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I also discuss how many feel that George W. Bush was dysrationalic. No, he outright makes that "diagnosis" of the former president, going so far as to title th

I also discuss how many feel that George W. Bush was dysrationalic. No, he outright makes that "diagnosis" of the former president, going so far as to title the chapter 1 "teaser" of his book "Inside George W. Bush's Mind". It's available here: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p... Maybe he's being cagey about it because his "evidence" is incredibly weak sauce. He expects most of the audience for his book to nod along when he describes a guy who managed to achieve the highest political office in an incredibly competitive environment as unable to make rational decisions. He cites for his analysis of GWB's cognitive function a whole two people. First, there's David Frum[1], who served as a speechwriter for 13 months from early 2001 to early 2002. Before that he had "no connection to the campaign or the Bush family". He's used that stint to great career effect, but seriously, there are a lot of folks who worked more closely with Bush for a longer period of time and have written about his thought and leadership style. Surely if Stanovich wasn't just looking for a good "hook" to snare his liberal readership, he could have found better sources, critical and otherwise[2]. Oh, and Frum was a huge initial supporter of the Iraq invasion, and obviously Stanovich or his imagined readership wouldn't dream of calling that a clearly irrational decision. Second, there's a bit from a George Will column. The section in italics was strangely omitted by Stanovich: "He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections." So which U.S. presidents weren't "dysrationalic" by this standard? This guy may be a terrific research psychologist, but he's obviously not above slandering a president and pandering to his readership with bad scholarship just to sell books. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum [2] http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/ http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

x0x0 13y ago
Yet George Bush's presidency is widely acknowledge to be, well, a fail parade. Or perhaps we should go with by their works ye shall judge them. An (extremely brief) overview of Bush's presidency: * he waved off warnings of Bin Laden ("All right. You’ve covered your ass, now") * he turned a highly effective -- under clinton -- national disaster agency into a joke, at least in part by putting a failed horse judge in charge of it, then oversaw an ineffective response to one of the largest national disasters to ever strike the US (katrina) * he lost Bin Laden at Tora Bora * he and his chosen vp and sec state back channeled incredibly wrong information into the public, in part via the nyt, in order to sell a war with, well, people who had no weapons of mass destruction and who were uninvolved in 9/11; * by the by on the above, he fired the general (shinseki) who gave an accurate prediction of iraq war costs * Bush hired wolfowitz, who predicted the iraq war would cost between $10 and $100B (what's $700B and counting between friends) * Bush ignored, well, basically everyone who understood much of anything about the middle east in favor of a war which wildly destabilized a highly geopolitically important (oil) zone, while empowering iran So your link, in which the author writes, [...] President Bush's thinking has several problematic aspects: lack of intellectual engagement, cognitive inflexibility, need for closure, belief perseverance, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and insensitivity to consistency. These are all cognitive characteristics that have been studied by psychiatrists and that can be measured with at least some precision. However, they are all examples of thinking styles that are not tapped by IQ tests. Thus, it is not surprising that someone could suffer from many of these cognitive deficiencies and still have a moderatively high IQ. Bush's cognitive deficiencies do not impair performance on intelligence tests, but they do impair rational decision making. [1] is, in retrospect, incisive. [1] http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p...
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Even if I grant you all of that, it doesn't change the fact that Stanovich's claims re: the cognitive abilities of George W. Bush are based on extremely flimsy evidence. If he had stronger evidence than the testimony of Frum and a column from George Will (who, as far as I know, never attended a meeting in which GWB made a decision), wouldn't he have used it? Indeed, in contrast to your laundry list, Stanovich doesn't present a single concrete example of an irrational decision by the former president and the cognitive bias that led to it. He doesn't have to, because he wants to appeal to a readership that is delighted to find that not only is the target of their political animus wrong, but actually suffering from a mental disability! It's intellectually lazy and unworthy of a serious scholar.
  - Retric 13y ago
    If this had been a dissertation I would completely agree with your point of view. However, serious scholarship has little to do with writing a popular book. If anything Malcolm Gladwell is the gold standard for popular, interesting, and bulllshit books that sell like hot cakes. Consider his religious affiliation suggests a level of irrational thinking, but you can't say such things if you want a best seller. Yet, there are plenty scholarly works focused on the connection between religion an irrationality because scholars especially those with tenure can get away with such things.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    >>Indeed, in contrast to your laundry list, Stanovich doesn't present a single concrete example of an irrational decision by the former president and the cognitive bias that led to it. This must be some kind of alternate reality where GWB did not declare war on Iraq based on a complete knee-jerk (read: irrational) reaction to 9/11. And I'm being very generous here. There are many smart people who have provided evidence that GWB's decision to invade Iraq was based on malice.
- chinpokomon 13y ago
mikeash 13y ago
I find that "slandering a president" phrase a bit odd. The idea that W was stupid or irrational is the kinder interpretation of his presidency. The alternative explanation is that he was just plain evil. It's also odd to point to his performance in politics as evidence of his rationality. Politics is a deeply irrational field, and I wouldn't consider becoming President an indicator that a person is rational any more than I would consider becoming head of the Flat Earth Society such. I'm not saying these specific conclusions are legitimate, but I don't think it comes down as "slander", really.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  I'm struggling not to repeat myself, but suppose I wrote a book with the first chapter titled "Inside mikeash's Mind" that purported to diagnose you with the propensity to make irrational decisions, and proceeded to document this inability by referring to a former employee who resigned after a year rather than be fired and selectively quoting something written about you by a non-associate...and nothing else. It's hard to see how that would not be a slander[1] on you, regardless of whether you've done more good or ill in your life. [1] Not in the legal sense, of course, since it's written, not spoken.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    If I had had a long public life filled with actions whose only explanation are malice or irrationality, I don't think it would be slander, no, even if the argument wasn't very well constructed. That doesn't make it a good argument, I just don't think it qualifies as slander. (Or libel.) For one thing, slander or libel in the US has to be actually false.
    - Millennium 13y ago
      The flawed assumption in your argument is that malice and irrationality are the only possible explanations for his actions.
      - mikeash 13y ago
DanBC 13y ago
Ignoring the polarisation of the debate when a politician's name is used: It's possible for someone to reach a high office in a competitive environment and still to make decisions that are not so rational. Cognitive biases are very strong, and affect most people, and so people in high office have their own biases.

x0x0 13y ago

Yet George Bush's presidency is widely acknowledge to be, well, a fail parade. Or perhaps we should go with by their works ye shall judge them. An (extremely brief) overview of Bush's presidency: * he waved off warnings of Bin Laden ("All right. You’ve covered your ass, now") * he turned a highly effective -- under clinton -- national disaster agency into a joke, at least in part by putting a failed horse judge in charge of it, then oversaw an ineffective response to one of the largest national disasters to ever strike the US (katrina) * he lost Bin Laden at Tora Bora * he and his chosen vp and sec state back channeled incredibly wrong information into the public, in part via the nyt, in order to sell a war with, well, people who had no weapons of mass destruction and who were uninvolved in 9/11; * by the by on the above, he fired the general (shinseki) who gave an accurate prediction of iraq war costs * Bush hired wolfowitz, who predicted the iraq war would cost between $10 and $100B (what's $700B and counting between friends) * Bush ignored, well, basically everyone who understood much of anything about the middle east in favor of a war which wildly destabilized a highly geopolitically important (oil) zone, while empowering iran So your link, in which the author writes, [...] President Bush's thinking has several problematic aspects: lack of intellectual engagement, cognitive inflexibility, need for closure, belief perseverance, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and insensitivity to consistency. These are all cognitive characteristics that have been studied by psychiatrists and that can be measured with at least some precision. However, they are all examples of thinking styles that are not tapped by IQ tests. Thus, it is not surprising that someone could suffer from many of these cognitive deficiencies and still have a moderatively high IQ. Bush's cognitive deficiencies do not impair performance on intelligence tests, but they do impair rational decision making. [1] is, in retrospect, incisive. [1] http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p...

twoodfin 13y ago
Even if I grant you all of that, it doesn't change the fact that Stanovich's claims re: the cognitive abilities of George W. Bush are based on extremely flimsy evidence. If he had stronger evidence than the testimony of Frum and a column from George Will (who, as far as I know, never attended a meeting in which GWB made a decision), wouldn't he have used it? Indeed, in contrast to your laundry list, Stanovich doesn't present a single concrete example of an irrational decision by the former president and the cognitive bias that led to it. He doesn't have to, because he wants to appeal to a readership that is delighted to find that not only is the target of their political animus wrong, but actually suffering from a mental disability! It's intellectually lazy and unworthy of a serious scholar.
- Retric 13y ago
  If this had been a dissertation I would completely agree with your point of view. However, serious scholarship has little to do with writing a popular book. If anything Malcolm Gladwell is the gold standard for popular, interesting, and bulllshit books that sell like hot cakes. Consider his religious affiliation suggests a level of irrational thinking, but you can't say such things if you want a best seller. Yet, there are plenty scholarly works focused on the connection between religion an irrationality because scholars especially those with tenure can get away with such things.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>Indeed, in contrast to your laundry list, Stanovich doesn't present a single concrete example of an irrational decision by the former president and the cognitive bias that led to it. This must be some kind of alternate reality where GWB did not declare war on Iraq based on a complete knee-jerk (read: irrational) reaction to 9/11. And I'm being very generous here. There are many smart people who have provided evidence that GWB's decision to invade Iraq was based on malice.
chinpokomon 13y ago

mikeash 13y ago

I find that "slandering a president" phrase a bit odd. The idea that W was stupid or irrational is the kinder interpretation of his presidency. The alternative explanation is that he was just plain evil. It's also odd to point to his performance in politics as evidence of his rationality. Politics is a deeply irrational field, and I wouldn't consider becoming President an indicator that a person is rational any more than I would consider becoming head of the Flat Earth Society such. I'm not saying these specific conclusions are legitimate, but I don't think it comes down as "slander", really.

twoodfin 13y ago
I'm struggling not to repeat myself, but suppose I wrote a book with the first chapter titled "Inside mikeash's Mind" that purported to diagnose you with the propensity to make irrational decisions, and proceeded to document this inability by referring to a former employee who resigned after a year rather than be fired and selectively quoting something written about you by a non-associate...and nothing else. It's hard to see how that would not be a slander[1] on you, regardless of whether you've done more good or ill in your life. [1] Not in the legal sense, of course, since it's written, not spoken.
- mikeash 13y ago
  If I had had a long public life filled with actions whose only explanation are malice or irrationality, I don't think it would be slander, no, even if the argument wasn't very well constructed. That doesn't make it a good argument, I just don't think it qualifies as slander. (Or libel.) For one thing, slander or libel in the US has to be actually false.
  - Millennium 13y ago
    The flawed assumption in your argument is that malice and irrationality are the only possible explanations for his actions.
    - mikeash 13y ago

DanBC 13y ago

Ignoring the polarisation of the debate when a politician's name is used: It's possible for someone to reach a high office in a competitive environment and still to make decisions that are not so rational. Cognitive biases are very strong, and affect most people, and so people in high office have their own biases.