User:Tmtoulouse/Neural modeling of magical thinking/meta

What am I doing?
This is an attempt to try something different, fun, maybe educational and if the stars align productive. Short version is that I want to use the wiki to create and publish from start to finish a research project whose quality could pass scientific peer-review standards. The project I have decided to try and tackle is how magical thinking might develop in the brain as a response to evolved adaptations for learning in general. Hopefully this is a topic close enough to the interests of the site and its users that others will want to join in and help. I hope that this will not be a solo adventure and that all of the power of the wiki format will be put to use in producing something interesting and different.

That is the short version, you can stop here if you want. What follows is a more verbose version of the above.

The real world
As many people know my not so secret identity when I am not playing wiki superhero is as a graduate student studying psychology and neuroscience. I have a particular interest in neural biological models of decision making and learning (read a free abstract here). I also have a bit of an obsessive hobby stalking analyzing cranks and quacks of all shapes and sizes. The similarities between all cranks, no matter what their cause de jour, in how they argue their points, learn new information, and handle conflicting data seems to point to some common innate functions that are misfiring. My thesis research does not directly address this issue, but I really want to explore it. So I have decided to do it on my own time.

Web 2.0
Rationalwiki offers a great home base for my forays into crankdom, and there are finally a lot of people around who have the same problem burning desire to address these wackos and their ideas. The wiki environment is great, it offers the ability to easily and instantly publish from anywhere what you find, all published material is completely open access to everyone world wide with an internet connection, it offers the ability to receive immediate feedback from others reading your material, and best of all it allows for collaborative development of the final product. It is the ultimate extension of “web 2.0” and I want to see what more can be done with it.

So I am going to try and bring together web 2.0 and my new hobby research. And that is how I arrived at this moment right now.

My goals
So really there are several different strands working through this idea. First is the actual research itself and its ability to maybe help shine some light on what is going at a deeper level with many of the problems this site addresses. Second is to explore how an open wiki environment could aid or hinder the development of a research program. Third is to show how research actually develops, put it out their and publish it to the world, many people may not know how you go from an idea to a published worked. Fourth, science is way to exclusionary with access only given to those who have gone through a fairly intensive vetting and training processes. Good ideas come from many angles and the more diverse the audience contributing to the final product the better it is. As the dominance of web 2.0 like interactions increase the chances that researchers have to gain wide ranging feedback increases exponentially I think it will only help...but lets try a “beta” version.

Please help!
I want this to work exactly like anything else on the wiki. I am not putting this in the mainspace because I am not sure it fits, and not in the essay space because I don't want this viewed as a solitary endeavor. Please contribute any thoughts you have on talk pages, or alter the main pages as you see fit. Participate as much or as little as you want. I have no idea if this will “catch on” or not. I will keep plugging ahead at it and basically see what sticks. Also no one should feel obligated to participate, if no one is interested then I won't have my feelings hurt too much.

Do not let fear over a lack of expertise prevent you from speaking up. While at several points in the process things might become overly technical I want this to be understood by a wide audience. The final product which will be published on RW for posterity should be readable and understandable by as many people as possible. If you don't understand something speak up! If you have ideas please tell us!

The current plan of action
There will be the main project page which will be developed over time. This project page is located at User:Tmtoulouse/Neural modeling of magical thinking. This page will be the final goal of this project. It should essentially be the published “paper.” There will also be a series of sub-pages like this one that are much much more informal. These will be the chalkboards allowing for brain storming, information collecting, vetting and writing. They will be sub-divided into hopefully logical categories of development from idea to finished project. At the moment I have the following stages in mind:


 * Motivation, hypothesis, predictions
 * Background information and previous research
 * Model development
 * Model creation
 * Model testing
 * Analysis of results
 * Conclusions
 * Potential experimental/empirical testing

If by this point the project is a success the next stage will be actually developing experimental testing of predictions and ideas. I fully intend to include human testing once the model is developed, which should be even more fun. And yes it must be ethical....