Category: Psychology

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The #Metoo Crucible

“Stratford Festival decided to put on a sure-fire crowd-pleaser this year: “The Crucible”, one of the greatest, and certainly the most powerful, American drama.

“The Crucible” is about a group of young girls in a small town in Massachusetts in the 1690’s who are caught dancing naked in a woods.  Think about the cultural climate– puritanical New England.  The upstanding leaders of the devout community are beyond horrified, and this is immediately apparent to the girls so they connive to persuade the town elders that they were, in fact, bewitched.  Their deception is helped by a particular girl who seems to be having fits and hysterics and claims to see apparitions.

Who bewitched them?

They begin to name names, including upstanding members of the community.

One of the girls, named Abigail, was a handmaid to a couple, John and Elizabeth Proctor.  John had an affair with her, which Elizabeth knows about.  John and Elizabeth reconciled and evicted Abigail but are terrified that the community will find out about the affair and disgrace John.

Abigail is convinced that John really loves her.  What were the girls doing in the woods?  Abigail had persuaded Tituba, a black slave, to show them how to cast spells, so she could curse Elizabeth Proctor and win John back.  With the community in hysterics, and her own position in the community under threat, she seizes the opportunity to accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft.

When some in the community become suspicious of the girls’ motives, they too are named.  Eventually, 20 citizens are hanged, and one is “pressed” to death because he refused to enter a plea.  Yes, this really happened– the historical record is unmistakable.

Years later, the magistrates who condemned them would– astonishingly– come to the realization that they had been in error and issue an apology.  How often does that happen?

Arthur Miller wrote the play in 1952 and he clearly intended to draw a parallel between the Salem witch-hunts and the McCarthy communist witch-hunt that was taking place at that moment, and which had snared Miller himself.  Miller was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and admitted that he had been a communist at one time in his life.  That was not enough for them.  They demanded that he identify fellow-travelers.  He refused and was black-listed.

In the play, as in real life, a man named Giles Corey discovered that some of the accusers stood to benefit by acquiring the land of the accused (if convicted of witchcraft, a citizen’s possessions were forfeit).  He is then accused of witchcraft himself.  He refuses to plea because doing so would result in a conviction and the land he hoped to pass on to his sons would be forfeit.  He is sentenced to be “pressed”: placed under a board with the weight on it increased gradually with rocks.  He dies under the torment, mocking his accusers.

Do you see a problem with this play?  I don’t see a problem.  The play is historically accurate.  More importantly, it is psychologically accurate: I find the portrait of a community that is fearful and cowardly and not really virtuous in the sense that they all believe it of themselves to be quite convincing even today.  (Think of how we symbolically recycle, and conserve, and care for the environment, while doing absolutely nothing that will have any real impact on global warming.   Think of how women go on national television to tell the world how ashamed they are of having been sexually assaulted.)

But the #metoo movement saw a big problem.  You see, a credo of the #metoo movement is that girls are ALWAYS to be believed.  They never lie about abuse or rape or assault, even if it is assault by the devil himself, as in the case of Salem.  (I am not exaggerating: I heard three women on the CBC discussing the issue and they all insisted that women never lie about abuse and there is never any “collateral damage” (ie. innocent men accused).  Do women ever lie about rape?  Judge for yourself.

And the play makes it clear that the girls are sly, conniving, convincing liars, and that they are responsible the deaths of 20 innocent victims.

So the #metoo movement demands an adjustment.   And the Stratford Festival Theatre made it.  Here is their description of the play from their website:

His (John Proctor’s) refusal to take responsibility for his actions leads to an epidemic of fear and suspicion that engulfs the guilty and the innocent alike. Inspired by historical events but no less pertinent to our own times, this American classic stands as a timeless tragedy of abusive behaviour and its all-consuming consequences.

This is worse than a distortion of the play.  It is an obscenely malicious reversal of it’s meaning.  It is all John Proctor’s fault.  The girls are innocent.  Abigail was forced to lie because she was oppressed by the patriarchy.  They were justified in causing 19 innocent individuals to be hanged to death.

Abigail didn’t enjoy seeing those people hanged.  Not at all.

Or maybe the girls were telling the truth after all: maybe there really were witches.

No young woman or girl would ever lie about that.

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Post PTSD Syndrome

“In many cases, more deliberate attempts to process the trauma – for example, trying to think it through or talk it through with friends and family – were actually associated with worse PTSD. The children who didn’t recover well were those that reported spending a lot of time trying to make sense of their trauma. While some efforts to make sense of trauma might make sense, it seems that it is also possible for children to get ‘stuck’ and spend too long focusing on what happened and why.

Shocking.

No, it’s not.  Researchers have hit upon the amazing observation that when well-meaning therapists, parents, teachers, and others make obsessive efforts to treat children for conditions that do not exist but which are projected onto them actually make things worse.  “You’re in shock.”  “No, I’m fine.”  “You’re in denial.”  “No, I’m just fine.”  “Oh, now you’re repressing it.  You need to get it out or you will have symptoms.”   “I don’t have any symptoms.”  “You pathetic human being: you won’t even deal with your issues.”  “Well, maybe I am having a few symptoms.”

Did you know that many high schools where there has been a shooting actually require students to be “treated” by a therapist in order to “process” their trauma?  This is justified with the pathetic medical analogy argument: would you allow a person who comes into a hospital with a broken leg to leave without getting a cast?   No, but your hospital will have him leave with a broken arm, a fractured pelvis, and a broken leg.  If he came to the hospital with a depression, he would probably leave with anxiety, PTSD, BPD, and an addiction.  And depression.  And medications, some of which treat the side effects of other medications.

*

Have you ever heard of “grief counsellor”, which is my nominee for the stupidest phrase ever coined in the last fifty years?

 

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Actuarial Love

This story didn’t really surprise me, but it should have.  A modern, educated, liberated woman is bored of dating progressive, enlightened men, and finds herself strongly attracted to a man who believes that he should control the finances in a relationship because he is the man, and only he should initiate sex.  She is very sad when he breaks it off, partly, at least, because he finds that she earns more money than he does.

This is real.  It’s not made up.  It’s not from Fox News.   It is a real, educated, affluent young woman declaring that there is something about a man with conservative values that appeals to her on a visceral level, something she isn’t sure she herself comprehends.

At the same time, some men who behaved the way she describes are being excoriated by feminists.  The question is, how far from “abusive” behavior is the style of a conservative man who believes, as she described, that the man always initiates sex?  That means he makes the first move.  That means he doesn’t ask for her consent first.  He makes a move.  And if the woman is receptive, she makes that clear with her body language and sounds– not with verbal consent.  In fact, that is one things she clearly doesn’t wish.  And she’s not the first writer on the subject in the Times to say so.

Consider this:

My idea of a hero is not someone who comes and sweeps the woman off her feet and turns her into a princess, but a man who cares about what a woman has to say, who listens to her, who pays attention to her needs and wants,” Guillory said when we recently spoke over the phone, adding that the ideal romantic lead would also then ask “what she wants, just to make sure that he’s right” in his assessment.

Well, that pretty well sounds exactly like the one thing Jasmine Guillory in The Atlantic denies she says she wants: to be treated like a princess.  She wants someone who listens, pays attention, addresses her needs and wants only what she wants.  Your highness.

Jesus, that does sound exactly like a princess.  It certainly doesn’t sound like a partnership.  It doesn’t sound like two people of equal abilities and capacities and potential and strength of character coming together for a mutually beneficial relationship in which obligations, responsibilities, and assets are shared equally.  But yeah, doesn’t that sound kind of boring?

Just imagine this:

My idea of a lady is not someone who comes and sweeps the man off his feet and turns him into a prince, but a woman who cares about what a man has to say, who listens to him, who pays attention to his needs and wants…”

 

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Linda Bishop

Yet after enduring so many irritations in her hospital unit—patients who wouldn’t stop talking, or who touched her, or sat in her favorite chair, or made noise in the middle of the night—she didn’t mind having time alone.  New Yorker

“God Knows Where I Am” would have you believe that the government, through misguided activism, has extended too many rights to the mentally ill.  They can no longer be locked up, as easily, against their will.  As a result, people like Linda Bishop end up wandering the streets alone in the middle of winter and then starving to death in an abandoned farmhouse instead of wisely accepting the custodial guardianship of her sister, Joan.

They are not completely wrong.  There is a problem.   But I was disturbed by how quickly and easily these advocates slipped into the idea that it should be easy for a relative or guardian to take over an individual’s right to decide, for herself, where she wants to be.  That’s one issue: her safety and health.  But what may have really pissed off the staff at the New Hampshire Hospital was her continued refusal to recognize that they were right and she was wrong.  I am sure they did not distinguish, in their own minds, between their concern for her well-being and their concern for their own status as gatekeepers.  But one of the reasons for her continued incarceration, rather than the actual symptoms of schizophrenia, was that she refused to admit that they had justly appropriated her autonomy.  That she had no right to decide whether she was competent or not.

…psychiatry is stuck in a kind of moral impasse. It is the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish.

They are not, as I said, completely wrong.  There are cases– Linda Bishop is probably one–in which it might be necessary for the state to step in to ensure that a patient does not cause herself or others harm.   But there is one enormous flaw in this process and it should not be run roughshod over by those eager to save someone from themselves.  It is this:  we may very well use that custodial arrangement to lock somebody up in a hell-hole from which they have no chance– ever– of escaping.

Or this.

Not one of the advocates for stronger measures for guardianship gave even a little credence to the possibility that the care that will be given to the secured patient will be inadequate, or incorrect, or downright negligent.  Or worse.  The New Hampshire Hospital, where she was institutionalized, seems like a fine, adequately funded operation.   At least, for the much smaller numbers of patients they harbour today than they used to.  But they didn’t acknowledge that, in the past, people with mental disturbances have been warehoused under brutal conditions.   They could be beaten, assaulted, sexually abused, neglected, and abandoned, by an institution deliberately underfunded by an uncaring government unwilling to ask voters for more money to do a better job.

One of the untold  reasons that the mentally ill were moved out of institutions in the first place was not really to free them but to save money.

Patients spent so many years in the hospital that they no longer knew how to leave it. (The institution has two graveyards for people who died in its care.)

Think about that.

It could mean they can’t find the exit.  It could also mean that they don’t understand the paperwork required.  It could also mean that after a certain amount of time spent in an institution the desire to leave, in and of itself, can be regarded as a symptom of mental incompetence.  In Linda Bishop’s case, that is at least partly true.

It is possible that Linda Bishop might have received excellent care somewhere.  It is possible that she was receiving excellent care at the New Hampshire Hospital in Concord where she was held for three years.  But it is possible that the money would run out eventually and she would be moved to a cheaper, state-run institution that needed to save money by cutting staff and buying cheaper food and drugging most patients into oblivion so they wander aimlessly in the common areas to be watched by minimal staff.

During her first, voluntary, incarceration, Linda cried constantly for four days, feeling betrayed by those who had persuaded her to go in.  Finally, she acknowledged she was suffering from delusions.  From the accounts of the staff there, it’s not clear that they make any distinction between a real acknowledgement and the more obvious fact that she gave up trying to convince them that she really was sane and decided to play along so she could be released.  If that’s what she wanted, it worked: she got a prescription.  And a release.

One interviewee argues that one would never allow a patient with a bleeding wound from the chest to just walk out of a hospital, so why would you allow a patient with bipolar disorder do it?  Well, one reason is this: one doctor thought she was bipolar, but another psychiatrist thought she was schizo-affective.  So one doctor thinks the patient needs stitches to a wound in the heart and another doctor thinks he needs a cast on his leg.  And perhaps the surgeon puts in a catheter.

Let’s think further about it: what patient, after getting treatment for a bleeding wound, would intentionally rip out the stitches?  Yet patient after patient who is on medication for a mental illness stops taking their medications.  The medications make them feel less alive, drugged, indifferent.  They feel less creative.  Or they start to feel great but they don’t really seem to believe that the drugs are responsible.

And let’s take note of something else: there is well-known experiment in which a group of perfectly sane psychology students posed as schizophrenics to get themselves admitted to psychiatric institutions.  Once inside, they all behaved exactly as normal, and requested a reassessment and release.  I don’t believe a single one of them was diagnosed as sane and released.  Not one.  Not one.  When a resentful psychiatrist dared them to try his hospital, they announced that they would.  A few months later, that psychiatrist had identified a fair number of “fakes”.  The problem is, that none of them were: no attempt was made to infiltrate that hospital.

At one point, again, Linda was offered access to a funded apartment for people in transition.  But to get it, she had to sign a document which essentially forced her to admit that she was mentally ill.  She refused.  Logic, here, somebody, anybody?  A woman refuses housing intended to help the mentally ill because you want to force her to admit that the diagnosticians are right and she is wrong and, more significantly, she is not competent to determine for herself whether she is sane or not.  And if she doesn’t sign– in other words, if she really is mentally ill– or she really is not mentally ill– it doesn’t matter– she doesn’t get the help intended for …. the mentally ill.

What she needed was a Hogeweyk: the Dutch institution for patients with dementia who want to be free, and wander the community, and shop, and go to school.  The Dutch solution: build a “school”, a “store”, a “community”, staff it with mental health professionals, and let them “free”.  Everyone’s safe.  Everyone’s happy.  It’s a marvel of common sense and practicality.

When Saks was a law student at Yale, she was restrained and medicated against her wishes; she calls it one of the most degrading experiences of her life.

I really believe there should be a constitutional amendment that says this: if the state is going to deprive an individual of the freedom to come and go as he or she pleases, it is required to provide the kind of quality of care that an objective observer would characterize as “excellent”, including good quality food, adequate staff, and opportunities for exercise, activities, relaxation, and privacy.

And it absolutely should include facilities like Hogeweyk.

If not.  If it cannot guarantee that level of care, then the forced institutionalization of individuals with mental problems is nothing more or less than imprisonment and even toture.

Right now, if the government, fails to provide enough funding to make these individuals comfortable, our elected representatives are not subject to any serious consequences.   Only the inmates bear consequences, in the form of neglect, restraint, harassment, lack of privacy, and abuse.

Incidentally, is the belief that there is not such thing as global warming really, in substance, all that different from the belief that “they are spying on me” and “they are out to get me”?  They are both equally fictional.

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The Failure of Social Research

One of the seminal social-psychology studies, at the turn of the 20th century, asked a question that at the time was a novel one: How does the presence of other people change an individual’s behavior?   NY Times, 2017-10-18

You have to read the whole article to get the gist of just how mind-blowing this discovery was:  people behave differently if there are other people in the room.  I know– I was shocked too.

This stunning revelation was made by Norman Triplett– may his name endure forever.  The reverberations continue still.  People behave… differently… if there are other people in the room.

This is the psychology, which has revolutionized the art of discovering things that are already known, repackaging them as “research”, and impersonating science.

It was a revelation to the psychological establishment which had, before then, believed that people behave exactly the same way if there are people in the room or if there are not.

You know where the writer of the article in the New York Times is going when you see:

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the best-selling “Tipping Point,” applied irresistible storytelling to the science, sending countless journalists to investigate similar terrain and inspiring social psychologists to write books of their own.

Gladwell tried to argue that the Beatles were successful because they had practiced for 10,000 hours, over-looking the obvious fact that thousands upon thousands of artists “practice” for 10,000 hours and don’t go anywhere because they don’t have any talent.  Gladwell did have one aspect of genius: when he wasn’t making an outright error, he made people feel smart by packaging obvious truths with smug observation.

Let’s not forget this chessnut:

that once people have made a decision, they curiously give more weight to information in its favor.

I guess most psychology students have never read Shakespeare, the brilliant 17th Century psychologist who discovered this truth in his study of neurological disconnects, “Hamlet”.

The article is about a researcher named Amy Cuddy who claimed to prove that your body language not only expresses your attitudes and your confidence, but actually can change your attitude and confidence.  She urged people to adopt strong poses, to display confidence and assertiveness.  She did a study that, she claimed, proved that adopting the body language of a confident, aggressive person would give you confidence and aggression.

She proved it thusly: she recruited subjects by telling them that she was studying the use of an electrocardiagraph, to see if it worked just as well above the heart as below.  Then she arranged all the students in body poses, half confident and assertive, half shy, diminutive.   Then she studied their responses.  She even tested them to see if they were willing to bet on the outcome of a literal roll of the dice.

And she was just stunned by the outcome!  A bunch of smart students from affluent families who could afford college were recruited for a specious “study” reported that they gained confidence after adopting confident poses!  Quick, publish the results:

“That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful, has real-world, actionable implications.”

Sensational.  People will now pay this researcher thousands of dollars to deliver this breakthrough in person at conventions and conferences!  Give her a TED talk!  Get her on Oprah!  Calling Dr. Phil!

 Across disciplines, a basic scientific principle is that multiple teams should independently verify a result before it is accepted as true. But for the majority of social-psychology results, even the most influential ones, this hadn’t happened.

No, it didn’t.  It is a miracle of sorts that anyone actually bothered to try to verify the results– you get more headlines if you don’t.  What went wrong?

 Simmons believes that self-reports of power generally reflect what is called a demand effect — a result that occurs when subjects intuit the point of the study. Cuddy believes that studies can be constructed to minimize that risk and that demand effects are often nuanced.

Yes.  Shocking insight here: a study like this creates an artificial environment that can’t reliably be extrapolated to real life.

[whohit]The Failures of Social Research[/whohit]

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Campus Duplicity

Dr. Foubert said he considered many of those responses a form of “excusing the perpetrator and blaming the victim,” and was very concerned about it. NY Times, 2014-10-28

MIT’s Study of Sexual Assault

The Real Rohypnol

I could not imagine a more emblematic example of how duplicitous this issue has become than the quote above: Dr. Foubert, responding to details in the MIT study that show that “large numbers” of undergraduates agreed with statements suggesting that the blame for sexual assault “did not always rest exclusively with the aggressor”, says, oh, we can ignore that data. Just pay attention to the results I like.

The results seem to imply that this university campus is just rife with monstrous men committing sexual assault everywhere with near impunity (only 5% of the victims ever report it).

Let’s start with the fact that only 35% of the student body completed the questionnaire. We don’t need to assume that a higher majority of victims than non-victims might be willing to take the time to complete the questionnaire, skewering the results, because it is obvious that that possibility exists. Dr. Foubert trusts this minority when they assert that they have been victims of unwanted sexual conduct, and then heaps contempt on the same minority when “two-thirds agreed that ‘rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved'”.

This is called “cherry-picking” your data. You take the results that support your ideological commitment, attribute fabulous reliability to this data, and then ignore the same “reliable” results that don’t.

Foubert is “concerned” about the fact that many of the supposed victims feel they might be co-responsible for the sexual activity that took place. As, perhaps, in “I guess I shouldn’t have gone to the bedroom with him while I was drunk and my friends were urging me not to”. No no– women must not even be permitted to think that that would be unwise.

In other words, we need to train these women to see things the way we want them to see them, instead of how they actually see them, without having been programmed.

Foubert wants everyone to report every unwanted sexual advance to the campus police and the authorities. He asks the students who did not report these assaults, why they didn’t: “more than half” didn’t think it was serious enough. Perhaps some did not think it worth the trouble (heresy!). Some, possibly, didn’t want to ruin somebody’s life over an incident they feel they can handle.

A few years ago, two children were killed in a car accident on the 401 highway. The driver of a transport truck was clearly at fault. Yet the parents of the children refused to demand “justice”, or severe punishment. They felt that the driver would benefit more from their compassion and forgiveness than from a stern prison sentence. Dr. Foubert would undoubtedly feel a need to insist that these parents demand a pound of flesh. He would be “concerned” that they don’t understand what needs to be done in that situation. He would argue that other parents of children killed in at-fault accidents have been undermined.

Perhaps some of the girls filling out his survey just don’t believe there is a lot to be gained by getting back at someone. Is it really all that satisfying? Yes, yes, we will conduct the charade of “trying to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else”, and we know the necessity of that cover, because otherwise, you know, it looks like revenge.

Oh my, no, — that cannot be permitted. Dr. Foubert will undoubtedly embark on a vigorous program of re-education to correct this deficiency. Everything is serious. Everything is assault, if you don’t have an explicit “affirmative consent” (which is “consent consent”, and will shortly be replaced with something like “affirmative positive consent”, or “consent consent consent”, until the authorities realize that even more gravity is required.

 

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The Discovery of Consciousness

A BREAKTHROUGH by a talented University of Huddersfield student has shown for the first time that people with psychopathic tendencies who have high IQs can mask their symptoms by manipulating tests designed to reveal their personalities. It raises the possibility that large numbers of ruthless risk-takers are able to conceal their level of psychopathy as they rise to key managerial posts.   University of Huddersfield Academic Journal

Wow. Shocking. So this “talented” student has discovered consciousness. This is a “breakthrough”.

I assume these tests were normally conducted by employers to evaluate employees and judge how suitable they might be for senior level positions. Managers. Leaders. Supervisors.

What Carolyn Bate did was apply these tests to a number of students. First she measured their IQs. Then she had them answer a number of questions the answers to which will help assess whether the person is capable of empathy or other normal feelings of compassion or kindness. After collecting this information, Carolyn had the subjects go through a different test utilizing Galvanic Skin Response– a lie-detector, really– to measure responses to a series of pictures which are intended to evoke feelings of empathy and compassion.

Carolyn found that the GSR responses among her participants were much as she would have predicted – except for the fact that it was only those with lower levels of intelligence who displayed the expected levels of excitement.

In other words, smart people were able to fool the lie-detector. I mean, the Galvanic Skin Response machine. They were able to fake the right emotional responses.

Like Generals and politicians and hedge-fund managers and brokers and bankers and investors and General Motors executives and arms manufacturers and football players and so on and on and on.

This kind of muddies the issue. Do organizations use the Galvanic Skin Response machine to test their employees?

Can it be that most psychology students, until now, have assumed that people filling out their questionnaires simply responded to their queries with uninhibited instinctive honesty?

Oh woeful day! Now they will have to go back over all of their studies and begin to account for the fact that people might have understood what those questions were about and how their responses might be interpreted and whether or not they like those interpretations and whether or not they really like the feeling of revealing their true thoughts to a stranger, even if it’s all supposed to be anonymous and private.

But Carolyn misses the biggest point of all: how many corporations would not, in fact, leap at the chance to hire a true psycho who was capable of concealing his complete lack of empathy for customers, investors, civilians, and reporters?

Is “Huddersfield” a real name?

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Falsifiable Theories of Depression

I offer a hypothetical.

Suppose that the best, most effective treatment for depression or emotional trauma was to suck it up and get on with your life?

Remember– this is a hypothesis. You don’t have to assume it’s true or that I am saying it’s true. You certainly don’t need to politicize it. I provide it in the spirit of Karl Popper’s idea — which I endorse– that it must be possible, theoretically, to prove any theory false, in order for it to be proven true. It must be falsifiable.

For example, if we assert that a certain bird eats worms, then we must be able to describe a method by which we could prove it false. Let’s say we are able to monitor the bird for every hour of every day for a week and to record with a camera everything that it eats. I think most of us would accept that if the bird never touched a single worm, the theory would be false. That seems silly on one level– don’t we only have to see the bird eat a worm to know that the theory is true? Yes. But that is because we can, theoretically, prove it if it didn’t. We think it’s a silly proof because it is so easy to do, but that’s why it works.

Here’s a more difficult one: preparing for war increases the possibility of war. In order to prove this hypothesis, we need to find an example of how it could be proven false. Let’s say, for example, that there was a country that never prepared for war. Like Costa Rica, which does not have an army. Costa Rica, sitting there in one of the most violent areas in the world, Central America, has never been invaded. Nobody is scared of Costa Rica. Nobody is worried that Costa Rica is going to invade their country and take their gold.

That’s only one example, so it’s not a very strong proof. We do have lots and lots of countries that do prepare for war and have prepared for war and got their wars. We don’t have so many countries who prepared for war and were thus able to avoid war. The big obvious one is the U.S., prepared– on a very large scale– for war with the Soviet Union, which, it would be argued, never happened because the U.S. was prepared. But our proxy nations like Guatemala, Iran, Chile, El Salvador, and so on, were not so fortunate.

Of course, the U.S. does go to war, often.  Point made.

Here’s another more anodyne example: pulling the goalie in the last few minutes of a hockey game does not improve the chances of victory.  Nobody dares to defy this piece of conventional wisdom.  Just imagine the crowd watching the home team trailing by one goal with one minute left and the face-off in the opponents end of the rink and the coach does not pull the goalie.  The crowd– and every sportswriter– would howl with derision.  But unless someone starts doing it regularly–not pulling the goalie– we’ll never know if it’s true or not.  (In fact, apparently in the KHL, Russia’s professional league, pulling the goalie is rare.)  My theory is that pulling the goalie doesn’t increase your chances of winning, but I’ll never be proven wrong, because nobody will test that hypothetical.

Anyway, suppose that you believe that the best way to deal with depression is to go see a therapist, get counseling, maybe some chemicals to adjust the serotonin levels in your brain (an idea which now seems to have been proven dubious). How would you know that was true? Well, you would have to be able to — theoretically– prove it was false.

Here’s the problem. If it is false, you would have a substantial number of people out there who were depressed but took the attitude that it was best to just suck it up and get on with your life…. and were less depressed because that’s what they did. In other words, just sucking it up and getting on with your life can be effective for some people who are depressed.

But here’s the catch: the clinicians and theoreticians and pharmaceutical companies who believe in therapies would say, those people are not really depressed.

Therefore, they are excluded from the sample that we analyze when discussing what works. In other words, the successes of the alternative approaches are simply excluded from the sample, so that only those who seek therapy and receive chemical treatments are in the pool of subjects.

That’s a self-fulfilling hypothesis.

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The Toyota Witch

I had been following the story about the alleged Toyota accelerator problems since the very first one about the family in the Lexus with the off-duty police officer. There was audio: a passenger in the car called 911 to report that the car had accelerated to 120 miles per hour and there as nothing they could do to stop it. The car went off the road, crashed, and burned. All four occupants were killed.

The decisive piece of information here was the assertion by the caller that the car seemed to have accelerated all on its own. It was a great story and got enormous play in the national media. And I’m sure all of stories– but especially on CNN and CBC– featured earnest looking young reporters looking into the camera and explaining to the viewer what he or she should do if it happened to them.

If there is a single website somewhere that shows scientific evidence that this problem really exists, I’d like to see it. As it turns out, the car in California that started the whole thing had the wrong floor-mats installed and it is almost certain that the floor mat had bunched up against the gas pedal and jammed it in place. It’s even possible that the driver thought he had his foot on the brake and kept pushing it harder and harder, and the harder he pushed it, the less it worked. But it didn’t matter: a compelling narrative was in place.  Cue the hysteria.

Need more?  Studies were done by reputable journals including The Atlantic.  The overwhelming majority of drivers reporting these problems were over 55.

GM got into trouble as well, for an ignition switch the had a tendency to turn itself off, thereby de-activating the air bags. One woman, whose family sued GM, crashed with twice the legal limit of alcohol in her blood. But, yes, she might have lived if she had had an air bag. All that is needed at that point is for the jury to hear what a wonderful human being she was– she could have been your friend too– you, on the jury– if only she had lived.

Sarcasm aside it is necessary to point out– to those who feel lawsuits are just ruining our world– that juries do in fact allocate portions of blame, and will likely assign her a significant portion of it in this case.

It is not at all unusual to see certain media outlets sensationalize some lawsuit somewhere knowing that a good portion of the audience will derive great satisfaction from reading just how stupid juries are and how greedy those freeloading plaintiffs are. In reality, over and over again, you will find that the details of these cases tell a different story– even of the woman who burned her leg with the McDonald’s coffee– a favorite of the Tort-Reform Cabal in Washington.

[added October 28, 2014] And it does, after all, appear that GM had a real fault in the ignition switch, which it deliberately ignored. There you go!

Kids playing in a river in St. Mary’s, Ontario.

Posted on

Boob Studies

This idea has some laboratory support. Studies have found that viewing people’s bodies, as opposed to their faces, makes us judge those people as less intelligent, less ambitious, less competent and less likable. One neuroimaging experiment found that, for men, viewing pictures of sexualized women induced lowered activity in brain regions associated with thinking about other people’s minds. NY Times, November 29, 2013

If there ever was a definitively ridiculous incarnation of the “studies show” shibboleth out there, this is might be it.

Studies show…. So, like, they did this research, and it proved, uh, that men who look at naked women are stupid.

First of all, do you accept that scientists know which part of the brain is involved with “thinking about other people’s minds”? Surely, you don’t. I sure as hell don’t. And I don’t think I would even believe you if you said you thought they did. But this kind of absurd assertion gains currency all the time in our culture, very simply, because you can’t show me the part of the brain that doesn’t think about other peoples’ minds. In other words, you can’t prove that it’s false, because you can’t prove a negative. You especially can’t prove a negative of an un-provable positive.

As Karl Popper demonstrated, that means this assertion is, therefore, unproven. There has to be at least a hypothetical possibility that you could prove the assertion wrong. Given the nature of “studies show” and “neuroimaging” (which is not even a word), there is no such possibility.

But never mind– these “social scientists” heedlessly carry on with the other qualities they believe men ascribe to naked women. “Less competent”. Do you think this actually means something in this context? Does a man looking at a picture of a naked woman actually apply some kind of affected judgment to the next woman he gives a job interview to?

To their dubious credit, the researchers acknowledge that some of the effects of seeing someone naked are positive. The comment is poorly worded but, in essence, a researcher indicates that some people feel empathy for people who are experiencing being naked. I think.

It’s not very hard to set up these kind of studies. You have a hypothesis which has to be somewhat, moderately, possibly true. Usually, there is a social mission to the theory– that there is discrimination, for example, against an identifiable minority. Then you set up a straw man: people don’t think they are biased (see Malcolm Gladwell). Then you act as if you have shocking news for everyone.

Bottom line: they reached the profound conclusion that people react differently to naked people than to clothed people. This astounding revelation is sure to make CNN and provoke another wide-ranging round of “studies”.

This bullshit was found in…

On Negative Reviews

You really need to know this:  On TripAdvisor.ca there is a little box near the bottom of the screen:  ” If you own or manage [this attraction] register now for free tools to enhance your listing, attract new reviews, and respond to reviewers.”

This is a bit like the Ministry of the Environment inviting Shell to come in for a friendly little hoe-down and lunch and opportunity to give us their perspective on those pesky environmental activists.  How do you attract more comment from the public, meaning, perhaps, people who believe they stand to benefit from your work.

We just want to hear from both sides.