The comments on the recent Bad Science posting on Brain Gym included several in which the commenters indicated not having the courage to question the introduction of pseudoscience nonsense in their school or business. I've had corporate managers tell me that they've submitted to the indignity of performing pseudoscientific activities such as those of Brain Gym and Neurolinguistic Programming, rather than protest and being seen as not "being team players".
I've mentioned before that nonsense congregates. It also migrates. Brain Gym has moved from the school environment to the corporate environment. It is one thing for a grade one child to press his Brain Buttons, it is something quite different for an adult manager. Yet, this kind of indignity is often expected when companies embrace pseudoscience.
Harvard University's Bob Sutton of the No-Asshole Rule and Evidence Based Management fame, has 15 rules he believes in. I'd like to single out number 11, which in a small way is relevant to this discussion:
"The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence."
The message? Employees have to be able to question something as simple as the introduction of a pseudoscience technique and know that their argument and their evidence will be heard. Bringing in nonsense activities into an organisation will not normally threaten the future of that organisation, although it may divert valuable resources to nonsense. The question is whether organisational culture that suppresses dissent at that level, will allow it where more important issues are at stake?
Dr Ben Goldacre, writing for The Guardian over at Bad Science, smote Brain Gym, and again, and again, and again, and again, and (sigh...) yet again! Will Brain Gym, a quackish granfalloon, react officially? I can find no evidence that they have in the past reacted officially and publically to accusations of quackery. Brain Gym's guru, Paul Dennison, seems to believe in just lying low in the knowledge that things will quieten down again.
Brain Gym has now also been exposed as pseudoscience nonsense in the commentary Neuroscience and Education by the British Economic and Social Research Council and in this scholarly article by Keith Hyatt. The evidence against Brain Gym is mounting and the education establishment worldwide must surely now take note.
Up to now Brain Gym was spread like a virus in schools throughout the world by scores of consultants whose only required qualification seemed the completion of a series of Brain Gym courses. They were ably assisted by thousands of well-meaning, but gullible teachers. The picture below shows teachers doing a mindless Brain Gym exercise during a training session (from Bangor Daily News via Bad Science). Apologies to these ladies who probably did not bargain on having their faces spread all over the internet.
Many commenters on Brain Gym denounce its pseudoscience nature and the excessive claims of Brain Gym practitioners. They see some merit in the exercises, however, claiming that any physical exercise would be beneficial to children at school. I beg to differ. Most of the exercises have some pseudoscientific or plain nonsense rationale. They make no sense in the absence of the explanation given for them in the Brain Gym manuals.
An example is the "Brain Buttons". The Brain Gym Teachers Edition (given to me by a disgusted teacher), describes this as follows:
"The Brain Buttons (soft tissue under the clavicle to the left and right of the sternum) can be massaged deeply with one hand while holding the navel with the other hand"
This is supposed to improve the brain's contralateral functioning and "increase the flow of the body's electromagnetic energy".
The explanation from the Brain Gym Teachers Edition:
"Brain Buttons are known in acupuncture as Kidney 27's. ... This is known in Applied Kinesiology as ocular lock ..."
How can a teacher teach this nonsense exercise without giving the child the pseudoscience explanation? The same applies to most of the other exercises.
In South Africa Brain Gym was taken on by Christian churches because they perceived it as New Age with Eastern religeous influences. The reaction by some of the Brain Gym practitioners was to remove all references to the origin of the exercises from their literature and to declare it to be science based. As to the honesty of this, you be the judge.
"Three policemen. One service pistol. No clip for the firearm ... and no bullets! That's how police had to patrol the town on Friday night. Their worst fears were realised in the early hours of Saturday morning when robbers opened fire on them."
Patrolling with an unloaded pistol anywhere in the world is stupidity, but in South Africa it's suicide. Surely the police's standard operating procedures should not allow it to happen? A pistol with no magazine is a single shot weapon, with no cartridges (bullets) it becomes an inefficient and dangerous baton.
South Africa has some of the best and most experienced "gunfighter" police officers. The story is told of a top American police trainer who came to train flying squad officers (an elite unit) in South Africa. He had never been in actual combat. He asked his trainees whether any of them had ever been involved in a gunfight. He was dumbfounded to find that many had lost count of the number of times they had been in gunfights.
How then for these capable and experienced police officers to transfer their expertise to their less capable colleagues, such as those who went to a gunfight with an empty pistol?
Basic target shooting training and participation in practical shooting exercises are of course prerequisites before any higher lever tactical training can be done. The problem is that even the best training do not necessarily transfer to real life situations.
Interestingly, the opposite also sometimes applies. Jim Cirillo, while on stakeout duty for the NYPD, was involved in a much spoken about shootout. During the incident he shot and hit three armed robbers, firing six shots, three of which were head shots. Cirillo was never able to repeat this feat on the shooting range.
"Gunfghter" police officers are few and far between, even in very professional police forces. It is unrealistic to expect that level of expertise from the majority of officers. On the other hand, the level of incompetence shown by the officers described in the "look Ma, no bullets" incident, is unacceptable.
Good basic training is non-negotiable. For the rest, the use of competent "gunfighter" police officers as mentors to especially younger officers seems a good idea. The use of narrative in auditory format could also work, especially in a country where the majority of police officers have English only as a second or third language. The use of story telling and narrative as learning tools also feature strongly in traditional African culture and can therefore be especially effective.
These measures, however, will have to be followed up by scenario based training under realistic circumstances.
Just for interest sake, see below what shooting feats are possible!
These feats were performed by Jerry Miculek, the current revolver World Practical Shooting champion.
In a previous post on brain profiling, I've indicated that the concept is pseudoscientific and in fact has nothing to do with the differential functioning of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. I quoted Ned Herrmann, the originator of the concept, as follows: "The whole-brain model, although originally thought of as a physiological map, is today entirely a metaphor." I've further indicated that brain profilists consider their brain profiles to be metaphors, although you often have to read very carefully to distill that fact from their writings.
Now we have one group of brain profilists who claims to be able to construct "genetic" brain profiles. Nowhere in their work do I find the weasel word, "metaphor". A description of the work of Dr. Annette Lotter and Associates with the South African Springbok rugby team appears in the normally scientifically reliable South African edition of the Popular Mechanics (September 2007). The full article by Andy Colquhoun is available here.
The article has the normal left brain right brain pop psychology nonsense that you'll find in such articles. I've previously referred to this as whole-brain half-wittery.
It then goes further and describes how 32 genetically determined combinations of left right dominance of brain hemisphere, hand, foot, eye and ear, determine people's reaction to stress. Based on the genetic brain profile, Lotter and Associates claim that they are able to predict "blockages" persons will experience under stress. These "blockages" cause different parts of the brain to become inaccessible under stress.
I quote one example:
"(Rugby) Players with left-eye dominance are overly sensitive to body langauge, and if you know that, you can throw them of their game by pulling faces or making gestures. You might also wonder how they would react to the haka (the Maori war chant used by the All Blacks)"
No, this is not satire. Have a look below at the All Black haka referred to. If there was any validity to the claim, any left eye dominant player who faced the All Blacks, would go into a catatonic state! To my knowledge that has never happened.
I have been an active target pistol shooter for many years. Pistol shooting is the one sport where the participant's dominant eye is fairly noticeable. Face pulling and grimaces are very common when bad shots are fired (add to that that many of my fellow shottists are an ugly lot!), yet I've never seen a left-eye dominant shottist being phased by that. The fact that there are many left eye dominant shottists competing at the top level, is a Popperian falsification of Dr. Lotter's claim. That, however, is anecdotal and as everone knows, anecdotal evidence have little scientific standing.
Let's look at facts. Consider that about 36% of the general population is left-eye dominant, that 34% of right-handed persons and 57% of left-handed persons are left-eye dominant Bourassa, 1996). Those are the percentages of rugby players you would prefer not to select when playing the All Blacks!
The claim that left-eye dominant people are sensitive to facial expressions assumes that eye dominance has a specific and predictable relationship to hemispheric asymmetries, from which specific predictions can be made about behaviour. This is questionable. Eye-dominance and its relationship to the hemispheres of the brain is not a simple either-or matter, as it is well known that each eye is connected via the optic chiasm to both hemispheres of the brain and that each eye has two visual half-fields that project to different sides of the brain. Sally Springer and George Deutsch, in their authoritative book, Left brain right brain (1998, p.133), point out that the relationship of eye and ear preference to hemispheric asymmetry is not particularly strong.
Left-eye dominant rugby players cave in under the haka? I think not! But consider for a moment the position of a left-eye dominant player who is not selected for a team because his coach believed this pseudoscientific nonsense.
As to Lotter Associates general claim that depending on the genetic brain profile and the pattern of motor and sensory dominance, different parts of the brain would become inaccessible or develop blockages under stress, I know of no scientific evidence to support this. There are stacks of reliable information on the internet on stress and the brain, but in no reputable website do I find anything on brain blockages as described by Lotter and Associates.
This quote by Druckman and Bjork (1991) from the excellent report of the American Academy of Sciences, based upon research commissioned by the American Army, says it all:
Sports performance is a quintessential problem in complex motor, cognitive, affective, and attentional processes, and it depends on functions that are widely distributed throughout both cerebral hemispheres. Studies that characterize the cognitive, attentional, or motor components of sports as “left hemisphere abilities” or “right hemisphere abilities” are fatally flawed. Not only is it inherently insupportable to characterize sports abilities by brain hemisphere, it is also methodologically and logically flawed to narrowly localize these complex processes.
This and the previous report by Druckman and Swets (1988) are both available free online. Sporting bodies, even those with limited funds, have no excuse not to properly research approaches and fads they subject their players to. The Springbok team have a history of involvement with management fads. This included whole-brain half-wittery. They should also take heed of the Druckman and Bjork quote above.
Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon had an interesting post on "Corporate Alzheimers". Lambe described how rapid turnover of staff in public and commercial corporates could lead to loss of organisational memory, particularly for slow moving events, such as developing tax policy or running major engineering projects.
Clinical and cognitive neuropsychological memory research have some useful metaphors for corporate memory loss. Now I should immediately add that brain based anything is often nonsense, i.e. brain based teaching and brain based business. Consultants and trainers often use the status of the neurosciences to sell their pseudoscientific approaches to gullible clients. Alternatively they try so sell neuroscience based ideas long before stable bodies of research have been established and before practical applications have been demonstrated for said ideas. That's why I emphasize that in discussing the mapping of personal memory on to organisational memory, I'm using a metaphor. Granted, corporate memory is largely dependent on individuals' memories - the metaphor is thus a strong one. One proviso - those individuals will hopefully not be dementic!
This article on organisational memory has a useful way of mapping cognitive memory concepts to organisational ones:
Procedural memory - work routines (I would add technical skills)
Episodic memory - stories & myths, critical incidents and other information related to a specific event or time
Lambe referred to corporate Alzheimers. Alzheimers Disease in its early stages typically affects declarative memory, which is considered to consist of semantic and episodic memory. Procedural memory deficits on the other hand, is more characteristic of Parkinson's Disease. Together I believe these dementic processes form a useful metaphor for corporate memory loss.
South Africa currently has major problems with the maintenance of its infrastructure. This affects the power network, the water reticulation and sewerage systems, the dams, the roads and much more. It is widely accepted that this is largely due to the wholesale loss of competent administrators, technicians and engineers since the early 90's. In the case of the electricity supplier, ESKOM, there was not only a turnover of staff, the workforce was almost halved.
As Patrick Lambe indicated, such staff depletion in organisations with activities that span generations, had to cause major corporate memory loss. As this happened at the time of the transition for apartheid to democracy, there was also bound to be attitudinal issues on both sides (outgoing and incoming staff) that could have compromised knowledge transfer. Those issues are now history and we have to look forward.
There seems to be a realisation among all concerned that the knowledge and skills of displaced administrators, technicians and engineers need to be captured and harnessed. The question is how to do it? How can the knowledge of those who left, be captured and lost corporate memories restored?
"We always know more than we can say, and we can always say more than we can write down".
Following on this, I believe that the best way to capture lost individual knowledge and to restore corporate memories, is to capture the knowledge of those who left and who may be returning (even if only temporarily) in narrative form. Just contracting them to write things down (i.e. manuals) will help, but too much which is important will be lost.
The second is:
"Knowledge can only be volunteered; it can never be conscripted".
The full cooperation of not only displaced persons, but also of current incumbents will be crucial. Lost memories will have to be recovered, but will also have to be integrated with new knowledge and new systems. This will require tact, wisdom and leadership from the management of organisations who have suffered corporate memory loss. It seems to me that these processes will of necessity have to be outsourced - I cannot see how an organisation can recover its own memories. Therapy to recover memory in a brain injured person, can be seen as the metaphor for such a process.
Let's trust that South African state and parastatal organisations find ways to recover their lost corporate memory and return to sanity. They need not look further than Cognitive Edge and its South African affiliate, Sonja Blignaut, to assist them.
In a previous posting "Caught between ENRON and ESKOM", I drew a somewhat tenuous link between ENRON and ESKOM. I did not for even a moment consider or suggest that ESKOM may be manipulating South Africa's power supply in the same manner that ENRON did to California early in this century.
The ESKOM official further alleged that the current maintenance problems experienced by ESKOM (but which they vehemently deny), were caused by the fact that executive bonuses were previously based on savings against budget. The savings that "justified" high bonuses also led to the loss of skilled staff and the neglect of maintenance.
These allegations must for the moment be regarded as unsubstantiated. The only evidence supplied by the official is that the rolling blackouts (euphemistically called load- shedding) started after the summer holidays, whereas there were no supply problems before the holidays.
The exorbitant salaries paid to ESKOM's top management and the obscene bonuses they declared for themselves last year, however, lend some credence to the allegations. ESKOM executive's clumsy handling of the power crisis, whether it was caused by imcompetence or design, lost them all credibility. They can restore some credibility by instituting a full, transparent and independent public investigation into the whole mess.
One can't help but to wonder whether, if around the turn of the century, both ESKOM and government had exhibited greater critical thinking skills and mindfully examined the evidence they had available to them, we would have been in this crisis? The same question could of course have been asked about Lay, Skilling and ENRON.
But then again, not even the critical thinking ability of a Socrates would have stood up in the face of raging greed.
Why did the once all conquering Israel Defence Force fail in the Second Lebanon War in 2006? This question was addressed in the just released Winograd Commission Report, the English summary which can be found here. The issue was also reflected upon in a 2007 academic paper by Raanan Lipshitz, to be found on Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton's Evidence Based Management website.
The core of the findings of the Winograd Report are:
Seriously deficient decision making at all levels.
Seriously deficient tactical and strategic thinking, planning and preparation.
Indecisiveness once the war started, specifically on whether an air or ground offensive was required.
I quote one sentence from the report:
This outcome (not achieving the war's objectives) was primarily caused by the fact that, from the very beginning, the war has not been conducted on the basis of deep understanding of the theatre of operations, of the IDF's readiness and preparedness, and of basic principles of using military power to achieve a political and diplomatic goal.
These finding are broadly similar to those of Lipshitz I've previously referred to. He specifically indicated that:
Management fads inherited from the US Army, including excessive context inappropriate jargon, led to poor communication and unclear and unmeasurable objectives. As an example, Lipshitz points to the difficulty to determine whether an abstract effect such as "shock and awe", has been achieved.
Extremely limited training of ground forces due to limited budgets.
Excessive reliance of high technology where simpler solutions should have been preferred, i.e the use of smart bombs where area bombing would have been more effective.
Lack of mindful, critical thinking, common sense and an evidence based approach. Instead management fads and business jargon reigned.
There is a lesson in this not only for military organisations, but also for other branches of public service and even business. The lesson is that inappropriately applied management methods and fads can severely damage such organizations, even lose wars.
My son returned from school a while ago with a pamphlet. A speaker at school distributed the pamphlets after a talk on whole brain functioning. The pamphlet suggested that parents have their children's brain profile tested for a small sum of money. What it did not say that it was a classical bait and switch scam. The assessment would lead to a programme to promote whole brain functioning and that was not at all cheap.
A while before that a friend had to undergo a brain profile assessment at work. Being a bit more neuroscientifically astute that the average worker, he questioned the concept, as well as the reliability and validity of the brain profile "test". Hopefully this was not a career limiting move, as his boss seemed set on knowing each employee's brain preferences.
So what is brain profiling and what is its scientific status, if any?
A brain profile assessment is not as one may imagine a neurological or neuropsychological examination of brain function. As envisaged here, it is a questionnaire of thinking and behavioural preferences, putatively representing underlying differences in brain organisation. The questionnaire is sometimes combined with simple tests of motor and sensory dominance (hand, foot, eye, ear).
Brain profiling seemed to originate with Ned Herrmann, a trainer/consultant who developed his four quadrant brain model based the split brain research of Roger Sperry, combined with the triune brain model of Paul McLean. Herrmann developed his Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) to test determine so called brain profiles. The scientific rejection of the simplistic brain model his theory was based on, soon led Herrmann to state that his four quadrant brain model was to seen as a metaphor.
Although Herrmann began with a brain-based theory of hemisphere dominance, he later accepted that this was an oversimplification with inadequate empirical support and recommended (1989, 63) that A, B, C, D quadrant terminology be used instead: ‘The whole-brain model, although originally thought of as a physiological map, is today entirely a metaphor.’
Hat tip to Jon Mueller at PESTS for this link.
Brain profiling instruments mostly seem to be derived from either Herrmann's HBDI or a shorter "test" by Paul Torrance, the "Your Style of Learning and Thinking" (SOLAT). Organisations affiliated to the Herrmann International group use the HBDI, while the Kobus Neethling Group and its affiliates use the Torrance derived instument, as adapted by Neethling.
Herrmann International claim that the HBDI is valid and reliable, but according to Prof. De Amato in the "The Eleventh Mental Measurements Yearbook, 1992", both validity and reliability are questionable. The SOLAT's validity and reliability is even more doubtful. Neethling claims high validity and reliability for his version of the SOLAT.
Claiming validity for either instrument must of necessity bring into question the validity of the "whole brain" concept on which both are based. I've indicated in a previous post that the concept is pseudoscientific nonsense that can best be described as whole-brain half-wittery. Is it sensible to even consider the validity of a psychometric test if the concept it purportedly measures is nonsense?
Even though Herrmann suggested moved away from the brain profiling idea, current Herrmann affiliated organisations, as well as Neethling affiliates, continue using brain based terminology extensively. The fact that it's meant as a metaphor, is normally only mentioned in passing and is probably missed by most of their clients. The fact that both organisations use the whole brain concept so extensively in all their programmes and do so very literally, brings about the question whether the metaphor idea has not merely become a fallback position for when they'e challenged by neuroscientifically astute clients?
My conclusion? Brain profiles are pseudoscientific in nature. The only way these instruments can get scientific respectability, would be to totally drop the pretense that they are in any form, metaphorically or otherwise, brain profiles. They are measures of thinking preferences, nothing more.
What is the difference between South Africa and the Titanic? ...
The Titanic's lights were on when it sank.
I'm sure similar jokes were making the rounds during the California electricity crisis when ENRON was manipulating their power supplies in 2000 and 2001. ENRON also features indirectly in South Africa's power problem.
The current electricity crisis in South Africa is the result of mainly two issues. The first was a decision by government not to build new power stations, as it wished to privatise power generation. Issues such as the ENRON debacle caused it to reconsider. Too little was done too late and we were irrevocably headed for disaster.
That was ENRON. The other issue was and is ESCOM's poor maintenance of its infrastructure. ESCOM, like so many state and parastatal organisations in South Africa, failed to understand that maintenance, though not a glamorous activity, needed to be done and needed competent engineers and technicians to manage and do it. Now that at last they're realising it, there is a problem.
There are not enough engineers and technicians to meet the need. Beeld newspaper today reported that ESCOM, has a shortage of hundreds of engineers and projects a shortage of thousands of technicians over the next five years. The 2010 Soccer World Cup, of course, falls right in the period of five years.
ESCOM is now considering re-employing engineers and technicians previously retrenched and forced to retire due to affirmative action. Will it work? Knowledge and skills that are not used, decay over time. Will they be up to the task? Will the current incumbents of positions previously occupied by the returning engineers, accept their guidance?
Many South Africans could see this situation coming and warned government and ESCOM long ago. It is only natural that they would now bask in that exquisitely destructive emotion, schadenfreude.
We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of The Astrological Magazine will cease with the December 2007 issue.
I thought initially that this was probably an urban legend, just too good to be true! I checked, however, and it seems genuine.
Hat tip to John Johnson at PESTS (Psychologists Educating Students to Think Skeptically) listserve for this.
Each year The Edge asks a number of prominent scientists and other thinkers an open ended question. Their answers always make for interesting reading. Previous years' questions included:
2007 - What are you optimistic about? 2006 - What is your dangerous idea? 2005 - What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
The Edge's question for 2008 is especially thought provoking and the answers will provide you with many hours of bedtime reading:
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?
This blurb from Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly's Radar sums it up well: "A remarkable feast of the intellect... an amazing group of reflections on science, culture, and the evolution of ideas. Reading the Edge question is like being invited to dinner with some of the most interesting people on the planet."
The names of the respondents to The Edge's question reads like a Who's Who of science and include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Howard Gardner, Daniel Kahneman, David Meyers, John Allen Paulos, Stephen Pinker and more than a hundred others.
Scanning through the responses, I picked up a number of common themes. The limitations of an overly reductionistic approach to science and the necessity to consider complexity was one. I must admit that I am myself still more comfortable within a reductionistic scientific model. I have fairly recently been introduced to the concepts of complexity, complex adaptive systems and emergence by Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge and Sonja Blignaut at Narrativelab.
Another theme was the dangers of bias and even of manipulation in the reporting of scientific experimentation. Many of the responses also touched upon the escalating conflict between science and religion. I am sure there are many other themes that can be identified, but in the absence of a comprehensive analysis, these depend on the confirmation bias of the reader.
Field Marshall Erich von Manstein allegedly categorised military officers into four types (I have been unable to find an original reference and I have seen the same categorisation ascribed to Von Clausewitz). These types are:
The brilliant and energetic man makes the best staff officer. He handles routine work with accuracy and completeness.
The brilliant and lazy man makes the best commanding officer. He tends to see the big picture accurately and avoids preoccupation with detail work which might distract him.
The stupid and lazy man makes the best subordinate. He will do what he is told properly, no more no less.
The stupid and energetic man, however, is to be avoided at all costs. He is quite capable of ruining the best laid plans.
In wartime such a categorisation may be a useful quick and dirty heuristic. One would wonder to what extent it was actually consistently acted upon and whether Nazi party membership did not feature strongly in such decisions. Von Manstein himself was one of the best of the German generals and was eventually fired by Hitler when he opposed his irrational military decisions.
This military rule of thumb is, however, also sometimes proposed as a corporate management tool, classifying people in boxes, as seen below in this figure from Slow Leaderhip.
Now, I believe one should be very careful about such categorisations and I doubt that this matrix is quite what Von Manstein had in mind. People's actions are often context specific, something categorisation does not allow for. The application of a rule of thumb from a military context in a corporate context is also questionable.
I am concerned that such classifications may become self-fulfilling prophesies. Writing about it as I am here, one's staff or customers may wonder in which part of the matrix you have placed them. Even worse, where will they categorise you!?
Having said that, I doubt that Von Manstein's classification is any worse than pseudoscientific classification systems such as brain profiling or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. At least Von Manstein's does not claim to be scientific and does not have a whole mythology built around it. Staff is not subjected to being tested with pseudopsychometric tests of doubtful reliability and validity. They are not subjected to workshops to manipulate their classification, or to show them to get along with others with different different brain or personality profiles. Best of all, Van Manstein's officer typology is free and no consultants are needed to interpret it or follow it up!
It is finally, however, a use now and pay later system. Eventually you'll pay the price for categorising people and losing sight of their individuality in the process.
Jeffry Ricker on the PESTS (Psychologists Educating Students to Think Skeptically) listserve alerted us to a post on polygraphing by Dan Greenberg on the Chronical Review. Greenberg points out that voluntarily undergoing a polygraph test (lie detector) is a bad idea due to a lack of scientific evidence for the reliability of such tests. He claims that "...it’s a voodoo device that can stain the innocent and exonerate the guilty."
Greenberg demonstrates how the device survived concerns about its scientific merits with an interesting quote from Richard Nixon: “I don’t know anything about polygraphs, and I don’t know how accurate they are, but I know they’ll scare hell out of people.”
One of the commenters on Greenberg's post points out that while screening polygraph tests may be suspect, directed issue tests are more accurate than eyewitness testimony. Which brings about the question, how accurate is eyewitness testimony? A Google search on eyewitness testimony brought me to an interesting example of memory misattribution.
An Australian eyewitness memory expert, Dr. Donald Thomson, was arrested for rape after he was identified by a rape victim as the rapist. At the time of the rape he was appearing on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. The raped woman had confused his face seen on TV with that of the rapist. The Australian police refused to accept his alibi, even though it was backed up by an assistant police commissioner who also appeared on the show, not to mention the studio audience and viewers! Which does not say much for the intelligence of the policemen involved (unless it was possible for Thomson to be in two places at once due to some weird quantum effect)! This incident from a book by Alan Baddeley, although I think it may have been mentioned before that by Daniel Schachter, both of them prominent memory experts.
Moral of the story? You agree to a screening polygraph test at your own peril. Consider perceptual distortions and unreliable memory when judging or challenging eyewitness testimony.
What an incongruous sight, Oprah Winfrey in Obama's corner, Chuck Norris in Huckaby's, or was it McCaine's? The ultimate agony aunt and her millions of avid faced "Oh my God" supporters versus the ultimate kick-ass guy with his probably fewer macho men supporters. Now if someone could just teach Chuck Norris how to properly hold a pistol so at least it seems as if he could hit the target, maybe then he would have a chance against Oprah!
Don't get me wrong, Obama (or Huckaby) may well be the best next president of the USA. My problem is the influence of celebrities. Will Oprah's supporters think their choice through critically, or will they follow blindly where she leads? George Soros referred somewhere to America as a feel-good society who elects feel-good presidents who are unable (or unwilling) to do what needs to be done. Will Oprah and her feel good supporters elect the ultimate feel good president?
What right, you may ask, does a South African have to express his views on the American presidential race? Well, just as Kennedy once said "Ich bin ein Berliner", many of us have to say "I'm an American", whether we like it or not. The USA seems to be a waning empire, but it still influences our lives like no other country can. Our lives are almost as interlinked with the fortunes of America as that of most Americans.
Well then, as an American by proxy, I hope that America gets the president it needs, rather that the one its celebrities want (or the one it deserves?). But are we there yet?
