One lesson I’ve worked hard at imparting is that scientists, being generally of slightly above average intelligence, and sometimes more, excel at finding evidence which supports their beliefs.
I do science as well, here's my sample of one: my father (farmer's son) shot my mother in the **s four decades ago with an airgun. For fun. (It was indeed funny). No dot is big enough to express her intensity about that, even today. I'm adament i have proven at least something and surely one of the thousands of journals would accept my work? Though possibly without a watermark. But then i'll call it 'experimental science).
What i found most interesting - as Turner's conclusion is not surprising since it reflects his political views which can easily be identified from his career's work and his sources - is this, from the conclusion on page 40:
'...in the style of predictive validation, this data has been compared with three key scenarios...'
Predictive validation comes from psychometrics...It's used for recruitment, emplyee behaviour etc
Btw; Turner keeps updating his predictions every few years;
The first thing that comes to my mind is that I despise party politics so much I would break their thesis. Something tells me that the authors are probably politically embedded in one of the two dictated parties. That tells me that they are likely not near as smart as the publisher of Brain would let on.
Shouldn't we see more politically active retired football players if this thesis is true? This is a group of people which has both fame and money as starting points. There are a few involved in politics, but given their out of the box head starts, they strike me as underrepresented in Congress.
"People diagnosed with various mental health disorders can sometimes start engaging in intense political behavior, such as violent protests, civil disobedience and the aggressive expression of political views. So far, however, the link between political behavior and the brain has been rarely explored, as it was not viewed as central to the understanding of mental health disorders."
Even if their theory had any sense to it, they have completely reversed cause and effect, as is sadly typical.
Our thoughts create pathways ("connections") in the brain, and these pathways do, like any jungle track, become easier to use the more they are used. Hence, "intensity" increases as a function of habitual thinking produced by self-reinforced thought patterns.
Contrarily, the jungle becomes relatively harder to penetrate the more the track is used and so the track becomes more than preferred it becomes the default and using any other route becomes so hard that one rarely bothers unless one meets a tiger on the track.
You can see very clearly in this article that these researchers have no idea that jungle even exists, for them the track is all that there is, and they will vehemently deny - with extreme "intensity" - that any other path is even theoretically possible.
i.e. retards.
It's a bit like that quote from Paul about eunuchs: Some were born retards, some were made retards, and some have made themselves retards.
For these guys, it's a bit of all three. Their natural inclinations, their educations, and their own choices have combined to devastating effect; it's an intellectual trainwreck. Gruesomely fascinating to watch but all you learn from it is a cautionary tale; don't be that guy.
There is a field of research called trauma research. It's very weird and polarizing: some argue it's totally true, you'll see; others argue it's totally false, as always.
The researchers aim at establishing an equivalence of the metaphor of "psychological trauma" with brain trauma, or brain injury, or some other kind of lesion (permanent or not) to that organ.
There are far too many confounders in this case. For example, increased political activity on brain-injured people could be explained by increased activity of propagandists, politicians, journalists, spies; and also due to the presence of economic crisis, make-believe pandemics, disruption of normal life, constant mockery from mass media, land grabs, erosion of civil rights and of fundamental rights, and so on, a so forth.
It could simply be that brain-injured people are as sensitive to everything as everyone else, but they over-react, or become easier to brainwash and transform into political zombies (for example, young feminists, who perhaps are brain-injured from psychiatric drugs taken early on in life. A 20-year old feminist in 2018 probably was prescribed amphetamines for some fraudulent diagnoses of attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity disorder some time between 2008 and 2014; then, she discovered she had to join the intifada against males, against Russia and against Global Warming caused by white people)
So, if it all boils down to people with poor self-control are poor at self-control, then this kind of research is not very much of a scientific research. They should return the research money!
But I think it's very useful to always look at what they hide. One hidden variable that is a big candidate to explain how weird our world is today is drug use, not of illegal drugs, but of prescription drugs. This is a blind spot for many "conservatives" who are total doormats of Medical Doctors. Pediatricians seem to be the worst offenders.
At least they made sure that liberal/democrats dots were blue and conservative/republican dots were red. Independents should have been gray, not black.
Surprised they didn't make conservative dots squares, liberal dots round and independents triangles. But you can't have everything.
Interesting and promising results which obviously require more studies. $5 million for the next year should cover it.
Thanking you in advance.
I'm ready to do the analysis for $4.9 million.
What, are you from the University of Tel Aviv?
University of New Mexico. I think they both may be experts though in government sponsored science grift.
New Mexico gives discounts? (Though at 2% it is hardly worth the trouble of having new contract)
During the Great Depression people were willing to do it for a ham sandwich. We're heading that way again.
I do science as well, here's my sample of one: my father (farmer's son) shot my mother in the **s four decades ago with an airgun. For fun. (It was indeed funny). No dot is big enough to express her intensity about that, even today. I'm adament i have proven at least something and surely one of the thousands of journals would accept my work? Though possibly without a watermark. But then i'll call it 'experimental science).
On a more serious note, today, via this substack 'The limits to growth… are coming closer' https://klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/the-limits-to-growth-are-coming-closer (summary: 1970s club of Rome MIT study was right, global society will collapse in a few decades) i found this 2008 study:
A comparison of the limits to growth with 30 years of reality - Graham Turner
https://selectra.co.uk/sites/selectra.co.uk/files/pdf/thirty-years-of-reality.pdf
What i found most interesting - as Turner's conclusion is not surprising since it reflects his political views which can easily be identified from his career's work and his sources - is this, from the conclusion on page 40:
'...in the style of predictive validation, this data has been compared with three key scenarios...'
Predictive validation comes from psychometrics...It's used for recruitment, emplyee behaviour etc
Btw; Turner keeps updating his predictions every few years;
2012 Is Global Collapse Imminent? An Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data http://pinguet.free.fr/turner814.pdf
2014 Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse
Thank you for starting my day with a great laugh.🤣
Thanks more for laughing!
The first thing that comes to my mind is that I despise party politics so much I would break their thesis. Something tells me that the authors are probably politically embedded in one of the two dictated parties. That tells me that they are likely not near as smart as the publisher of Brain would let on.
“our results do not necessarily imply that conservatism is driven by cognitive impairment or that liberalism is driven by self-righteous posturing.”
They've hit the sweet spot where both poles of the political spectrum can seize upon their paper greedily and use it to smear the opposing side.
Doubling their citations! Excellent marketing placement.
“You need that like you need a hole in the head!” Thanks for bringing up one of the wise euphemisms my mom always said to us! 😂😂😂
Shouldn't we see more politically active retired football players if this thesis is true? This is a group of people which has both fame and money as starting points. There are a few involved in politics, but given their out of the box head starts, they strike me as underrepresented in Congress.
Brutal. Four of my brothers and I served active duty US military. Sad to see the VA still allows studies like this. Shame on them.
"People diagnosed with various mental health disorders can sometimes start engaging in intense political behavior, such as violent protests, civil disobedience and the aggressive expression of political views. So far, however, the link between political behavior and the brain has been rarely explored, as it was not viewed as central to the understanding of mental health disorders."
The Democrats, yes?
Even if their theory had any sense to it, they have completely reversed cause and effect, as is sadly typical.
Our thoughts create pathways ("connections") in the brain, and these pathways do, like any jungle track, become easier to use the more they are used. Hence, "intensity" increases as a function of habitual thinking produced by self-reinforced thought patterns.
Contrarily, the jungle becomes relatively harder to penetrate the more the track is used and so the track becomes more than preferred it becomes the default and using any other route becomes so hard that one rarely bothers unless one meets a tiger on the track.
You can see very clearly in this article that these researchers have no idea that jungle even exists, for them the track is all that there is, and they will vehemently deny - with extreme "intensity" - that any other path is even theoretically possible.
i.e. retards.
It's a bit like that quote from Paul about eunuchs: Some were born retards, some were made retards, and some have made themselves retards.
For these guys, it's a bit of all three. Their natural inclinations, their educations, and their own choices have combined to devastating effect; it's an intellectual trainwreck. Gruesomely fascinating to watch but all you learn from it is a cautionary tale; don't be that guy.
There is a field of research called trauma research. It's very weird and polarizing: some argue it's totally true, you'll see; others argue it's totally false, as always.
The researchers aim at establishing an equivalence of the metaphor of "psychological trauma" with brain trauma, or brain injury, or some other kind of lesion (permanent or not) to that organ.
There are far too many confounders in this case. For example, increased political activity on brain-injured people could be explained by increased activity of propagandists, politicians, journalists, spies; and also due to the presence of economic crisis, make-believe pandemics, disruption of normal life, constant mockery from mass media, land grabs, erosion of civil rights and of fundamental rights, and so on, a so forth.
It could simply be that brain-injured people are as sensitive to everything as everyone else, but they over-react, or become easier to brainwash and transform into political zombies (for example, young feminists, who perhaps are brain-injured from psychiatric drugs taken early on in life. A 20-year old feminist in 2018 probably was prescribed amphetamines for some fraudulent diagnoses of attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity disorder some time between 2008 and 2014; then, she discovered she had to join the intifada against males, against Russia and against Global Warming caused by white people)
So, if it all boils down to people with poor self-control are poor at self-control, then this kind of research is not very much of a scientific research. They should return the research money!
But I think it's very useful to always look at what they hide. One hidden variable that is a big candidate to explain how weird our world is today is drug use, not of illegal drugs, but of prescription drugs. This is a blind spot for many "conservatives" who are total doormats of Medical Doctors. Pediatricians seem to be the worst offenders.
Well it does have the involvement of the Harvard Medical School! Purveyors of crap medical studies since forever.
At least they made sure that liberal/democrats dots were blue and conservative/republican dots were red. Independents should have been gray, not black.
Surprised they didn't make conservative dots squares, liberal dots round and independents triangles. But you can't have everything.
Hypothetically, it will soon be possibly using AI, to generate an anti-paper for each paper submitted. Briggs can soon retire.