOIN. he has to pay like a steep entrance fee, which he does (and it blows my mind that the government of my country paid money to illegal tree dealers), but then he is given full access to records and maps because they think he’s one of them, not a SECRET AGENT.

now this part blows my mind because the tree lords don’t even have to try very hard to find cucumber trees because government agents MARK THE TREES AND DISTINCTLY TAG THEM SAYING THIS IS ENDANGERED DO NOT TOUCH. so, ya know…………. it’s a bit obvious. my prof hangs out with the members so much that he figures out their “hit spots”. these are where the trees are relatively secluded and unguarded. (he writes all this poo poo and numbers down for his research.)

BUT THATS NOT ENOUGH BECAUSE THE GOVT SAYS HES WASTING THEIR FUNDING IF HE DOESNT HAVE PROOF and they are willing to take LEGAL ACTION for misuse of funding (my prof doesn’t have the money nore time nor power to take them to court, which would also blow his cover). so my prof literally STAKES OUT a copse of cucumber trees at a recognized wildlife reserve for. DAYS. he camps there, and watches the trees, is about to give up, he’s going off an unreliable rumor from the traffickers that a harvester would be going there within the next week. finally, this guy comes and takes the cucumber tree seeds from the CLEARLY MARKED trees by the government, and my prof takes pictures (we are shown these pictures, most of us are speechless at this point). dozens of candid shots of a man my grandpa’s age with a grocery store bag, garden shears, and a ladder, clipping away the illegal seeds and then going on his merry loving way.

so my prof has the proof, he’s been undercover for months now at this point, he writes up his report, gives it to the government who is like…….. “oh poo poo”, helps them draft up a new LESS COMPLETELY loving OBVIOUS way of marking endangered trees (so that way non-tree-lovers wouldn’t damage them further, etc.), and then never returns to the tree traffickers. he’d given them a fake name, address, everything….. he disappears.

…there was a full minute of stunned silence from us students at this point, during which he grew more and more nervous (again, he’s a muffin) and all of us students are just like……. “whoa.” we asked him what happened to the remaining illegal cucumber trees & if he turned the tree dealers in to the government, and that is when he smiles a little bit and shows us the last few pictures. because here’s the kicker… he never turned the smugglers in. he burned all the data he collected, defied the government pressuring him to turn them in, and the only reason he’s not incarcerated is because his work is so prominent in certain circles now & universities love him, that there would be an uproar if he got arrested. he’s like a loving anti-hero and then he tells us (i’ll never forget, it’s the most inspirational green-thumb thing in the world) “it may be ‘illegal’, but those who risk their liberty to ~save the world~ should never be reprimanded, no matter what those in power say.”

we are all stunned. some of us are considering dendrology as a field we’d now be interested in pursuing. he clicks his slide one final time, before we leave our last lecture and, since he had an asthma attack (lil muffin) he didn’t attend our exam, so i never see him again…………

and there, on the slides, the last picture? THERE HE IS. in his own backyard. with his equally lovely TA wife. both grinning innocently, standing underneath a……. loving. FULL GROWN. ILLEGAL. CUCUMBER TREE.

Stroop There It Is posted:

In other news re: things no one cares about : uhhh these are terms two different fields, so unless they actually have a biological component to all of the psych stuff, it ain't behavioral neuro.

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

I don't care if he's been on TV or not--people who say "I do improv " are universally awful

Verisimilidude posted:

Ok I could keep linking these but basically this whole "tumblr dump" folder is stdh. http://imgur.com/gallery/yBXs4

Verisimilidude posted:

Stroop There It Is posted:

The way I saw it is that the purported CR is actually salivating and feeling hungry in expectation of the UCS. The CS is the knocking, the UCS is the food that they are allowed to have.

But then again, this poo poo doesn't come up in my field of study at all so I can't say I remember much.

Dienes posted:

Why is it always Peter Pan that is so in tune with mental illness symptoms? Just once I want a variation with a sympathetic Gaston actor.

Dienes posted:

Ah. This is my research area. IF he was talking about salivation (and since he never mentions it I don't think you can say he is), yes, the knock is a CS, the food is a US, and the salivation would be the CR/UR. However, hunger is a state, not a behavior or a reflex. At best, presenting the knock concurrently with hunger would making the knock a surrogate conditioned motivating operation, which is tied to operant behavior. He also mentions how the kids freak out when snack time is denied - that's an extinction burst, an operant phenomenon. You don't see it in Pavlovian responses. He just jumbled together a bunch of half-remembered tidbits for his STDH.

Content:


Why is it always Peter Pan that is so in tune with mental illness symptoms? Just once I want a variation with a sympathetic Gaston actor.

cash crab posted:

Indolent Bastard posted:

The barcode tattoo one is ultra stdh. You scanned a tattoo of a bar code in a book store and it rang up as a bag of Cheetos? Why does your bookstore have the sku for Cheetos?

Who makes up all these fake stories and for what reason?

cash crab posted:

Verisimilidude posted:

Cosima posted:

This person's imagination sucks.

cash crab posted:

I've seen several iterations of this.

Palisader posted:

Dear tumblr,

Disney actors are not allowed to touch you,

god bless

cash crab posted:

I've seen several iterations of this.

Dienes posted:

Well you see they are so important that the actors broke the rules just for them!

Murphy Brownback posted:

Seriously, when has a mugger ever slit someone's wrists to kill them? You're getting shanked in the chest and/or throat if they want to kill you, not your wrists.

My Lovely Horse posted:

But probably never one with that level of saturation, goddamn.


Jesus Christ how do you think weed or vents work

how much weed would you even need?

My Lovely Horse posted:

But probably never one with that level of saturation, goddamn.


Jesus Christ how do you think weed or vents work

how much weed would you even need?

Verisimilidude posted:

Ok I could keep linking these but basically this whole "tumblr dump" folder is stdh. http://imgur.com/gallery/yBXs4

cash crab posted:

Kind of an awkward name, but there's an entire literary stereotype about this. Also, why can't people resist the urge to make their imaginary black characters talk like stereotypes?

Cosima posted:

In my cool stdh fantasy the mugger intent on murdering me is thwarted because I kicked his rear end, not because he was overwhelmed by my own patheticness.

My Lovely Horse posted:

But probably never one with that level of saturation, goddamn.


Jesus Christ how do you think weed or vents work

how much weed would you even need?

Dienes posted:

Ah. This is my research area. IF he was talking about salivation (and since he never mentions it I don't think you can say he is), yes, the knock is a CS, the food is a US, and the salivation would be the CR/UR. However, hunger is a state, not a behavior or a reflex. At best, presenting the knock concurrently with hunger would make the knock a surrogate conditioned motivating operation, which is tied to operant behavior. He also mentions how the kids freak out when snack time is denied - that's an extinction burst, an operant phenomenon. You don't see it in Pavlovian responses. He just jumbled together a bunch of half-remembered tidbits for his STDH.

Postal Parcel posted:

Ignoring the stdh, no one uses 'lil' anymore. The word is youngblood white writers

Aleph Null posted:

What about Lil Kim?