Date: 02 Sep 2009 16:51 Subject: Highway to the meta zone Security: Public

There's a psychology-student legend which runs something like this. A graduate student in childhood development is invited to the home of her dissertation supervisor, who has twin daughters. The graduate student immediately approaches Twin A with a gleam in her eye and says, "Do you think this Coke bottle contains more Coke or ... ", pours the entire contents into a glass with a flourish, "...this glass?"

Twin A replies, "You need to talk to Twin B, she's got conservation of volume." The graduate student flees screaming into the night.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of Drs. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. They set out to study a community that, taken as a whole, knew more about queer theory, gender theory, anthropology, sociology, the experimental design of surveys, human-study ethics, Institutional Review Boards, and cognitive neuroscience* than they did. The good doctors had scarcely pulled out their straw-and-cup stethoscopes when suddenly the patient sat up and said, "Excuse me, you're listening for heart sounds in entirely the wrong place, and in any case I'm pretty sure I have Adjustment Disorder With Mixed Disturbance of Emotions and Conduct. "

They didn't cope well. Not well at all. People tried -- with surprising patience, at first -- to explain why their assumptions about culture and innateness were incorrect, why their descriptions of sexual possibilities didn't map on to the real world, why their gender essentialism was fogging their approach to sexuality,  why their beliefs about the uses and nature of slash had very little relationship to the concept as known to the community, and why you had to phrase survey questions very carefully to avoid biasing the results. Dr. Ogas replied with condescension when he chose to reply at all -- praising people for being, variously, published authors, scholars, and academics, and then carefully explaining topics that had nothing to do with their questions with handwavy references to "culture" and the "lizard brain" and the dreaded evolutionary psychology.  He finally threw out a deliberate slur -- "shemales", linked to the Wikipedia article explaining why the term is offensive -- and disappeared in a cloud of f-lock.

Dr. Ogas's dissertation title is "A Neural Architecture for Visual Classification: Fast-Priming and Opponent-Color Computational Systems. " Dr. Gaddam's dissertation title is not available on his home page;  his BU page lists his research as "focused on the modeling of physiologically plausible neural models of vision and memory and I applied these models to problems in image understanding and machine learning." and he has  recently had the manuscript Biased ART: A neural architecture that shifts attention toward previously disregarded features following an incorrect prediction accepted in Neural Networks (he's the second author).  In short, based on their vitas and on their execution of their so-called survey, the two doctors are exactly as qualified to perform any sort of psychological research as if their doctorates were in Renaissance Italian literature.  Not all Ph.Ds are created equal, and a degree in neural networks cuts no ice when you're researching gendered behavior in sexuality.  

The two doctors don't know that.  They refuse to know that.  They know that they, with their new-minted 2009 Ph.Ds, are experts.  Various people in fandom handed them their livers sliced into trembling shreds, and they don't even grasp that there's blood on their shirts.  They don't know enough to understand that they know nothing.

* Go read http://neededalj.livejournal.com/ about cognitive neuroscience, because s/he is awesome.   When you're through, read http://sabrina-il.livejournal.com/769385.html about the science of psychology because she, also, is awesome.  You are all of you, in your separate ways, intelligent, fierce, articulate, and awesome, and I'm grateful to be able to learn from you.

P.S.  Also read N. Pepperell,  http://www.roughtheory.org/content/wearing-the-juice-a-case-study-in-research-implosion:

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