Is there no limit to academic foolishness?

I was amazed to read in The Guardian’s blogs that a Professor Joseph Ferrari from DePaul University in Chicago claims procrastination is a serious disease that needs to be recognized and treated by clinicians. He blames the ‘condition’ for everything from depression, low self-esteem, and insomnia, to “discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor,” and “more accidents at home involving unmended appliances.” (“Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow”)

Another academic, Professor Piers Steel from Calgary University has calculated, apparently, that: “the beeps notifying the arrival of email are . . . causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.” How he works this out is beyond me — and I suspect beyond any kind of logic or commonsense. (“Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters”). Continued

Maybe today’s financial crisis has an unexpected upside

That, at any rate, is the view of Terence Blacker, writing for Britain’s newpaper The Independent (“Reasons to be cheerful about the credit crunch”).

He cites a number of potential upsides: people realizing once again that a house is somewhere to live, not an investment opportunity or a source of never-ending income; less constant yakking about making money; a sense of disgust at some of the incomes of top executives; less indulgence in conspicuous spending; even a greater appreciation of what we all have today. Continued

Is loyalty always admirable? Is faith always a virtue? Perhaps not.

An Antebellum era (pre-civil war) family Bible.
Image via Wikipedia

Loyalty has long been prized by leaders of every kind, from business moguls to politicians and church leaders; to be disloyal is typically seen as an obviously negative trait. Yet too much emphasis on loyalty can cause real problems, like stifling dissent, dulling people’s willingness to tell the truth and blunting their creativity. If no one is willing to rock the boat by pointing out problems or suggesting new ideas, how many opportunities, mistakes or instances of questionable practice will be missed? When does loyalty become misplaced?

It’s a problem of balance. Too much disloyalty is disruptive and destroys trust. Too much loyalty — especially of the unquestioning kind — means important questions may be ignored or suppressed until it’s too late. Should you put loyalty above ‘outing’ misbehavior or dishonesty? Should you stay loyal to a polticial party, a candidate, or a point of view even if you now believe they have it all wrong?

What about patriotism? Is ‘my country, right or wrong’ an admirable attitude — or one that prevents nations from making the changes they need to protect the very values they claim to stand for? What if my country is wrong? Isn’t it more loyal, in the true sense, to stand up and say so, than keep my mouth shut out of misplaced qualms about what others may think? Continued

How false beliefs become fixed in people’s minds

Source Amnesia diagram
Source: Wikipedia

As we remember things, we also forget where we heard them or who told us about them. As a result, we easily forget whether a supposed fact is true or was originally merely a rumor.

Even when we are told something with a good many caveats attached, when it comes back into the mind, the disclaimers have probably been detached somehow, so we recall it as factual.

That’s the claim of this article in The International Herald Tribune (“Your brain lies to you”). The authors, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, explain how information is moved around and processed in the brain before being stored in memory. It is this processing and re-processing that strips the supposed fact from the context in which it was originally received as data. Continued

We aren’t becoming more cynical, we’re becoming more dependent on authority and simplistic views of the truth

Ben Goldacre, writing about a week ago in “Comment is Free,” the blog network of the British newspaper The Guardian, mentioned an interesting study into the way the media handle science stories (“Why reading should not be believing”).

The researchers found that 65% of stories didn’t correctly deal with “the study methodology and the quality of the evidence.” Obsessed with giving out eye-catching ‘truths’ from authority figures in white lab-coats, these reporters skidded over any drawbacks or uncertainties and reduced the numerical information in the studies to simple headlines, preferably with big numbers in them. Continued

Maybe all the injunctions to show your emotions and let it all hang out aren’t as sensible as their proposers claim

As a British person living in the United States, I quickly got used to all the stereotypes about cold, stuffy, screwed-up and up-tight Brits (doubtless wearing bowler hats and carrying rolled umbrellas) versus the open, emotionally-balanced, well-adjusted Yanks.

While I can see the benefit to some people of talking about their problems openly, I still nursed a basic aversion to telling perfect strangers about my troubles and deluging friends and family with raw emotion.

Now I have some scientific support, reported in the British magazine The New Statesman, but produced by Dr. Mark Seery of the University at Buffalo. Continued

Not only do set targets rarely prove useful, they can sometimes make things worse

Corporations and governments love setting targets. It gives them the illusion of being in control and allows them to tell the world how tough and businesslike they are acting — never mind that such targets can cause more problems than they cure.

That’s why this piece from The Guardian’s ‘Comment in free’ section in Great Britain caught my eye (“Crunch time for numbers”). The subhead says it all: “Government targets don’t work - and the decision of four police forces to dispense with them is a brave and significant step.”

The arguments against targets are now pretty familiar — the weaker pupils who lose out to those who might be coaxed over the line, the trains that set off happily without their passengers to avoid being late, the hospital bugs (the waiting lists are down, but one in 10 hospital patients now face real harm). . .

      Small changes in definition also have dramatic effects. Bag-snatching used to be defined as lost property until the 1930s, minor vandalism became defined as criminal only in 1977 - doubling the vandalism rate overnight, and fueling some of the angst about rising crime that followed.

Continued

I guess most of us have become used to the constant efforts by the media to induce mass hysteria over some minor topic. I had come to think of it as little more than marketing, on the basis that disaster stories always sell better than good news. Then I found this article by Robert Skidelsky and realized that such apocalyptic thinking has a very long history (“The apocalyptic mind”).

He says that, “classical apocalyptic thinking is certainly alive and well, especially in America, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism, and is mass-marketed with all the resources of modern media.” Even scientists are not immune, expressing probabilities as certainties and attacking dissent as some sort of heresy. Continued

It’s common for young people, especially young women, to claim that they “can’t do math.” Of course, it’s not true. It seems to be more a perception that math “isn’t cool” — or whatever the relevant expression is nowadays. It’s for nerds and geeks, like most intellectual pursuits. And while my guess is that this attitude is more prevalent in the US than most places, it seems to be common throughout much of the world.

That’s why this article in The Guardian “Comment is free” section intrigued me (“Geek + nerd = ?”). Ian Stewart, the writer, comments on the power of stereotypes to replace actual knowledge and how, once they are in place, they become hard to change. On the topic of geeks and nerds he writes:

The real problem, I suspect, is not confined to mathematics. The words “geek” and “nerd” were both coined in the USA, where they reflect a general tendency to despise all types of intellectual activity. Any interest other than television or sport is viewed as weird, be it collecting fossils or writing poetry. And when children encounter something difficult at school - such as mathematics - a natural defence mechanism comes into play. It is much easier to denigrate the topic, and make fun of the students who can handle it, than it is to admit to your own inadequacy.

I have to say that I view the thoughtless denigration of intellect in favor of ‘being practical’ with some alarm. Continued

Paul MacInnes offers a tongue-in-cheek welcome to new European Union laws that aim to outlaw misleading and aggressive marketing practices. “Will this,” he wonders, “mean an end to overexcited reviews on Amazon?” (“Free to rave”)

It seems that the EU’s “unfair commercial practices directive” is aimed at harmonizing EU standards to stop “sharp practices” such as “misleading and aggressive marketing”. As McInnes says, “If such a directive were thoroughly implemented, there would surely be no marketing left.” That would be especially true in the USA, where believing any marketing message demands a degree of credulousness that borders on insanity.

But “overexcited reviews on Amazon?” McInnes wonders whether banning misleading marketing would deny people a fundamental right:

“. . . the right to pen bogus and misleading reviews on Amazon. . . Practices like posting reviews of your own book that read: ‘Brilliant! I luv this! It has 2 be the besst novel about existential detachment since The Stranger! Er, lol!’”

On a more serious note, McInnes wonders whether regulations like this would really allow people to trust more in what they read. I wonder that too. After all, the best defense against hucksters and snake-oil salesmen isn’t a law; it’s a healthy dose of skepticism.

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