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A comment on Brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept. Parent comment

Re:Brain activity can be used to measure how well you unders... by joe_the_user on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @11:30PM (#20408902)
Sure, I believe you can rigorously find brain patterns that are correlated with understanding. The obvious, "correlation is not causation" applies, however.

The problem is such pattern aren't any guarantee of understanding. Just "feeling confident" seems like such an easily correlated thing. More people who learn a subject sufficiently to do well on a test might "feel confident" but certain kinds of people might just feel confident without that actual learning.

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Re:Brain activity can be used to measure how well you unders... by elefanten on Thursday July 11, 2019 @12:20AM (#20409097)
But they're testing the participants to see if they actually understand. Re-read gp
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Re:Brain activity can be used to measure how well you unders... by jgtrosh on Thursday July 11, 2019 @03:01AM (#20409647)
They're testing understanding for the learning set, but applying a correlation to estimate understanding on the test set.
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Re:Brain activity can be used to measure how well you unders... by TrinaryWorksToo on Thursday July 11, 2019 @08:24AM (#20410953)
What is scientific causation but correlation that works to an acceptable quantity of Sigma?
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Re:Brain activity can be used to measure how well you unders... by Nasrudith on Thursday July 11, 2019 @10:03AM (#20411560)
Causation also implies well sequential causality in some way and reproducibility. A subtle but crucial difference.

If most people on the battlefield are covered in their own blood will soon die that doesn't mean gathering a gallon of a person's own blood through several donations and then throwing it at them at a Gettysburg musuem will kill them.

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Re:Brain activity can be used to measure how well you unders... by mannykannot on Thursday July 11, 2019 @10:05AM (#20411574)
As Feynman discussed in "The Character of Physical Law", there is more to it than that, but I think one can say that the empirical evidence underpinning all science can be characterized as correlation that passes various statistical tests.
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Re:Brain activity can be used to measure how well you unders... by krisrm on Thursday July 11, 2019 @10:13AM (#20411627)
Causal studies need to control for confounding variables, for one. There are all sorts of spurious non causal correlations with low p values.
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