Psychiatrists Comment on Trump's Lack of Fitness for Office

Salon reports on a detailed analysis of the Mueller report by a panel of psychiatrists. The analysis was to assess President trump's mental fitness for office. The Mueller report includes detailed data that bears on Trump's state of mind and the basis on which he makes decisions in office. Salon writes:

Dr. Bandy Lee, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and editor of the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" convened a panel comprised of leading mental health experts to evaluate Donald Trump based upon his behavior as detailed in the Mueller report.

Their definitive conclusion: Trump is mentally unfit, a threat to the United States and the world, and as such should have his powers severely restricted. At the invitation of several Democratic members of Congress, Lee and other mental health professionals will present their findings about Donald Trump's mental health at what they hope will be a bipartisan congressional meeting in Washington next month.

In a YouTube video, Dr. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist comments further, alleging that the president "failed every criterion for rational and reality-based decision-making capacity. Our assessment is definitive. Our recommendations were, first and foremost, to remove Mr. Trump from access to nuclear weapons and war-making powers. We could offer many more, but given the urgency, we decided to focus on the two most important." The psychiatrists concluded that Trump "can no longer see reality. His actions are exactly what we would predict from an individual who lacks mental capacity."



Dr. Lee goes on to assert that the situation could have been avoided if the president and vice president were subject to fitness-for-duty tests before taking office. Military personnel who deal with nuclear weapons are subject to such mandatory psychological testing annually. She pointed out that the panel's assessment looked for impaired decision making as evidenced by low levels of impulsivity, recklessness, paranoia, and false beliefs. The psychiatrists found Tump is highly impaired in his decision-making function, but they made no clinical diagnosis.

It is important to note that the psychiatrists considered the evidence in the Mueller report, much of it sworn testimony, to be of higher quality and quantity than they usually worked with. That led to confidence in their function analysis: "The wealth and quality of the report’s content made this possible. In fact, we had more and better data, under sworn testimony, than we have ever had in our usual practice."

The panel invited the President to come in for an in-person exam if he believed their assessment was incorrect. Obviously, the President will never do that.

This is more evidence of the president's unfitness for office, something that arguably should have been obvious to most open-minded people by now.

B&B orig: 7/10/19

President Attacks Climate Science, Again

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a State Department intelligence analyst resigned in protest because the White House blocked his discussion of climate science in Congressional testimony. The White House refused to approve Dr. Rod Schoonover’s written testimony for entry into the permanent Congressional record because it contradicted the president's false opinions about climate science. The WSJ writes:

A policy expert familiar with his case confirmed that his resignation came as a direct result of the episode. His last day is expected to be Friday.

“Intelligence analysts, as a rule, are very committed to objective truth,” said Francesco Femia, the head of the Center for Climate and Security, a research organization in Washington. “And when something extraordinary happens to try to politicize their or suppress their analysis, as happened in this case, that flies in the face of their professional integrity. It’s a matter of someone standing up for principle.”

The State Department agency where Dr. Schoonover worked, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, has long been regarded as one of the most scrupulous and accurate in the federal government. In the prelude to the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, the agency stood almost alone in asserting — correctly, but contrary to the positions of the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency — that Iraq was not reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

As usual, the White House refused to comment. For context, a few days ago, the president gave a speech touting his great and wonderful record on leading the world in protecting the environment. That speech was loaded with lies, as discussed here previously.

Once again, republican attacks on science they dislike is on full display and undeniable to all except their supporters. For the GOP and its supporters, ideology talks and all contrary reality, science and logic walks.

B&B orig: 7/10/19

What Hypocrisy Looks and Sounds Like

This 6-minute video is self explanatory.



B&B orig: 7/11/19

Identity Protective Cognition

Dan Kahan at Yale University's Cultural Cognition Project studies identity protective cognition. In a working paper, Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-protective Cognition, he discusses identity protective cognition.

ABSTRACT: This paper supplies a compact synthesis of the empirical literature on misconceptions of and misinformation about decision-relevant science. The incidence and impact of misconceptions and misperceptions, the article argues, are highly conditional on identity protective cognition. Identity protective cognition refers to the tendency of culturally diverse individuals to selectively credit and dismiss evidence in patterns that reflect the beliefs that predominate in their group. On issues that provoke identity-protective cognition, the members of the public most adept at avoiding misconceptions of science are nevertheless the most culturally polarized. Individuals are also more likely to accept misinformation and resist the correction of it when that misinformation is identity-affirming rather than identity-threatening. Effectively counteracting these dynamics, the paper argues, requires more than simply supplying citizens with correct information. It demands in addition the protection of the science communication environment from toxic social meanings that fuse competing understandings of fact with diverse citizens’ cultural identities.

INTRODUCTION: This paper investigates the role that “misinformation” and “misconceptions of science” play in political controversies over decision-relevant science (DRS). The surmise that their contribution is large is eminently plausible. Ordinary members of the public, we are regularly reminded (e.g., National Science Foundation 2014, 2016), display only modest familiarity with fundamental scientific findings, and lack proficiency in the forms of critical reasoning essential to science comprehension (Marx et al. 2007; Weber 2006). As a result, they are easily misled by special interest groups, who flood public discourse with scientifically unfounded claims on global warming, genetically modified foods, and other issues (e.g., Hmielowski et al. 2013). I will call this perspective the “public irrationality thesis” (PIT).

The unifying theme of this paper is that PIT itself reflects a misconception of a particular form of science: namely, the science of science communication. One of the major tenets of this emerging body of work is that public controversy over DRS typically originates in identity-protective cognition—a tendency to selectively credit and discredit evidence in patterns that reflect people’s commitments to competing cultural groups (Sherman & Cohen 2002, 2006). Far from evincing irrationality, this pattern of reasoning promotes the interests of individual members of the public, who have a bigger personal stake in fitting in with important affinity groups than in forming correct perceptions of scientific evidence. Indeed, the members of the public who are most polarized over DRS are the ones who have the highest degree of science comprehension, a capacity that they actively employ to form and persist in identity-protective beliefs (Kahan 2015a).

The problem, in short, is not a gullible, manipulated public; it is a polluted science communication environment. The pollution consists of antagonistic social meanings that put individuals in the position of having to choose between using their reason to discern what science knows or using it instead to express their group commitments. Safeguarding the science communication environment from such meanings, and repairing it where protective measures fail, should be the principle aim of those committed to assuring that society makes full use of the vast stock of DRS at its disposal (Kahan 2015b)

Is Kahan right to argue that the problem is a polluted science communication environment and not a gullible or manipulated public? For example, the president met yesterday with propagandists of the radical right and praised their efforts at deceiving and manipulating the public, commenting no their propaganda tactics: "The crap you think of is unbelievable. I mean it's genius — but it's bad." That evinces manipulation broader than just science-based content. Is there a difference between a polluted science communication environment and a manipulated public?

B&B orig: 7/12/19

The Will of the People: Legislators Do Not Care

“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write: Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

That’s a big claim. In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.” New Yorker magazine, 2014

Writing an opinion piece for the New York Times, political scientists Joshua Kalla and Ethan Porter report on a two-year study. They write:

We like to think that politicians care about what their constituents want. If voters in a legislative district have certain views about, say, the legality of abortion, we assume that their representative’s decisions will be shaped, or at least influenced, by those views. To a large extent, democracy depends on this assumption: The beliefs of voters should be reflected, however imperfectly, in the leaders they elect.

But there is reason to question this assumption. It is easy to think of issues, climate change and gun control chief among them, where the consensus of public opinion has provoked little legislative action. How much do legislators really care about the views of their constituents?

Over the past two years, we conducted a study to find out. We provided state legislators in the United States with access to highly detailed public opinion survey data — more detailed than almost all available opinion polls — about their constituents’ attitudes on gun control, infrastructure spending, abortion and many other policy issues. Afterward, we gauged the willingness of representatives to look at the data as well as how the data affected their perceptions of their constituents’ opinions.

What we found should alarm all Americans. An overwhelming majority of legislators were uninterested in learning about their constituents’ views. Perhaps more worrisome, however, was that when the legislators who did view the data were surveyed afterward, they were no better at understanding what their constituents wanted than legislators who had not looked at the data. For most politicians, voters’ views seemed almost irrelevant.

No one wants or expects politicians to march in lock step with their voters. Politicians are not supposed to mechanically replace their own views with the views of their constituents. But constituents’ perspectives should carry considerable weight. Our study suggests that for most politicians, voters’ views carry almost no weight at all.

What Kalla and Porter describe in this opinion piece accords with the Gilens and Page (Yale U. and Northwestern U., respectively) analysis from 2104.[1] Kalla and Porter's research shows a clear indifference by legislators as to what voters want, and when they do pay attention, they usually misunderstand what voters want.

Footnote:
1. The abstract from a Gilens and Page paper in Perspectives on Politics:

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. (emphasis added)

B&B orig: 7/12/19

The President's New Media Strategy?

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. . . . . The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The President hosted conservative provocateurs yesterday at the White House for a 'free speech' summit. One source writes that he "welcomed prominent conservative social media provocateurs to the White House and said that along with himself, they are being treated unfairly by big tech firms, which he says suppress conservative voices." The president was quoted as saying "We're not going to be silenced . . . . Big tech must not censor the voices. The crap you think of is unbelievable. I mean it's genius — but it's bad" as he complained about fluctuations in the number of his Twitter followers and praised the liars who support him.

Another source comments:

President Trump used a White House conference Thursday to applaud far-right social media provocateurs even as he conceded that some of them are extreme in their views. Trump, who has weaponized social media to eviscerate opponents and promote himself, led a "social media summit" of like-minded critics of Big Tech, excluding representatives from the very platforms he exploits, the AP reports. The president used the event to air grievances over his treatment by Big Tech, but also to praise some of the most caustic voices on the right, who help energize Trump's political base. "Some of you guys are out there," he told them. "I mean it's genius, but it's bad."

Trump praised James O'Keefe, whose Project Veritas organization once tried to plant a false story in the Washington Post. In May 2010, O'Keefe and three others pleaded guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor in a scheme in which they posed as telephone repairmen in Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office. "He's not controversial, he's truthful," Trump insisted of O'Keefe. Trump told the friendly crowd, "You're bypassing the very, very corrupt media." The meeting represented an escalation of Trump's battle with Facebook, Google and Twitter. The president has claimed, without evidence, that the companies are "against me" and even suggested US regulators should sue them on grounds of anti-conservative bias. He announced Thursday that he is directing his administration to explore "all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free-speech rights of all Americans." (emphasis added)

This may turn out to be another step toward the deeply corrupt, lies-based tyranny the president is intent on building in the US. Going forward, the president may simply stop talking to all responsible media sources that try to report truth. Instead he may opt to rely on friendly propaganda sites to communicate his dark free speech[1] to the American people. It may be the case that the professional MSM is often or usually unreasonably biased, fails to be honest (comprehensive) enough and/or plagued by other factors that impair its professionalism or the veracity of its content.

That said, our imperfect MSM is far better than the kind of obviously dark free speech-based sources that our dark free speech-driven president apparently wants to deal with. Or is that point debatable?

Footnote:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or otherwise protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide corruption (~ lies and deceit of omission), and inconvenient truths and facts, and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism.

B&B orig: 7/12/19