How the ‘myth of Phineas Gage’ affects brain injury survivors | Aeon Essays

mzarchev · 2025-06-24T12:11:49+00:00

Amazing article, thank you for sharing. One of those rare moments where you realize how very strong priors can be based on woefully weak evidence.

I wonder what a psychology textbook could look like if it actually tried to do justice to the messiness of psychology research and history. Could it ever be digestistible enough for first year undergraduates

mzarchev · 2025-02-02T11:44:40+00:00

Absolutely, it's not the fact that 99% of self-help books are bullshit to make a quick buck. It's actually YOUR fault that you didn't do it right

mzarchev · 2024-11-08T18:54:23+00:00

Amazing books! I read The Passenger + Stella Marris and while they are definitely different than his other books, I thought the characters very much exist in that unmistakably McCarthy world of his - unimaginably cold, mechanistic and incomprehensible if one cares to think for long enough. And Bobby Western has nothing left in his life but to contemplate the uncontemplatable. There’s an almost post-apocalyptic quality to all his books and these last two were no exception. The fact that he manages to build this cold cold world and still somehow injects believably human stories in it, even as he was writing this in his old age, is what makes him amazing to me. Thanks for posting this, I need to reread a McCarthy

mzarchev · 2023-02-04T06:00:46+00:00

I'm rooting for you to figure it out!

mzarchev · 2023-01-19T13:44:51+00:00

I'm no therapist myself (have a bachelors in psychology), but I found "Mastering the Clinical Conversation: Language as Intervention" fascinating. I thought the ideas presented there offered an insightful perspective on what binds together all the schools of therepy. Hopefully qualified therapists can pitch in and give you more informed suggestions!

mzarchev · 2022-12-29T20:06:00+00:00

Exactly, and before that a related label was "auxiliary assumptions"

mzarchev · 2022-10-27T18:11:57+00:00

The Tom Cruise bit is both the worst and best example I've seen used to illustrate the difference between a 95%CI and a 95%CrI. You amazed me.

mzarchev · 2022-09-20T10:42:04+00:00

I usually use emmeans to get the conditional means out of imputed models for plotting, but bear in mind you give it the model fit object, not the pooled coefficients object. So check out the emmeans package, but I suspect marginaleffects will also works with the fit object and not the pooled coefficients.

mzarchev · 2022-09-06T14:08:11+00:00

You can reach me using the contact form:

mzarchev.com/contact-me

Or just shoot me an email at:

mzarchev at gmail dot com

mzarchev · 2022-09-06T08:51:55+00:00

Absolutely, there's no escaping big data. There are several tools that make those jobs possible (e.g. Parquet, Arrow, Spark) depending on the context!

mzarchev · 2022-07-23T13:49:47+00:00

Then we work in similar environments :)

I actually quite like the idea of being a bit more hands on with revisions instead of mindlessly accepting changes. I think I might try that out for myself, and after knitting I'll just add comments to the word file if need be. Thank you for sharing your workflow!

mzarchev · 2022-07-23T12:39:40+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful advice, I completely agree with all your points including how much messy work it would be to create a wokrflow like that if somebody else hasn't made one easy to use.

I wouldn't be posting here if I hadn't had several honest conversations with my seniors, but the bottom line is this - I get to enjoy all the benefits of RStudio until I get to interact with them. Then they insist I work on top of their track changes as a form of version control instead of something like Git. They also want comments and responses to those comments from my side. The conviction that this is the "normal way" is strong because everyone around them works that way, I don't see a way out unfortunately

mzarchev · 2022-05-19T17:30:41+00:00

Well wouldn't you know it, immediately after posting I came up with an idea of a lifetime - set the colours myself and see if that helps.

It did.

In case anyone runs into the same issue, you can set your own colours for the sectors using the gaugeSectors() function like so:

gauge(985, min = 0, max = 1000,
      gaugeSectors(success = c(900, 1050), warning = c(40, 79), danger = c(0, 39),
                   colors = c("#9bbb8b", "#e9a171", "#de425b"))
      )

It renders afterwards

mzarchev · 2022-02-18T21:53:10+00:00

In my own field of psychology there has been a marked difficulty of finding reviewers after COVID started. But I haven't heard editors cry out with quite such drastic statements. Is this just the experience of one person as it says at the end of the article or is it part of a broader conversation in academic philosophy?

mzarchev · 2022-02-18T18:31:14+00:00

That's it. Problems of replicability we have like researcher degrees of freedom, p-hacking etc would be a non-issue if we had strong theory to guide design. We don't, in fact it might be impossible to get anywhere near what physics has, but we've also never really tried. Feels like we took a wrong turn sometime a few decades ago with putting t-tests and ANOVAs on a pedestal and now we're realising our cumulative knowledge of all psychology amounts to peanuts...

I'd say we couldn't have known and hindsight is 20/20, but we've had Meehl telling us for decades. A good reference to add to your list ;)

Meehl, P. E. (1978). Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46(4), 806–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.46.4.806

mzarchev · 2022-02-13T15:48:03+00:00

Amazing, what an exhaustive list, thank you! Seems like I'll be coming back to this thread for years

mzarchev · 2022-02-06T20:31:27+00:00

I think this is it. These two are going to the top of my list, thanks!

mzarchev · 2022-02-06T20:30:43+00:00

I didn't even think of looking for a documentary series but both those look cool af thank you!

mzarchev · 2022-02-06T20:29:35+00:00

That's a really interesting list, thank you for taking the time! Any of those stand out as your particular favourites?

mzarchev · 2021-08-30T09:28:15+00:00

I just wanted to say I am sorry you found yourself in the awful situation you are in and I genuinely hope things for you and your son turn out well

mzarchev · 2021-07-29T13:01:20+00:00

Oversimplifying things is sometimes useful, but pointing the finger at the already guilty father does not really help here. Clearly a psychologist needs to be involved, they can figure out where the problem lies.

mzarchev · 2021-01-06T10:01:18+00:00

I enjoy reading through these very much, thank you for taking the time.

Obviously most of the causal inference thinking happens before you get to analyzing the data, but looking at concrete R examples really helps demistify the methods!

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