NYT's Brainless Brooks: NOOOOoo!! "psychologists"

[Mort Zuckerman]

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Subject: NYT's Brainless Brooks: NOOOOoo!! "psychologists"

Date: Oct 29, 2008 8:03 AM

ARTICLE BELOW- CAN WE GET RID OF THESE PEOPLE, PLEASE?
AND GET SOMEONE IN WHO HAS A BRAIN IN THEIR HEAD AND
SOMETHING TO OFFER THE NATION?

==================================================

We hardly need psychologists.

E=mc(squared) predicted the meltdown:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.diseases.lyme/browse_thread/thread/6940a8d9e0024621/8591b95e0ece47f7?q=Bush/Gore+ENERGY+&rnum=1#8591b95e0ece47f7
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.diseases.lyme/browse_frm/thread/e4359868117b8d81/e066f6566802741e?q=lehrer+bush+gore+bombs+bursting+in+air&rnum=1#e066f6566802741e

How could a psychologist tell us that we needed to place
the fulcrum under energy? Psychologists don't think
logically at all. In fact, they do nothing but argue
against logic.

They're like politicians and lawyers and brainless
pundits like Brooks, who shows he all along drank
the Kool-Aid and never had an independent thought in
his life. Rather he thought he was the self-anointed
Bearer of the Repugnicant Kool-Aid Chalice.

OMG, this idiot is a world-class idiot.

Untrainable. Brooks needs to be fired immediately.


Kristol, they should keep because his weaseley re-writes
of history and barely disguised flattery (contempt), for
us Gentiles is a valuable study in cowardice. Kristol
is good for motivating us to study where these Neocons
came from so that we can... "NEVER AGAIN."

E= mc(squared). It's how to make things out of something
else. In practice, we use the Laws of Thermodynamics.
You can't run an economy without an energy source and
materials to convert. This has ZERO to do with psychologists.

Running a country has ZERO to do with personalities.

It has to do with physics.

If this is supposed to be Brooks' personal excuznikism, the
real deal is that Brooks *CHOSE* to be a Kool-Aid Drinker
because it did something for his "ego" to hang with rich
people and pretend to understand what was going on
with the banksters and the Reporknicants' sell-out to the
corporate Kool-Aid formulary.

He needs to analyze himself, not us. And the last thing
we need is psychologists to tell us how the USA is now
a failed State. It was they who brought us the "IT'S ALL
ABOUT MEEEee!!!" theory of leaving the hard thinking to
others, while selling yourself as an expert on the
people who actually did the thinking. It's the "Wrapping
a Baseball Around a Basketball" theory of having a psychologist
analyze a chemist, resulting in the Lyme Crymes being described
as "Ted-Kascynski-Like Unabomber Chemistry."

And *criminally* "dangerously intelligent."


It's amazing how much money can be made by being an
astonishingly stupid person. I guess I should say,
"It's amazing how much we pay the entire DHHS and USDOJ
for doing absolutely nothing, and worse, are apparently
intellectually incapable of their jobs."


What happened to this country was 100% predictable to
anyone who *gave* a crap, and THAT kind of selfish
thinking was brought to us by psychologists.

In the weeks and months ahead, as fewer and fewer
people seek psychological help (because they will
need *real* help), psychologists and psychiatrists will
create a new class of victims and demand that they
be "treated." You've already seen part of it already
with "Shaken Baby Syndrome" and IDSA's new "Fibromyalgia"
campaign.


All of these groups (CPS/DCF/DMHAS) who don't actually *DO*
anything are going to get more ferocious with their
cannibalism. And at a time soon after that, their victims,
being armed, are not going to put up with it.

You *WILL* see it happen.

You *WON'T* see an ethics campaign warning against
*creating* "patients" or "clients" during this period
of economic decline being proffered by the American
Psychiatric Association.


Everyone else, though, should be on their guard,
if you know what I mean.


Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://wwwrelapsingfever.org

====================================================
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/opinion/28brooks.html?em=&pagewanted=print
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October 28, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Behavioral Revolution
By DAVID BROOKS

Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you
perceive a
situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you
calculate which
course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.

Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that
step three
is the most important. Economic models and entire social science
disciplines are
premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in
rationally calculating
and maximizing their self-interest.

But during this financial crisis, that way of thinking has failed
spectacularly.
As Alan Greenspan noted in his Congressional testimony last week, he
was “shocked”
that markets did not work as anticipated. “I made a mistake in
presuming that the
self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were
such as that
they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their
equity in
the firms.”

So perhaps this will be the moment when we alter our view of decision-
making. Perhaps
this will be the moment when we shift our focus from step three,
rational calculation,
to step one, perception.

Perceiving a situation seems, at first glimpse, like a remarkably
simple operation.
You just look and see what’s around. But the operation that seems most
simple is
actually the most complex, it’s just that most of the action takes
place below the
level of awareness. Looking at and perceiving the world is an active
process of
meaning-making that shapes and biases the rest of the decision-making
chain.

Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases
for four
decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and
also with work
by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan
Ariely.

My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-
out party
for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated
psychology to
the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible
explanations for
why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the
risks they were
taking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of
research. Taleb
not only has an explanation for what’s happening, he saw it coming.
His popular
books “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Back Swan” were broadsides at
the risk-management
models used in the financial world and beyond.

In “The Black Swan,” Taleb wrote, “The government-sponsored
institution Fannie Mae,
when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite,
vulnerable
to the slightest hiccup.” Globalization, he noted, “creates
interlocking fragility.”
He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of
stability,
in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse — “when one
fails, they all
fail.”

Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler
than the one
we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many
of the perceptual
biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that
confirm our prejudices
more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue
recent events
when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin
concurring facts into
a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed
skill in circumstances
when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of
errors of perception.
Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught
in social contagions
and reinforced each other’s risk assessments. They failed to perceive
how tightly
linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.

Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk
models, which
try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what
he calls
the tragic vision of humankind, which “believes in the existence of
inherent limitations
and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement
of this fact
as a basis for any individual and collective action.” If recent events
don’t underline
this worldview, nothing will.

If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing
you realize
is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always
good guardians
of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances
when government
could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see “Nudge” by
Thaler and
Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that
government
officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality
than private
business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited,
and, being
deeply politicized, they’re even more likely to filter inconvenient
facts.

This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one.
It’s a big,
whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to
perceive things that
aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.

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