Decoding The Gurus
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Gabor Maté’s Neuroscience Shortcut: When Low-Quality Evidence Meets High-Level Rhetoric
🕑 Added 2024-11-15 04:35:35 +0000 UTCExploring how Gabor Maté leans on non-replicating neuroscience to bolster his claims, plus a quick stop at Matt’s Correction Corner concerning Russian oligarchs.
Sources
Gabor Maté's Guardian article on authoritarianism. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/06/authoritarianism-roots-origin
The original study.
Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current biology, 21(8), 677-680. More recent research.
- Boekel, W., Wagenmakers, E. J., Belay, L., Verhagen, J., Brown, S., & Forstmann, B. U. (2015). A purely confirmatory replication study of structural brain-behavior correlations. cortex, 66, 115-133.
- Kharabian Masouleh, S., Eickhoff, S. B., Maleki Balajoo, S., Nicolaisen-Sobesky, E., Thirion, B., & Genon, S. (2022). Empirical facts from search for replicable associations between cortical thickness and psychometric variables in healthy adults. Scientific reports, 12(1), 13286.
Comments
DJM
Also, any interest in a Viktor Frankl episode?
DJM
Amygdala does not just mediate fear, mediates emotion overall, as I understand.
Jonathan Swayze
Like this one too: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" From him also
Jonathan Swayze
Also Gabor's point a poorer variant of the Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Troy Jensen
Have you read ‘predisposed’ by John Hibbing? Academic researcher … might find it interesting… he’s not a guru though. He’s probably trying to hide for the next 4 years.
Kevin Nyberg
Is that Gabor Maté in the picture? I thought that (face) was Howard Zinn 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ When I saw the pic I thought “Fuck, how did Zinn get dragged into this?”
Lord Brannigan-7
# You've got to search for the nazi inside yourself Search for the facist you hide Search for the nazi inside yourself Until you find the key to your life #
CrystalJade
It’s the appeal to nature implied by using the veil of neuroscience that is used here that feels so wrong. To reach the conclusions in the article you’d need to abandon ethics. A longitudinal study measuring the amygdala size through developmental stages. ‘We took young children and exposed them to right wing ideology until they became adults, and measured the size and volume change of their amygdala and measured their political preferences in a between groups study against a control group of unindoctrinated children’. Worst idea ever! I prefer the idea that amygdala size might correlate to affect generally, which then correlates to emotional stability / inhibition. Although politics might weaponise fear, affect is a way broader concept!
Will
I'm house-sitting for my in-laws and they're big fans of DOAC and take Athletic Greens.. I decided to search for this video on their YouTube Account and watch it there in an attempt to inject some common sense into their recommendations algorithm.
Will
Someone should tell Maté that being monomaniacally focused on one issue and insisting that all social ills are caused by it stems from his childhood trauma.
