IS bush a dry drunk?

[AndrewEndowed24]

Regarding insults, I have no idea what you are talking about... I was speaking frankly about your stats, I assumed that in revealing your stats you were comfortable enough with them to subject them to public scrutiny and analysis. Perhaps if you are sensitive about them you shouldn't reveal them to strangers.

Look, there is a difference between good and 'overlookable'. If you have many other extremely good statistics recommendations, writings samples ect, i think most programs would overlook a 550 GRE.

Anyway, let me make a deduction: 550 on the verbal SAT is considered very poor for ivy league undergrad admissions, if 550 sat roughly equals 550 gre (as you have implied) then the equivalent of a 550 on the SAT (by your argument) would be considered 'good' for graduate admissions to some of the same universities that consider it poor for undergrad admissions. This is patently absurd. This shows that either a 550 GRE is much harder to achieve than a 550 SAT (and thus the relative value of the GRE verbal score tells us little about how good Bush's verbal sat score is) or that you are wrong about a 550 GRE being 'good'. At least at the schools you claim it to be good for.

 

[Pumblechook]

Regarding insults, I have no idea what you are talking about... I was speaking frankly about your stats, I assumed that in revealing your stats you were comfortable enough with them to subject them to public scrutiny and analysis. Perhaps if you are sensitive about them you shouldn't reveal them to strangers.

Look, there is a difference between good and 'overlookable'. If you have many other extremely good statistics recommendations, writings samples ect, i think most programs would overlook a 550 GRE.

Anyway, let me make a deduction: 550 on the verbal SAT is considered very poor for ivy league undergrad admissions, if 550 sat roughly equals 550 gre (as you have implied) then the equivalent of a 550 on the SAT (by your argument) would be considered 'good' for graduate admissions to some of the same universities that consider it poor for undergrad admissions. This is patently absurd. This shows that either a 550 GRE is much harder to achieve than a 550 SAT (and thus the relative value of the GRE verbal score tells us little about how good Bush's verbal sat score is) or that you are wrong about a 550 GRE being 'good'. At least at the schools you claim it to be good for.

You're perfectly right sir!

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

mmm did i just get a whole wad of sarcasm shoved in my mouth? it tastes good in the morning.

 

[Pumblechook]

mmm did i just get a whole wad of sarcasm shoved in my mouth? it tastes good in the morning.

ewwwwwwww

 

[DC_DEEP]

DC— is that an oblique reference to

(A) the rumour that as a young man Prescott and his officer mates indulged in skulduggery (literally) by digging up Geronimo's grave and stealing the cadaver's skull as a trophy for the Skull and Bones group at Yale?
or
(B) being officer of a company that did so much trading with the Nazis?

All of the above, and then some, rawbone. He did not limit his greed and shady dealings to the German Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s.

 

[madame_zora]

SATs are definitely NOT IQ tests! This completely drives me nuts, despite what I've read in the media, I would have been smacked in the face by my college professors had I made such a comparison.

SATs measure learning, that is their purpose. IQ tests (supposedly) measure only the capacity to learn and reason. Since there is no way to measure capacity without using any instrument of learning at all (such as numbers or words), the results of an IQ test are flawed and limited at best. What they measure best are spatial ability and logic. Theoretically, a person's IQ should remain relatively consistant throughout his life, although a score plus or minus ten points can be explained as easily as using a different instrument (test), whether he slept well beforehand, whether he was hungry, etc. It gives a general range, but the exact number is of no consequence at all.

A military aptitude test is a laughable comparison! Give me a fucking break.

Education, if used to it's potential, should reveal something about a person's capacity. However, we all know underachievers who do not participate fully or get the most out of their education, which is clearly the case with bush. I found a number of sources back in 2003 that listed his IQ on his high school transcripts as anything from 97 to 125, the latter being the most frequently reported, although that's got nothing to do with what the reality may be. 97 would be more believable, given his track record in life, but I wouldn't be too quick to discount the possibility that he could have an IQ of 125, given his alcohol and drug abuse.

What is clear to any alcoholic who's spent any time at all in AA is that bush exhibits "stinking thinking", which are the negative thought patterns that AA seeks to teach a person to correct. Anytime someone proudly proclaims that they "did it all by themselves" in regards to getting sober, that immediately says to me that they've probably taken no steps whatsoever to work on their mental illness, assuming that alcohol was the problem and not just a symptom. It isn't- it NEVER is! Remove the alcohol and drugs from a chemically dependent person, and you have an untreated alcoholic still. We in AA call untreated alcoholism "stinking thinking", which she outlines very clearly in this paper. That's who's sitting in the Whitehouse, like it or not. Not understanding the disease of alcoholism is forgivable because so little is known about it as for as diseases go, but it is a disease of the brain, and it affects the thinking processes. Even church membership isn't enough to correct mental illness, but it CAN and often does lead one to correct their behaviors. The problem here is that bush's mental state is of great importance, given his position.

If he really isn't capable of higher-level thought processes, and taking a wide array of facts and drawing a logical and sane conclusion, then we have a problem. This, I feel, is the situation. I know presidents don't write their own speeches, so I disregard any speech wholesale. What is telling is the way he reacts to questions that require him to make a response of his own, like those from the reporters or the rare occasions he is seen talking to a citizen. Surely, I'm not the only one who remembers the debates. Of course, those incidents were limited severely by bush himself, no doubt on the advice of Rove or his cabinet members when it became immediately apparent that is a nearly a functional moron. He doesn't talk "off the cuff" because he can't. Whether that is because of brain damage sustained from alcohol and drug abuse or if he was just below average to begin with doesn't really matter. What does matter is that someone this apparently stupid is representing our country. What do you think other world leaders must think of him when they are alone? I know what I'd be thinking.

When a person such as Ms. Van Wormer uses the word "intelligence" it means something very specific- she is aware of that, and so are those in the field of psychology who are reading her papers. She even said specifically in a email to me that what those tests measure is not to be taken as a big deal, just one of the many things to take into consideration when assessing his brain functioning. While everyone is free to look at what is meant by "intelligence" in their own way, it does create a problem that we are talking about several things at the same time, and most of the time we are not disagreeing about the facts, but only our own understanding of them.

Yes, you can fairly accurately assess the nature of a person's character based on their actions and words- that is all we have to go on with anyone! This is not a medical diagnosis, it is a psychological one, and that is imperative to understand. The author is not a physician, but holds a doctorate in social psychology and runs a treatment clinic for the chemically dependant. She only spoke to her own area of expertise, and that was a main thing that I found compelling about her work.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

She is operating so far outside of the parameters of reasonable scientific controls that she cannot be the least bit confident that she isn't superimposing her experiences onto onto phenomena to which they don't apply. People are riled up, things aren't going well, it would make sense for a psychologists to read 'clinical disorders' into the faces of those they deeply hate. Is it normal practice in psychology to diagnose disorders to people you are biased against for political reasons? it seems like any reasonable psychologist (if such a thing exists) would step aside if they had a significant personal motive in showing that a patient is incompetent.

The paper is full of vague terms:

• Exaggerated self-importance and pomposity
• Grandiose behavior
• A rigid, judgmental outlook
• Impatience
• Childish behavior
• Irresponsible behavior
• Irrational rationalization
• Projection
• Overreaction

They are general enough to fit the bill for Dry Alcoholism but could clearly have many alternate causes. It is a laundry list of common place human behaviors, how can anyone possibly infer from those a specific disorder?

A problematic aspect is that these traits are likely to cause one another and thus it would be remarkably easy for someone to exhibit all or some of these traits without being a dry alcoholic because one need only develop one of them (for *some* reason) to potentially develop them all. Another problem is that all of these terms are completely subjective, they have more to do with one's relationship to a social group -ie. whether one's perceptions and statements match the perceptions and statements of his gorup- than one's relationship with reality. The fact that Bush appears to exhibit these could be a function of his cloistered situation within a sub-group that has very different values and expectations from this woman and most of us on this board. Finally, I strongly dislike the attempt to reduce legitimate intellectual tension to name calling. Bush's conservativism involves an 'us against them' attitude. This attitude may have been held by luminaries such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes and Plato, it is a philosophy -not a disease. This is the very concept of the nation state, that at some level it is us against them. This politcal philosophy was disagreed with by JS Mill and Locke, both of whom had the decency to assault it on its merits (or lack thereof) rather than simply screaming that anyone who isn't a nice liberal must have a mental disorder. Still, I would say that Bush's us against them is significantly less pronounced than the clear headed Kissinger's Real Politik version of 'us against them'.
a "kill or be killed mentality;" the tunnel vision;
"I" as opposed to "we" thinking;
the black and white polarized thought processes (good versus evil, all or nothing thinking).
His drive to finish his father's battles is of no small significance, psychologically

The first three are remarkable verbal abstractions, I have no idea how one could decide who those terms wouldn't apply to, I think that everyone I know exhibits these to a significant degree. The last line on the list can easily be explained by childhood experiences, it doesn't necessarily to have anything to do with alcoholism, but we should note that the plan to go into Iraq was developed far before Bush2. They were considered a potential threat by the neo-con foriegn policy advisers ten years earlier.

This article did nothing but lower my opinion of the psychology in general. Our shrinks are the Jesuits of the 20th and 21st century, bridging the gap between heaven (our emotions) and earth (reality) with a complex series of meaningless phrases. I really don't see why we bother with this stuff, there is no wisdom to be found here, only pompous asses calling people they dislike sick under the guise of science.

About the SATs, Mensa used the SATs for admissions until the either the 70's or 80's when the test was altered for the first time, and they still accept tests dating from before a certain year. The SAT has become much less of an IQ test lately but it still has a relatively high correllation to IQ. The army test emphasizes mathematical and spatial intelligence over verbal, which might explain why Kerry didn't do so well, but by all reports it is still well correllated to IQ tests well enough to have been used by numerous social scientists as measures of IQ. That's one of the reasons it is still used, the same is true for the SAT.
Also, many reputable high IQ societies still accept SAT scores for admission.

The SATs were developed out of IQ tests, it can be traced directly back to Jean Piaget's early ones.
The SAT has no specific stated goals anymore, though I believe it is still called a 'reasoning test'. It definitely wasn't designed to measure what a student has learned, in fact it was developed specifically to find talent in locations where students had poor educations. The original goal was to use it as an intelligence test. This was very un-PC and this aspect was eventually underplayed, the New Sats are just another step in the removal of highly G loaded elements from the test.

On a final note, do you really think Bush used his environmental advantage to any degree, he clearly didn't enjoy quick witted dinner table discussions, or absorb these discussions if he did? And besides, one would think that environment would be most pronounced on the verbal section, yet he did poorly on that portion. In fact, whatever ability he had was found in the area of the test that environment would -at least from the perspective of common sense- have the least effect on: Math. Sure he went to a wealthy high school which probably had some good math teachers, but i'm sure that his math score was far above his school's average and I really doubt he was the sort of kid who did a lot of work outside of school so I'm guessing it's a fair indication of his ability. There is a major lapse in logic made by everyone who decries Bush as a lazy son of privilege and then claims that he his SAT scores overpredict his intelligence, if anything they would underpredict this slacker's iq to a certain degree.

Also, you have records of Bush's IQ tests, why haven't these been leaked to CNN along with his SAT scores? Can I see them? Oh, you have 'sources' which list them, what are these sources, why do you believe them? I would think that if they were the least bit reputable they would be all over the media like the everything else about his private life.

And about the AA meetings, I would be really careful about drawing general conclusions based on any event that had a major effect on *your life*. It is very tempting to universalize the particular when one feels the particular quite strongly.

 

[madame_zora]

She is operating so far outside of the parameters of reasonable scientific controls that she cannot be the least bit confident that she isn't superimposing her experiences onto onto phenomena to which they don't apply. People are riled up, things aren't going well, it would make sense for a psychologists to read 'clinical disorders' into the faces of those they deeply hate. Is it normal practice in psychology to diagnose disorders to people you are biased against for political reasons? it seems like any reasonable psychologist (if such a thing exists) would step aside if they had a significant personal motive in showing that a patient is incompetent.

I beg you read the date the article was published- 2002. It was NOT a function of her "hating him" politically, which is something people throw up so readily as a rebuttal to objections to his specific actions. I find this weak and unworthy of argument. None of us know him personally, he might be fun to go fishing with or have an entertaining day hanging around with, but that has nothing to do with his qualifications as the leader of the free world. Why to I have to "hate him" to think he's incompetent? I "hate" the job he's doing- I don't know him as a person. Is that clear enough?

The paper is full of vague terms:

• Exaggerated self-importance and pomposity
• Grandiose behavior
• A rigid, judgmental outlook
• Impatience
• Childish behavior
• Irresponsible behavior
• Irrational rationalization
• Projection
• Overreaction

They are general enough to fit the bill for Dry Alcoholism but could clearly have many alternate causes. It is a laundry list of common place human behaviors, how can anyone possibly infer from those a specific disorder?

In case you are unaware, the field of psychology is in its infancy stages, there are simply no better tools available than grouping traits into categories to form profiles of disorders. EVERY psychological disorder is described thusly.

A problematic aspect is that these traits are likely to cause one another and thus it would be remarkably easy for someone to exhibit all or some of these traits without being a dry alcoholic because one need only develop one of them (for *some* reason) to potentially develop them all.

It's even worse than that- being a "dry drunk" actually has NOTHING to do with alcohol. You are right is assessing that one thing may cause another, and in this case, the attempt to describe the "dry drunk" is really an effort to describe the underlying mental defficiency that "drives one to drink". Obviously, there are many people with the same (as yet not fully understood) disorder who never choose to drink. Some carry out their behaviors in other excesses (like gambling or even sex addiction), while some do what we call "white knuckling", which means they overcome their urges with staunch self-control, but never really understand the driving force behind their desires to begin with.

Please understand, I am in no way calling this an absolute diagnosis, nor do I believe it was postured as such.

I also believe that EVERYONE has some of these symptoms in varying degrees, and that some degree of any of them can be completely normal. Since the study of the mind is not a numerical science, there are no absolutes and exact diagnoses that would satisfy the more numerically grounded mind. If that is our difference, we will just have to accept it. Nothing about psychology can be "proven" yet, but I think the value of exploration exists in that we may arrive there one day if we keep striving to do so.

Another problem is that all of these terms are completely subjective, they have more to do with one's relationship to a social group -ie. whether one's perceptions and statements match the perceptions and statements of his gorup- than one's relationship with reality. The fact that Bush appears to exhibit these could be a function of his cloistered situation within a sub-group that has very different values and expectations from this woman and most of us on this board.

Naw, I doubt it would just be his upbringing or everyone who lived a life of privelege would have the same personality quirks, but I understand where you're going. The terms ARE subjective, which is why it helps a little to understand what is meant by them. When language limits the exact expression of an idea, it is difficult to express in terms clearly understandable to persons outside the group for which they exist. In the rooms of AA, you'd see a lot of nodding heads, and this is because each of us has had to confront these things within ourselves. Definitions become much easier then.
We also roll our eyes in unison when some n00b exhibits these symptoms and we mutter "untreated alcoholism" under our breath.

Think of it like trolling. Hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. What's the difference between an annoying member and a troll here? Kind of like the difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic. They look the same in a bar at happy hour though.

Finally, I strongly dislike the attempt to reduce legitimate intellectual tension to name calling.

And I resent the attempt to describe a psychological profile as a "name"! Is it "name calling" to call a schizophrenic what he is? Is it name calling to call a cancer patient that? This is absurd- trying to figure out what the fucking problem is is NOT name calling!

Bush's conservativism involves an 'us against them' attitude. This attitude may have been held by luminaries such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes and Plato, it is a philosophy -not a disease. This is the very concept of the nation state, that at some level it is us against them. This politcal philosophy was disagreed with by JS Mill and Locke, both of whom had the decency to assault it on its merits (or lack thereof) rather than simply screaming that anyone who isn't a nice liberal must have a mental disorder. Still, I would say that Bush's us against them is significantly less pronounced than the clear headed Kissinger's Real Politik version of 'us against them'.
a "kill or be killed mentality;" the tunnel vision;
"I" as opposed to "we" thinking;
the black and white polarized thought processes (good versus evil, all or nothing thinking).

Right, and you will find no small number of "experts" in the field of psychology who would call all of that a mentally deficient way of thinking. It's the very dependancy on duality that leaves one without tools necessary to handle the many situations in life that call for more options than two. Anyone who strives to become an adult will have found many times before reaching the age of majority that life is simply NOT black and white all the time. This kind of thinking is immature (as in underdeveloped) at best, and dangerous at worst.

You are free to call it "just another philosophy" if you like, but I'll be rolling my eyes and muttering "hogwash" under my breath.

His drive to finish his father's battles is of no small significance, psychologically

Right. Same cabinet, same enemy. I think it's fair to call this obsessive behavior, considering Saddam had nothing whatever to do with 9/11.

The first three are remarkable verbal abstractions, I have no idea how one could decide who those terms wouldn't apply to, I think that everyone I know exhibits these to a significant degree. The last line on the list can easily be explained by childhood experiences, it doesn't necessarily to have anything to do with alcoholism, but we should note that the plan to go into Iraq was developed far before Bush2. They were considered a potential threat by the neo-con foriegn policy advisers ten years earlier.

As I said earlier, it is only in degrees that we could call this a syndrome. Does bush exhibit these characteristics more or less than the average person? How strongly do his decisions seem to be based on faulty logic? Is his behavior rash and uncompromising compared to other human beings in general? Yes, everyone has some negative behaviors and thinking patterns sometimes, the question is, how much of a person's life is influenced by these "character flaws"? It is my *opinion* based on observations of what little is available to the public, and on his public behaviors and decisions since 1999 that he has more of them than the average person.

This article did nothing but lower my opinion of the psychology in general. Our shrinks are the Jesuits of the 20th and 21st century, bridging the gap between heaven (our emotions) and earth (reality) with a complex series of meaningless phrases. I really don't see why we bother with this stuff, there is no wisdom to be found here, only pompous asses calling people they dislike sick under the guise of science.

You do rather nicely at name calling yourself, pal. Anyway, if you find it unworthy, why have you spent so much time on it? I find it interesting to study the workings of the mind, and accept the limitations of the tools we have as of today, in the hopes that continued discussion and study will take psychology to greater places as the field develops. We could have said the same thing of medical science in the dark ages, but if they'd given up, we'd have never found ways to cure the many diseases we have. I am personally very grateful that some people don't need absolutes to find worthiness in study. That would be very limiting indeed.

 

[madame_zora]

I regret that I had to break this up due to the length. I'll be wimping out on responses since I had to delete the longer version.

About the SATs, Mensa used the SATs for admissions until the either the 70's or 80's when the test was altered for the first time, and they still accept tests dating from before a certain year. The SAT has become much less of an IQ test lately but it still has a relatively high correllation to IQ. The army test emphasizes mathematical and spatial intelligence over verbal, which might explain why Kerry didn't do so well, but by all reports it is still well correllated to IQ tests well enough to have been used by numerous social scientists as measures of IQ. That's one of the reasons it is still used, the same is true for the SAT.
Also, many reputable high IQ societies still accept SAT scores for admission.

Well, using MENSA as a gauge for anything is absurd. Since neither I nor the author challenged his IQ, and even 125 wouldn't get one into MENSA, I don't see how that applies. Postulating that an SAT qualifies as an IQ test is just proving that you don't know what an IQ test is supposed to measure, OR what an SAT does.

The SAT (pronounced "es-A-tee") Reasoning Test, formerly called the Scholastic Aptitude Test and Scholastic Assessment Test, is a type of standardized test frequently used by colleges and universities in the United States to aid in the selection of incoming students. In the U.S., the SAT is administered by the private College Board, and is developed, published, and scored by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). In many areas of the United States, the ACT is given in place of the SAT and is considered just as valid in assessing academic performance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT

Sorry pal, this IS an academic assessment test, like it or not.

The SATs were developed out of IQ tests, it can be traced directly back to Jean Piaget's early ones.
The SAT has no specific stated goals anymore, though I believe it is still called a 'reasoning test'. It definitely wasn't designed to measure what a student has learned, in fact it was developed specifically to find talent in locations where students had poor educations. The original goal was to use it as an intelligence test. This was very un-PC and this aspect was eventually underplayed, the New Sats are just another step in the removal of highly G loaded elements from the test.

The SATs have been improved over time, which is somewhat unlike most classical IQ tests, but that didn't change them from one type of test to another. It's still a scholastic achievement test, only not as verbally prejudiced. Yes, SATs give a snapshot of one's overall "intelligence" and how they have integrated that with their education, but it can't be considered an IQ test on its own. Since he took the test before the reforms, his scores are actually quite decent, like you said, probably in the 80th percentile or thereabouts. I have no problem accepting that, and drawing the conclusion that he is an underachiever.

On a final note, do you really think Bush used his environmental advantage to any degree, he clearly didn't enjoy quick witted dinner table discussions, or absorb these discussions if he did? And besides, one would think that environment would be most pronounced on the verbal section, yet he did poorly on that portion. In fact, whatever ability he had was found in the area of the test that environment would -at least from the perspective of common sense- have the least effect on: Math. Sure he went to a wealthy high school which probably had some good math teachers, but i'm sure that his math score was far above his school's average and I really doubt he was the sort of kid who did a lot of work outside of school so I'm guessing it's a fair indication of his ability. There is a major lapse in logic made by everyone who decries Bush as a lazy son of privilege and then claims that he his SAT scores overpredict his intelligence, if anything they would underpredict this slacker's iq to a certain degree.

In a lot of ways, tests like these, both IQ and scholastic achievement, measure a person's ability to test. There are a lot of people who perform well on tests, and those who "freeze up", and this seems to be independant of intelligence. I don't see a profile of a man who exerted himself at any point in his life, so his tests probably reflect what he was capable of doing just waking up.

Although there is little widely published, it is not completely impossible to find. Here is one site that explores several of the current studies and results with regards to alcoholism and the brain, this one was fairly pertinent to our discussion:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=9351490

If you have time, read a few. I think it will give you a better grasp of where the field has been going, and reassurance that not all psychologists are squirting shit out the side of their mouths.

Also, you have records of Bush's IQ tests, why haven't these been leaked to CNN along with his SAT scores? Can I see them? Oh, you have 'sources' which list them, what are these sources, why do you believe them? I would think that if they were the least bit reputable they would be all over the media like the everything else about his private life.

Where did you get that? I clearly stated that I do NOT have his IQ test scores, that I had read a variety that ranged from 97 to 125. All I did was a google search, which you are qualified to do as well. I didn't find ANY site that I felt comforatble endorsing, so I didn't. I won't defend myself against things I never said.

And about the AA meetings, I would be really careful about drawing general conclusions based on any event that had a major effect on *your life*. It is very tempting to universalize the particular when one feels the particular quite strongly.

At the risk of sounding like a condescending bitch, here goes- Do you ask the plumber for legal advice? Do you ask a librarian how to fix your brakes? No? Oh, then perhaps it's not too shocking to ask people who HAVE LEARNED TO MANAGE ALCOHOLISM what does and does not work! Duh. I speak about recovery issues often and openly because I've been there, done that. If that makes me more capable of recognising behavior patterns in others, I would find that an obvious effect. Someone who knows cars very well can name the car coming down the road by the sound of its engine too- no big secret there or Ouija board needed. I might caution YOU to think about what you're saying a bit more, some of the things you've said here just don't make sense. I don't have an uninformed opinion about alcoholism because I have it- I have what could be called an educated opinion based on my experience, the experiences of literally hundreds of people, many of whom did not remain sober, and the documents and studies written of every psychologist or social therapist I could find to read- numbering at least in the dozens. BECAUSE I have it, I've taken time to learn about it- isn't that a valuable thing to share?

I will often post questions about things I don't know about, hoping those who know more will chime in. I didn't claim to be "the final authority" on alcoholism, nor would I ever, but I know a good bit more than someone for whom it has not been a lifelong issue.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

I will post soon.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

First, while I wrongly assumed the article was current, I still think that the meat of my point regarding a political bias stands. The very fact that she published this diagnosis in a left-wing magazine creates an adversarial relationship between her and the person she supposedly is objectively observing. This is not meant as a value-free diagnosis from a disinterested party but an indictment. I do not think she is moving psychology further down the road of science in writing this. The tone is accusatory and scolding , she clearly has a personal interest in the matter and while it is perfectly possible that she is right (i want to emphasize that) she seems to be violating a general guidline of all science by not letting a more politically disinterested observer take over. I don't think I should be criticized for being skeptical of difficult to verify claims being made with an authoritative tone by someone claiming to be objective in a forum with a clear political slant. In 2002, if I remember correctly, Bush was already eroding civil liberties and folks all over were getting scared. Hate might be too strong a word but this president has aroused extremely strong feelings from the very beginning(justifiably so)

Secondly, your point about the field of psychology being in it's infancy stages is well taken. However I would ask you to consider that point more carefully. The correct inference to make from this is that one should be very skeptical of its method and criteria because being in the infancy stages makes it extremely liable to make mistakes, as was the case with medical science. Would I have been wrong to doubt many of Hippocrates's original medical conclusions? Should one let an 18th century physician draw all the blood he wants despite one's reasonable doubts as to the treaments efficacy, simply because one wouldn't want to risk snuffing out the science with skepticism? I hope it's clear that if medicine had been doubted more heavily early on, many lives would have been saved and it would have progressed much faster, instead for a long time it was intermeshed with religion and magic and later with a-piori philosophies,and thus caused much unnecessary pain. If psychology has the potential to be a full fledged science, questioning the rigor of its terminology will only make it stronger. If the push towards empiricism kills it, it wasn't a science in the first place.

I would argue that psychological profiling is a brand of name calling when it is done from the sidelines without a significant engagment with the observed. This will be a recurring theme: the criteria listed are just too rosarch inkblotty to be trusted, especially from our distance from the president. This has the negative effect of encouraging people to throw their authority an their words around.

I am not sure the concept of a 'dependence upon duality' is coherent, we cannot avoid dualities, the question is which one's do we choose. Your choice seems to be 'healthy and unhealthy' as opposed to Bush's 'good and evil'. However I would note that healthy and unhealthy seem to have a normative force in your and many psychologists vocabulary, healthy and unhealthy used in this way are a form of good and evil.

The only thing I'll say about political philosophy is that I don't think it is a good idea to adopt any philosophy which precludes one from getting into honest arguments with alternative views. Plato would have argue against Freud but Freud would have psychologized Plato, not directly confronted him on the open field. (not that Freud is so significant in psychology anymore.) My point is that it seems like psychology reverses the order, one should first prove that someone's philosophy is wrong-headed before one is allowed to call it unhealthy.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

My point about Mensa accept the SAT's was simply that the heads of Mensa, people who know far more about IQ tests than either of us, consider the old SATs to be pretty much equivalent to IQ tests. This was meant to argue that the SATs were in fact a crypto iq test.

Also, I wouldn't trust the college board to explain their purpose in anything but the most eloquent doublespeak. After a the courts ruled that intelligence tests could not be used by employers hiring, the college board recognized that it was going to hide its status as a proxy IQ test as well and as long as possible. America has been historically opposed to intelligence testing and the Board does not want to offend the masses.

I don't want to imply that you don't have a significant degree of useful experience from your travails with alcholism, but let me put it this way. My point is only that people with extremely intense personal experiences with something are often more prone to projection. I could see someone whose greatest struggle was alcohol easily reading alcoholism into the clouds. I don't doubt your ability to determine alcoholics from nons on a personal basis and tohave a important understanding of their psychology, but I just find this matter really suspicious given our distance from the source, it's really easy to project things onto public figures and because alcoholism has had such a role in your life, i think you might be susceptible it, especially regarding a president whose incompetence you might like to definitively establish through the power of science. My point is that no judgment can be reached at this juncture and It would be irresponsible to push forward.

 

[madame_zora]

Andrew, every single point you made was based on making a judgement, then proceeding from that. You've decided that this author hates or dislikes bush personally, so you reject her as biased. The majority of her work is on women in prison and recovery, so I don't see how you can take that as a given.

You take the stance that bush is somehow not getting a fair shake, but why would a man, ANY man (or woman) not be accountable for their own behavior? This is the question I really want answered.

You assume the article is plucked from the air, but she cites sources in the article which include his own biography. His long struggles with both alcohol and cocaine are well documented, you'd have to be living under a rock not to know about it.

You assume that because I'm an alcoholic, I see everyone who drinks as one, but that just shows your complete ignorance into me as a person. Anyone who has spoken to me about alcoholism behind the scenes knows how reticent I am to call anyone an alcoholic, and I frequently tell people that alcoholics and heavy drinkers look the same in a bar.

I believe if you weight the evidence without your preconceived prejudices, you may come to a different conclusion. Clearly you don't understand alcoholism, which is natural unless you've been closely involved with an alcoholic's recovery process. Because of the nature of AA being an anonymous group, people are hesitant to talk about it at all. I think this is a mistake, but I understand the original intention. At one time, being an alcoholic carried a great stygma, much like being black once did, or being gay today. While this is rarely the case anymore, it is the position of AA that membership should be anonymous, to protect the livelihoods of its members. The other reason is that because of the high rate of relapse, the group doesn't want any one member to make a beacon of himself as an AA representative, lest he relapse and make the whole system look bad.

I surrender my anonymity voluntarily, as I believe that the discussion is valuable, both to others who may be struggling with the issue, and to those who never will- to help understand. I don't represent AA in any way, I am just grateful that I got what I needed there. AA started here in Ohio, so it's kind of a big deal around here.

As for MENSA, it is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I'll overlook that. Membership in MENSA is supposed to be limited to the top 2%, but according to which instrument you use, you can get in with scores that range from 128 on some to 135 on others. I have a hard time believing that only 2% of Americans have scores that high. Be that as it may, the original question posed, based on the article was "Is bush a dry drunk?". I repeat that no one has challenged his IQ score, as in fact none of us claim to know it.

I love skepticism, and I agree that anything worthy of study should be able to stand up to it. I am not aware if any of her work is peer reviewed, but I'll look into it. As for proving anything is inappropriate, I feel its safe to say that bush is doing that for us even as we speak. I am satisfied with the results, but if it needs more evidence, you can count in all the other fallen politicians who've claimed alcohol as an excuse (yes, that was tongue-in-cheek). Seriously, the one thing you can't argue with is the history of what has occured since he's been in office. It's already occured, it's over. The results of his early decisions have already come to fruition, impossible to deny.

This isn't a broad reaching question- it's a view of one specific man, about whom there is a great deal of observable evidence. He is perhaps the most public figure in America, I can think of few others for whom such a report could be so accurately made. Once again, it's an OPINION, not a medically verifyable fact. It doesn't claim to be or assert itself as anything else, so it's stupid to judge it as such.

And to the first point that having an opinion means she should recuse herself? Nigga, please. She states clearly what is going to be outlined. She never claims it "proves" anything, the entire piece is an opinion piece, just with a far above average amount of expertise backing it up. Experts can be wrong, and she makes no assertion to the contrary. Hilariously enough, you lump me into polarised views group, which is ignorant beyond measure. My OPINION is that she pulls too many punches, but that may be because of when the piece was written. I don't see things in terms of good and evil, but I do see them in terms of what is beneficial to us as a society, with the goal of survival. Good and evil is an imaginary construct devised by men with simple minds to give a feeling of security, which I accept as an impossibility.

I could make a flimsy statement that there is probably *some* truth to the article and some untruth, but that's just now how I see it. I see it as a spot on assessment, with the only flaw perhaps being that it lacks the severity of the actual situation. Please understand, this ONLY means I'm throwing my hat in the ring with her on this. I would be happy to entertain a rebuttal from someone with equal knowledge in the field, but I do get bored of fielding replies from people who must first characterise ME as a bush hater, and thusly ignoring or belittling the situation at hand. Would yuou care to comment on the ISSUES brought forth in the paper, which you yourself even admit *could* be true? I find it incongruent that you are so quick to make an asessment of the author, based on one paper, when you claim that with everything we have availble about the life of bush, there isn't enough information. Funny how that works.

 

[Lex]

"You're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts."


Act (and think) accordingly.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

First, I clearly didn't start with a presupposition about Dr. Wormer, I stated clear and persuasive reasons for doubting her objectivity. You obviously don't understand the problem with making a diagnosis in a political journal. How would you feel if Cheney's heart problems came out in mother jones? YOu can't say that psychology is a science and then not hold them to the same standards, but since you don't seem to care about this contradiction, i won't press the point.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

You don't have to respond to this, I am growing tired of your use of strawman arguments against me and your angry willful equivocations.
Look, when people use the word 'hate' today, it makes them sound ridiculous. You make my point look absurd by asserting that I characterize you as a Bush hater and leaving it at that, fine. But the fact is there is obviously some truth in it, would be stupid to deny that you have strong negative feelings towards his actions and policies and it is remarkably implausible that some transmission between your views of the actions and your views of the man has not occurred. Enough make-believe!
To know someone's general feelings about a public person is far easier than determing whether they have an arcane, difficult to verify disorder related to alcoholism (so much easier that it isn't in the same ball park), you may deny it but we all know it, the belief in the relatively simple transferance of emotions makes basic interaction possible. Claiming that there is a contradiction in my assertion of your general political and emotional attitude and my claim that we have to with hold judgement on whether Bush is a dry alcoholic is ridiculous. That's like saying that because I can't know whether Bush has brain cancer, I can't know what is policies are on France. The degree of complication, subtlety and possibility of error are significantly different in each case. The conflation of such very different phenomena is a pathetic equivocation.

It is becoming clear that our disagreements are not as great as they first appeared to me. Still think you have underestimated the severity of the breach Dr. Wormer conducted in developing her method of diagnosis, it isn't just her opinion they wouldn't have asked her if she wasn't a doctor. She is operating in capacity as an expert without taking on the responsibilities of rigor and impartiality required for an expert. The reason I believe that she doesn't like Bush, aside from her choice of medium is that the very categories she applies to him could have been taken from a screed-piece. Who on the right criticizes the duality between good and evil or the claims that Bush in two thousand two has an unhealthy does of kill or be killed attitude? It's obvious that she deeply dislikes him as she says that he is obviously a littany of bad value laden terms and then (humorously) proceeds to apply these terms in her diagnosis.

I would say that there is a significant difference in having a doctor examine you and claim you are deficient and simply acting incompetently, one more firmly stands as a prediction of your future competency.

I never said that you saw everyone who drinks as an alcoholic, nowhere near it. I am sure you are capable of discerning quite a bit about people you know, but forgive me for saying that despite all of the noise about Bush there are few inferences i feel i can safely make about whether he has this specific disorder, I would have to completely trust your and Dr. Wormer's judgment and I think i have some reason not to, if you don't see how the adversarial tone and the adversarial medium might make me skeptical of her objectivity, you certainly won't agree that her value laden terms should so I won't belabor this point any further.

Still, I would ask you If you were in my position, just having read an article in a right wing magazine about say.. Jon Stewart (i pick him becuase he is quite likable) by a psychologist who lists his traits as repressed hostility, avaricious interest in the lives of public figures, a childishness regarding important matters, a moralistic attitude (his criticism of the administration as morally bankrupt) a lack of sense of social boundaries (ie. his entrance into the 'real' news world on various occassions to make serious statements, thus pissing off the rest of the media) and who then concluded that he suffered from 'mania' or something. You might argue that some of these are just part of the job description, but she could plausibly counter that the work that people choose often is determined by their personal characteristics and Stewart certainly elected to do this work, .You might argue that some of these traits indicate poor mental health, would you trust them given there vaguely plausible sounding criteria and the fact that they were voiced by the experts, no they are a series of invidious distinctions made in a political magazine, hardly plausible. And what if you had doubts and you felt like you couldn't make a judgment on the matter and there was an ex-manic on your board who basically said, 'trust me, ex-manics can tell if someone is suffering from it' would you suspend doubt? I am of the opinion that when an expert calls someone ill, they are making a very strong claim and they have a responsibility to attempt to replicate the scientific controls found in physical medicine. Your reponses seem to be that it is stupid to judge this as if it were a verifiable medical claim, but my view is that when someone makes a claim about health they are inviting such a response and if they are not, they severely misunderstand the gravity of such terms. You cannot, as an expert, claim taht someone is ill and then deny that you should be held to scientific standards, shrugging and saying 'well it's just my opinion'.

 

[madame_zora]

Andrew, I argue vehemently when I feel strongly, but I really have been enjoying our talk. Please don't take it as a personal attack, I don't mean it that way.

I am saying that psychology is NOT medicine, nor can it be measured by using medically verifyable criteria. Ms Van Wormer is not a medical doctor, so there is no way her opinion can be viewed as such, period. She is ONLY a social psychologist, and therefore that's all the weight her opinion carries, or her responsibilities.

"They" didn't ask her opinion on anything, I don't know what you're talking about. She wrote the paper because she felt like it, which she is free to do.

I can repeat ad infinum that my opinion of bush as a person is irrelevant, because I don't fucking know him! I can't make it any clearer than that. I HATE what he has done in office, and as an American, it IS my right to judge the job he's doing in that office. I'm really not infantile enough to just take shots at someone I don't know just because I think they have a bugger hanging out- you seem to be saying there isn't valid reason to be disgusted with his work! Anyway, what seems clear is that there are some people who will just not be comfortable drawing conclusions until all the facts are revealed, and some people (like me) who feel fine drawing conclusions when only A through X are revealed, but not Y and Z. That's what theories do- they draw conclusions based on evidence available, in the hopes of predicting future patterns of behavior (in psychology).

I'm sorry this thread got sidetracked with just us doing all the talking, because I really did want to hear what some other people felt about the paper's theory, rather than just questioning the validity of the paper itself, which never claimed to be authoritative. I understand that you want it to be, but it just wasn't presented that way, nor was that its intention.

You seem to be saying that if a person has an opinion, they are then incapable of being objective. I find that absurd, because why would anyone have any interest in studying something about which they have no opinion? I think any scientist, physician or psychologist would be more likely to study things in which they DO have an interest, so your point of view would make nearly all study useless.

Anyway, your points are taken about the publishing source, and I probably would be suspicious, if it were not for the fact that bush's behaviors since 2002 have added more fuel to the fire that she had a good point to begin with- with far less examples. See, the point is how much CAN really be ascertained from very little information, if one just looks. This is only a hobby for me, not a study, but one I find interesting. That I happen to agree with her opinion is still just my opinion- I'm claiming neither as all-out fact.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

I am enjoying this as well, i have an addiction to argument which you are feeding quite admirably.

My point about her opinion was just that if you or I wrote in with the same article, they wouldn't have published it. Her expertise made the editors interested in her opinion.

I would argue that not knowing someone is no inhibition to having strong feelings about them. And that a consistent dislike of someone's actions almost always translates into a dislike of them. But a dislike of Bush's actions are perfectly reasonable. But reasonably and honestly arrived at emotions are still emotions.

I suppose my current beef is with psychology in general, though I think that psychologists can behave with a greater simulacrum of scientific rigor than Dr. Wormer. I recognize that it isn't a medical science, but when they use terms that have objective sounds to them like healthy or sick as opposed to good or bad and thus gain all of the authority and certainty those terms convey and then blanche at being asked to justify themselves.

I believe that it is possible for her to be objective, but there is a difference between interest an emotional attitude. I can have an interest in mitochondria but it is fairly hard to feel strong emotions about them. On the other hand, emotions come much more easily regarding people. This one of the reasons the human sciences proceed more slowly than the physical ones and this is a problem for the practicioners of those sciences, not their critics i.e if certain facts about human nature make it tought to come to sound conclusions about certain phenomena, tough, if youwant to make sound conclusions you have to find a way around it or you should stop trying.

If psychologists want us to respect them as scientists, as to opposed to say theologians and philosophers, they should attempt to imitate the rigors of medical science. They can't have it both ways, they cant have our trust that their views have empirical validity and the freedom to write anywhere using a terms and coming to conclusions based on some public observation.

I think you are correct to label our disagreement one of our dispositions. I am not sure we can adequately settle this and I have no trouble with speculation, it was actually the conflation of scientific authority with such speculation as manifest in this article that got my goat.

Now i will cease hogging this thread.

 

[madame_zora]

I am enjoying this as well, i have an addiction to argument which you are feeding quite admirably.

I'm glad, I have sometimes been misunderstood to be actually angry when I am really just enjoying a spirited debate. I'm glad to know you feel the same way. I'm the easiest person in the world to draw into a debate, I can never shut my mouth!

My point about her opinion was just that if you or I wrote in with the same article, they wouldn't have published it. Her expertise made the editors interested in her opinion.

Point taken, her credentials in the field do give her words more notability. My words are just the rantings of a bored mind. I'm not sure, but I don't think the article was written for that publication- I believe it was picked up. Some of her other works can be linked through her website- my opinion about the majority of her writing not being about bush was from having read some of it.

I would argue that not knowing someone is no inhibition to having strong feelings about them. And that a consistent dislike of someone's actions almost always translates into a dislike of them. But a dislike of Bush's actions are perfectly reasonable. But reasonably and honestly arrived at emotions are still emotions.

Oh sure, and I do understand what you are saying. I guess our difference is just that I find the subject of psychology to be unique in the sense that since it IS the study of the human mind, and we ARE human beings, there will be precious little possibility of EVER achieving anything close to scientific impartiality. To impose that requirement would render the whole study impotent, and I think that would be a shame. A great deal of very useful, highly predictive information has been gleaned by applying these less-than-stellar applications, so "the proof's in the pudding", for me.

However, I do accept your skepticism. I can only assume it must be similar to how I feel when a highly religious person tells me God exists, and he just "knows" it. You have my sympathy, and it is MY lack of ability to explain my "intuition" better that is causing the frustration. Let me think about it for a few days and I'll try to do better.

I suppose my current beef is with psychology in general, though I think that psychologists can behave with a greater simulacrum of scientific rigor than Dr. Wormer. I recognize that it isn't a medical science, but when they use terms that have objective sounds to them like healthy or sick as opposed to good or bad and thus gain all of the authority and certainty those terms convey and then blanche at being asked to justify themselves.

Sure, but none of that has happened. She wrote an article, as herself- a known and published psychologist! I think it's completely unfair to claim that she's posing as a scientist- that's YOUR imposition. She didn't claim any more authority than what one would normally grant a person without a medical degree. It's unfair to judge her otherwise just because you WISH she had a medical degree and could be held to those standards. Psychology is still in kindergarten, and none but the daft take it as absolute science. Still, kindergarten must be gone through to get to the higher grades, that's all I'm saying.

I believe that it is possible for her to be objective, but there is a difference between interest an emotional attitude. I can have an interest in mitochondria but it is fairly hard to feel strong emotions about them. On the other hand, emotions come much more easily regarding people. This one of the reasons the human sciences proceed more slowly than the physical ones and this is a problem for the practicioners of those sciences, not their critics i.e if certain facts about human nature make it tought to come to sound conclusions about certain phenomena, tough, if youwant to make sound conclusions you have to find a way around it or you should stop trying.

The part I bolded is the crux of our discussion, I believe. It is the subject of psychology that renders it useless to this standard. Of course you wouldn't have strong emotions about mitochondria, unless you were derranged. Try only writing about subjects in psychology about which you are dispassionate- you won't get far. I disagree that we should "stop trying"- I disagree firmly.
Too much about life has no firm proof, but we can prove a great deal more now than we could a thousand years ago, and the religious, zealots, scientists, atheists, politicos, veterinarians, barbers and all manner of people have contributed. Psychology is but one vessel- it is not meant to be the ONLY one.

If psychologists want us to respect them as scientists, as to opposed to say theologians and philosophers, they should attempt to imitate the rigors of medical science. They can't have it both ways, they cant have our trust that their views have empirical validity and the freedom to write anywhere using a terms and coming to conclusions based on some public observation.

Now at least five or more times in print, WHO THE FUCK SAID THEY DID?????
It gets wearing having to point out, OVER AND OVER, that neither I nor she said that! I've repeated ad nauseum that psychology is NOT science, it's a developing study in its infancy stages. What the hell is so objectionable about that, or even so goddamned hard to remember, when I've printed it in every single fucking reply? I do get annoyed when you just ignore what I say, or change my words so you can argue against them better. *rollsmotherfuckingeyes* Calling psychology science just so you can disregard it is weak, and has sidetracked us from having any meaningful discussion about the article's predictive ability, which is clear.

I think you are correct to label our disagreement one of our dispositions. I am not sure we can adequately settle this and I have no trouble with speculation, it was actually the conflation of scientific authority with such speculation as manifest in this article that got my goat.

I think it is actually you who have the predisposition against psychology equally as much as you accuse me of having one against bush. You deny the possibility that I could dislike his behavior just based on the facts, when I see you sweeping a whole field of study aside because of things that have not been said or supposed- but you just happen to feel. Physician, heal thyself.

 

[AndrewEndowed24]

Okay, but my point was that in using the terminology of health, they misappropriate terms that should only be used with the greatest care and rigor. They don't say that they are scientists but many definitely exploit the confusion as to exactly what they are... this was the cause of great confusion during the early 20th century and eventually inspired Karl Popper to create a general definition of science that involved falsifiability. I think the very fact that the field of psychiatry exists makes this distinction even more confusing.

Most people understand terms of health and illness to be medicinal terms applied under scientific rigors (as opposed to 'good and bad') My view is that pyschology bolsters its credibility artificially by borrowing terms from the lexicon of physical medicine and while it may plead not-guilty to these charges, i don't think it would excite as many people if it didn't bring an air of science to the topic of the human mind. My question to you is, if it isn't science how is it different from modern myth? What is it exactly?

And for that matter, it is false to say that in all cases psychology has separated itself from science, behavioral psychology definitely attempted to mosey down the road of empiricism.