oh my fking god. I am TRYING to do research for my book right now but I am getting DISTRACTED by the fact that I followed a citation from a paper into another paper and learned that they're interpreting EEG and eyetracking as a way to sort people into "in the flow" or "not in the flow" I AM GOING TO EFFING LOSE IT

I love that this was published in the same overall goddamn umbrella organization that sent me reviewers that said my work had "too much psychology" cited in it I AM. GOING. TO. LOSE. IT.

eyeblinks as a measure of frustration? I'm going to throw my entire laptop into the ocean

this is UNCRITICALLY cited in a BIG paper with NO reference to it being a biometrics study AT ALL

I mean. Can we measure things with EEG and with eyetracking, yes we can. Can we detect different kinds of waves yes we can. Do blinks correlate with something, I don't know, probably. This is all just so effing strange.

how is engineering the most critical field with the LEAST critical research I've ever seen. Do you guys just think if something is published in Fuck All Journal, 2024, that makes it good?

ML CLASSIFIER ON SIX DATA POINTS WHAT IS HAPPENING

Movement dominates brain activity, and is ALSO a huge artifact in any skin conductance. So like THAT'S a confound in these conditions. Yet no details at all about how this is truly analyzed, because it's an off the shelf EEG "band" someone bought with some research cash I bet. This paper is "we thought this was cool and so we bought a lot of stuff and tried it."

What's the play guys. What's the thing. Are we going to believe developers are human beings if we count enough eyeblinks and say they're systematically different if you focus harder? Are we going to unlock the magical super Computer Brain region if we measure hard enough?

MY WIFE PUBLISHED A PAPER ABOUT HOW MOVEMENT DOMINATES BRAIN ACTIVITY AND NEEDS TO BE ACCOUNTED FOR IN MEASURES AND NONE OF THESE GUYS READ IT

one of the measures is defined as capturing "various emotional states" I am dying

somebody made like twelve tables for this paper. Just like, table after table of everything they could tally up. NOT ONE OF THESE THINGS SHOWS KEY INFORMATION ABOUT THE EEG. This is like the baseball statistics version of analysis. Just tallying up as many numbers as possible. "mean task completion" across like six people which tells us fuck all about fuck all stfu

look, it's not that I wish anything but healing upon these people who wrote this paper and don't know better. it's just that you're so underserved. You're so underserved and you don't even know it. Somebody is serving you up a plate of raw hamburger paired with rat shit in the back alley next to the dumpster and telling you it's fine dining. You (software developers) BUILD THE WORLD. YOU COULD GET A NICE MEAL ONCE IN A WHILE.

You're stuck. We're all stuck. We're stuck in the back alley trying to say please god believe I have emotions look at my eyeballs WHO PUT US HERE

"we deleted all measurements that were marked as invalid by the eye-tracking device"

ahahhahahahahahhahhahahahhahahahahahhaaaaaa

they extracted??????? eyeblink "data"????? FROM THE EEG??????? what

are we treating the artifact AS the measure now

oh, I see, the sensor (purchased from some random website) has "two pre-processed signals" omfffffg YOU GUYS. HOW IT IS PROCESSED IS THE POINT

we're going to say that brain waves are predictive but not say WHICH brain waves we're talking about?

"finding relevant code" vs "not finding relevant code" are two sides of the classification how much do you want to bet this is essentially categorizing scrolling and skimming vs "not scrolling and reading" which is, again, A MOTOR MOVEMENT among many other things

The obsession with the idea that we are detecting "higher order problem-solving" via Secret Signals in the Skin

I forced my neuroscientist wife to look at this paper from a signal processing POV because she's actually published on the complex math of signal processing (and because I am not above outsourcing my complaining) and in her characteristically gentle spirit she said "many things could be extremely misleading, there's no way to know with what is being reported" I am going to translate that for you: GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT

Do you all want to know something super funny, the lab I did my PhD in actually did EEG work as well and THIS is why I NEVER talk about it, early in my tech career someone was like "omg you should put on your resume that you can do EEG and eye tracking and your entire career in UX will be set!" And I said no thank you, I will never! And ever since then people have mistakenly said I was "Qualitative" and maybe "not a scientist" but I sleep at night, so

Baffled by the idea that we should divide brain states into two categories that seem to mean "thinking about stuff" and "chilling" and some of these activities under the "chill" category do not sound chill at all unless we're talking about taking a nap

Stress is mentioned as a possible threat to validity when I think it's probably actually the entire ball game if you're forcing people to solve a coding task in a lab setting

Stress+ motor movements, that's what I see

There is something so bleakly funny to me about the fact that they list out the Greek letters for brain waves and then DO NOT show you this data with any specificity because they did not analyze it, their "off the shelf device" gave them two categories which they then tried to map onto coding "states" (I am guessing).

I followed a different citation to a completely different paper which is doing roughly the same thing but with heart rate data

I would like someone to look me in the eyes and explain to me, in physiological detail, the theoretical model under which we can make a causal claim about SPECIFICALLY Flow State SPECIFICALLY because of how the heart is beating

ok, so we have a manipulation that's supposed to create "Flow state" (it's always goddamn flow state) and the manipulation failed the validity checks, so instead of thinking the manipulation maybe doesn't reliably create "Flow state", we're going to exclude the sessions that failed the validity check, mmmmhmmmmmmmmmmmm

"a flow detection model using end-to-end deep learning" I Want. To. Walk. Into. The. Ocean.

adding one of the physiological measures makes one of the classifications worse, and another one better! Instead of concluding "perhaps these physiological measures are WILDLY BIZARRE TO USE FOR THIS" we conclude there is something magic about the second task idk

oh, if you're wondering if there is STRESS + MOTOR MOVEMENT involved in the tasks of this experiment again you would be correct

This paper is *also* being uncritically cited as a proof of the existence of special-brain-states-during-coding by a venue that should know better. I feel like the only human alive who reads something like "physiological measures have shown...." and goes huh, HAVE THEY?

Building a classifier that sorts cardiac activity is not hard. That is because OF THE WAY THAT HEARTS WORK. That doesn't make something a "flow classifier" holy shit this is an entire area

"This could be the basis for an intelligent, automatic controlling of office tasks and workloads"

oh, ok I see

no wonder they had to come up with their own little ML venues, psych and neuro would eat this shit ALIVE people would be meme-ing your paper within thirty seconds

so sad and baffling to me when the lit reviews of software research on developers decides to pick these citations as its ground truth of evidence, not, you know, anyone who studies human beings or has ever experienced the human body for a reflective moment

amazing to me how often people come up with a rote task design (like playing a repetitive game) to get people to zone out, and then measure a bunch of stuff and give it the ol razzle dazzle of analysis (I think some of this math is just fine, it's a perfectly fine way to sort things! It's just that the math doesn't solve the problem here! At all!), and THEN say, "we now take this to be a conclusion about what happens when people face wildly novel and unexpected tasks" I MEAN

look me in the eyes and hold my hand and explain to me why these two different things are actually the same thing and also distinguishable by your heart, and that we didn't just come up with this because measuring heart stuff was super easy and came with a fun wrist monitor and now we're justifying groupings post hoc

Something something something physiology astrology

because I hate myself I'm reading one of the papers THIS paper cites and they are talking about how prefrontal activity "may be necessary" during the performance of skills I mean sometimes you just have to be like, "you're not wrong, but" let's just measure dead people vs not dead people and be done with it

what really gets me is, even in these extremely poorly conceived and baffling studies, most of them have mixed results, and then they are cited as NOT having mixed results but instead providing PROOF of something in the next paper up the chain, leading me to once again conclude I am alone on an island, reading original claims as if there is meaningful information in them, as if the scientific record is an actual thing that we can actually engage in, so silly