Timing Paranoia

[Steve Thompson]

 --- "R.W. (Bob) Erickson" <roberte at ripnet.com> wrote: 
> One of the tools currently being used in the cognitive sciences is the 
> measurement of reaction time to stimulus.

What's this?  The cognitive equivalent to wacking someone on the knee with
a rubber hammer to measure the mentak kick reflex of the subject?

> It turns out that the length of time it takes to given situations is a 
> credible proxy for how difficult the discrimination is to make.

For the individual subject.  I would imagine that such testing would
(among other things) allow some measurement of the thoughtfullness put
into a response.  Careful construction of the tests to control for various
factors might then allow inferences to be made about the relative
sophistication to be found in the cognitive structures involved in the
test-response on a subject-by-subject basis.

> Imagine a paranoia  involving  mysterious e-mail delays and the length 
> of time it takes to catagorize

Imagine hordes of otherwise unemployable psychologists and cognitive
psychologists deployed on mailing lists and Usenet, harassing the fuck out
of `persons of interest'.  Civil rights, for the majority of the civilian
population, are entirely non-existent for all intents and purposes.  I
imagine that a great many self-styled scientists are happily engaged in
the cultivation and acquisition of psycho-social data and knowledge, in
public fora, without too much thought about the morality of their
intrusive meddling in the commons.

All in the name of science, of course.


Regards,

Steve


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