As rule of law rots away criminals run free and wild

The New York Times writes:

One of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who investigated Donald J. Trump believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable, according to a copy of his resignation letter.

The prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, abruptly stopped pursuing an indictment of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Pomerantz, 70, a prominent former federal prosecutor and white-collar defense lawyer who came out of retirement to work on the Trump investigation, resigned on the same day as Carey R. Dunne, another senior prosecutor leading the inquiry.

Mr. Pomerantz’s Feb. 23 letter, obtained by The New York Times, offers a personal account of his decision to resign and for the first time states explicitly his belief that the office could have convicted the former president. Mr. Bragg’s decision was “contrary to the public interest,” he wrote.  

“The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did,” Mr. Pomerantz wrote.

Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne planned to charge Mr. Trump with falsifying business records, specifically his annual financial statements — a felony in New York State.

Mr. Bragg’s decision not to pursue charges then — and the resignations that followed — threw the fate of the long-running investigation into serious doubt. If the prosecutors had secured an indictment of Mr. Trump, it would have been the highest-profile case ever brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and would have made Mr. Trump the first American president to face criminal charges.

One can only wonder what kind of bribe got Bragg to call off the prosecution. Maybe he had  a chat with Merrick Garland and the two of them had a good laugh over people who actually still believed the rule of law for elites, wealthy people and politicians was real instead of mirage.

The moral rot in America's two-party system runs deep. Maybe democracy has finally fallen and all we are left looking at is smoke and mirrors.

Alvin Bragg, what did it take to buy him off?

Republican moral rot: Beyond rancid, into the indescribably ghastly

The demagogue traitor Mo Brooks with the demagogue traitor 

ex-president when times were better between them

Now they're in a snit at each other

The New York Times writes:

Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican who was deeply involved in former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to use Congress to upend the 2020 election and stay in office, claimed on Wednesday that the former president had asked him repeatedly in the months since to illegally “rescind” the election, remove President Biden and force a new special election.

Mr. Brooks made the extraordinary charge as the two onetime allies were engaged in a bitter political feud, and it was not immediately clear how their falling out related to the accusation. But the account from the Alabama congressman, who played a central role in challenging electoral votes for Mr. Biden on Jan. 6, 2021, suggested that Mr. Trump has continued his efforts to overturn his defeat and be reinstated.

It marked the first time a lawmaker who was involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to invalidate his election defeat has said that Mr. Trump asked for actions that, were they possible, would violate federal law.

His statement came after Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in the Republican primary for Alabama’s Senate seat, undercutting the congressman’s already slim chances in a crowded intraparty race.

“President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency,” Mr. Brooks said in a statement on Wednesday. “As a lawyer, I’ve repeatedly advised President Trump that Jan. 6 was the final election contest verdict and neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit what President Trump asks. Period.”  

In a subsequent text message, Mr. Brooks said Mr. Trump had made the request of him on “multiple occasions” since Sept. 1, 2021. He said the former president did not specify how exactly Congress would reinstall him as president, and Mr. Brooks repeatedly told him it was impossible.

“I told President Trump that ‘rescinding’ the 2020 election was not a legal option. Period,” Mr. Brooks wrote.

The GOP vs. the ex-president

This post is not about what the ex-president did and tried to do.[1] This is about Republican Party moral rot. Deep, thick rot. So deep and thick that probably ~95% of the GOP leadership is no longer able to see it in themselves. Incredible as it may seem, they appear to actually believe they are good guys. 

Here, we have a sitting Republican congressman, himself a liar and an all-around anti-democratic atrocity, who had knowledge of the ex-president's illegal treasonous explicit demands to illegally regain power, allegedly starting in September of 2021[2]. Brooks knew of this but nonetheless said nothing until the ex-president imperiled his own re-election by withdrawing his support. Brooks cared more about his own re-election than he cared about democracy, truth or most anything else. That is hard core moral rot. 

Since Brooks knew of this, it is fair and reasonable to believe that the entire Republican leadership knew of it as well. Arguably, all Republicans in congress knew but kept it to themselves. If they did, they were aiding a corrupt demagogue's attempt to overthrown the government for political purposes. This started September of 2021 and continued until Brooks flew into a snit and spilled the rotten beans. If the GOP leadership was not aware of all of this, then they are grossly incompetent and unfit to hold power. 

The GOP has worked long and hard by words and actions to earn public distrust. Therefore, it is fair and reasonable to believe that Republicans in congress knew about this, but just hid it from the American people for partisan political purposes. The burden of proof is on the GOP to prove it did not know. Since the GOP does not deign to explain or justify itself to the public, such proof will not be forthcoming. Thus, one can reasonably conclude the demagogic Republican leadership and politicians are just as corrupt and treasonous and the party's demagogic, corrupt and treasonous leader.

Or is there a flaw in that reasoning?

Footnote: 

1. By now, the non-deceived who are paying at least some attention know that he was and still is a divisive demagogue, a chronic liar, a criminal (a multiple felon), a pro-Russian traitor, a fornicator (Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, and God only knows who else), a cruel despot wannabe, and some other ghastly things, e.g., an unindicted co-conspirator (UNINDICTED, Merrick Garland, are you listening, you worthless jackass?). That is old news and minds are not going to change.

2. Who knows? Maybe Trump had been making such requests starting shortly after the 2020 election. With America's morally rotted, neo-fascist Republican Party, it's a significant possibility. Most of those people are chronic liars. 

What Makes People Vaccine-Hesitant?

 

A recent multinational study gives us some answers.

• Researchers undertook a 20-country survey of vaccine hesitancy.
• Being religious, perceiving low COVID-19 risk, and believing conspiracies were linked to more vaccine hesitancy.
• Prosocial intentions and messages, especially related to helping save loved ones, may improve vaccination rates.

COVID-19 vaccination has become a political land mine. We’re so polarized about a basic public-health initiative that we may have perpetuated the COVID-19 pandemic well beyond a reasonable endpoint.

The debate around COVID-19 sparked a multinational effort of scientists to look into what makes us vaccine-hesitant. Health and social science researchers on the study team were from countries including the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, and South Korea, among many others. In total, the team surveyed nearly 7,000 participants across 20 countries.

The resulting article, Intentions to be Vaccinated Against COVID-19: The Role of Prosociality and Conspiracy Beliefs across 20 Countries, was recently published in the journal Health Communication. The title highlights only two of the key factors researchers identified as being related to vaccine intentions; religiosity, gender, and one’s belief about the risk of getting COVID-19 were also important. For instance, indicating that one is religious was connected with lower intention to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

A few things are important to note about this study to properly make sense of its findings. First, it took place during the early phase of the pandemic—prior to the vaccines actually being available. Second, the study design is cross-sectional. In other words, it’s a snapshot in time that prevents the authors from claiming causal relationships.

With these caveats acknowledged, the insight generated from this 20-nation collaborative work is valuable. Here are three important takeaways:

1. We cannot underestimate the significance of conspiracy theories.

The science is fairly clear on a number of factors that may make us prone to love or believe conspiracy theories. These include personal qualities and experiences such as low trust in government agencies, prejudiced beliefs about minoritized groups, lower self-esteem, and perceptions of existential threat.

The authors of the Health Communications article took conspiracy theory science a step further. They used a validated general measure of someone’s willingness to believe big-picture conspiracies. Their results showed that a tendency to endorse conspiracy-style thinking was associated with greater vaccine hesitancy.

The study’s authors argued that a pathway to increasing vaccination is to address conspiracy theories at their roots. Rather than trying to correct misinformation, the authors promote the goal of social media efforts to cease conspiracy theory content before it spreads.

2. Our sense of risk matters.

As a colleague often reminds me, everyone has a differing risk tolerance. The study’s authors factored that into the survey by asking how susceptible a person believed they were to contracting COVID-19. Unsurprisingly, the greater the perceived personal risk, the more willing a person reported being to get a vaccine. I say this is an expected observation because prior health behavior research supports the idea that depending on the degree to which we judge our own risk for something, the more or less likely we are to take precautionary actions.

Although this finding seems intuitive, it’s quite important. The role of perceived risks speaks to the importance of engaging anyone who is vaccine-hesitant in a conversation to fully understand the reasoning underlying their perceived risk. Health care providers, community leaders, trusted friends, and mentors can all play an important role in engaging vaccine-hesitant persons. Health care researchers have argued that teaching important messengers motivational interviewing skills can be a particularly useful tool when engaging someone about their perceived risk.

The study’s authors also highlight the role of engaging key community settings and leaders based on findings concerning religiosity. Religiosity may play a role in perceived risk or vaccine intention. Therefore, the authors suggest there is an opportunity for health care providers to partner with religious community leaders who are seen as “trusted messengers.”

3. We need to understand and capitalize on prosocial beliefs and acts

Prosocial behavior is far more than just helping others. The authors captured several pieces of prosocial behavior by asking survey respondents several queries relating to their willingness to help or make sacrifices for others. These questions were framed specifically in the context of the pandemic. The researchers also assessed whether a respondent was willing to support major initiatives like mandatory vaccination for the collective good.

A general pattern was clear: More prosocial intentions and beliefs equated to greater intention to get the vaccine. This trend suggests that public health messaging and other strategies promoting vaccination may use prosocial messaging and reasoning on an international scale. Other social media research supports the idea that prosocial messaging about close loved ones (“protect your loved ones”) is effective in promoting COVID-19 preventive behaviors.

In all, this 20-country collaborative identified a number of important characteristics linked to vaccine intentions. Researchers and health care practitioners alike can continue such vital science in order to maximize the impact to increase prevention through vaccination.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/through-the-social-science-lens/202203/what-makes-people-vaccine-hesitant

The Russian war on Ukraine has broken the post-Soviet order

Mary Sarotte

The Financial Times published an essay by historian Mary Elise Sarotte (Professor, Johns Hopkins University) about how we got to the Russia-Ukraine war, some of what was probably on Putin’s mind, and what it all means. 

Pre-war history

Sarotte starts by asserting that the Ukraine war broke the post-cold-war order. That will be followed soon by redrawing the same line of division between Moscow-centric and Washington-centric countries that existed before 1989. She asserts that it is beyond question that Vladimir Putin’s insistence on eliminating Ukraine’s independence is the cause. Putin sees Ukraine independence as forcing nations and people to choose between Russia and the West. That is the core reason why Putin started the war. 

Sarotte argues that Putin became unwilling to tolerate Ukraine’s sovereignty due to its significant role in the the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin considers that as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. Thirty years ago, Ukraine broke from the Soviet Union and that made the break-up of the USSR irreversible. Putin’s decision to start his war ended the post-cold-war peace that  was already fading. The Ukraine war proved false the prevailing belief that a major land war would not happen again in Europe.

Sarotte's analysis of the current situation did not rely on long past history or current Russian and Ukrainian identity. Instead, she relied on declassified and other relevant materials dating back to the 1990s. The goal of Western leaders was to help create an independent Ukraine as part of a goal to insure long-term peace in Europe. Their efforts failed.

The GHW Bush administration was deeply divided about what to do. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, a radical right hawk and ideologue, wanted to help foment the breakup of the USSR. Secretary of State James Baker strongly disagreed and argued the US needed to try to keep the USSR intact as a means to keep its arsenal of ~35,000 nuclear weapons under professional control.

While the Bush administration bickered itself into gridlock, Ukraine mooted the debate by holding a referendum on independence in 1991. The people overwhelmingly voted to become an independent country. Turnout was 84% and the overall vote for independence was 90%. Clearly, the Ukrainian people wanted to get away from the USSR. In the Russia sympathetic Eastern districts of Donetsk, Luhansk, the vote for independence was more than 80%. The vote for independence was only 54% in Crimea, which Russia under Putin annexed by force in 2014.

The 1991 Ukraine vote was psychologically catastrophic for Moscow. Most Russians believed that Ukraine was an integral part of Russia. Rejection by Ukraine was unthinkable until the shock happened. As an independent nation, Ukraine would be the world's third-largest nuclear power. Baker fought hard to make sure that Russia would inherit all the nukes. The thought of a nuclear armed, unstable new nation terrified Baker. Baker's efforts ended with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

Clinton wanted NATO to expand to all the subjugated USSR colonies such as Poland and Lithuania. He hoped to make Ukraine feel secure enough to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. The Clinton administration established the Partnership for Peace (PfP), where potential NATO countries gained experience in peacekeeping and joint military operations with the West. The idea of PfP was that over time new nations could become full NATO member states. This incremental approach did not require Washington to (i) draw a new line through post-cold-war Europe, or (ii) leave most post-Soviet republics to their own devices. Although the PfP was not very appealing, the idea of joining NATO was. The old Soviet vassal states wanted to get away from the Russians. NATO looked like a good way out, so most of them grudgingly supported PfP. Importantly, both Russia and Ukraine supported PfP. For Russia, PfP was minimally acceptable but better than redrawing lines when NATO expanded. PfP thus provided a place for Ukraine, and was (barely) tolerable to Russia.

That nice plan blew up in 1994 when Yeltsin attacked Chechnya and Clinton's political priorities started to change his policy preferences. The Russian war terrified central and eastern Europeans. They saw the old Soviet tactics in the Chechen war. They reasonably feared they might be attacked next. Tensions between the US and Russia intensified, in part by the Republican party’s win in the 1994 midterm congressional elections. That landslide win was significantly based on the Republican vaporware document called the “Contract with America.” It called for faster NATO enlargement. That vote showed Clinton the NATO expansion issue was popular, especially in states that he needed to win in 1996 to get a second term in office. 

In addition, Ukraine was finally convinced to give up its nuclear weapons in return for assurances its on territorial integrity that were codified in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Under the Memorandum, Kyiv agreed either to destroy its nuclear weapons or to relocate them to Russia. That made Kyiv less important to the west. Russia, the UK and the US signed the agreement. Thus, Russia guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity in writing in 1994.

All of that convinced Clinton to redraw a line across Europe that was closer to Russia. Instead of a large number of nations in the PfP, a small number of nations would be added as full members to NATO. One practical effect of this was that created some former USSR states who were in NATO and protected by it, while others were not, including Ukraine. The other effect of this was to foreclose the flexibility that had PfP afforded. NATO became a matter of all or nothing.

At this time when Western options for dealing with the former Soviet states by way of NATO became limited, Putin was rising through the ranks in Russia. He started working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, one of Putin’s former college professors. There, Putin managed relations between elected authorities, local crime bosses and what was left of the KGB. He distinguished himself through unwavering loyalty. That loyalty trait caught the eye of Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, Alexei Kudrin. Putin joined the Yeltsin administration, where he displayed unquestioning loyalty to president Yeltsin. 

By August of 1999, Putin became Russia’s prime minister, and in March of 2000, he was elected president. Past experiences had hardened Putin. In 2000, he said “only one thing works in such circumstances [when there is a threat and help may not come] — to go on the offensive. You must hit first, and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet. .... we would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from eastern Europe.” 

Putin also opposed the idea of self-declared nationhood for former Soviet republics. In 2014 he commented that self-declaration of independence and separation from Russia meant that “millions of people [ethnic Russians] went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities.” In Putin’s mind, ethnic Russians were the largest minority in most of the former Soviet Republics and independence meant that those Russians were “the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders”. At this point, Sarotte wryly comments that “left out of his account was the role of Joseph Stalin’s forced deportations and resettlements in creating that reality.” 

One can guess that the progeny of some of those exiled from Russia by Stalin might not feel all that sympathetic to Russia or being Russian. 

Recent war history: The last year

That background leads up to the last year. Sarotte argues that Putin recently decided to attack the Ukraine claiming, among other things, that he was defending ethnic Russians from Nazis and other kinds of genocidal non-Russian people. His goal in this war is to permanently stop Ukraine’s capacity to move toward the West in its sympathies and alliances. In making this decision, she asserts that Putin (i) correctly understood that the West left Ukraine out of the post-cold-war security order, and (ii) because of that, it would have few options if Russia were to invade. She speculates that in addition to that analysis, Putin probably also took into account deep political and social discord in the US (the toxic politics I keep complaining about), Britain entangled with Boris and Brexit, France in elections and Germany without Angela Merkel. Sarotte notes this about Merkel, “who, having grown up in East Germany and speaking fluent Russian, had far too good an understanding of Putin for his own comfort.”

Sarotte cites as mistakes of the West, (i) rejoicing over the people who escaped Russia’s iron grip, while mostly ignoring all the people who had lost out, especially including Putin himself, (ii) downplaying or ignoring how seriously Putin was taking the Ukraine conflict with the West, and (iii) misunderstanding the intensity of Putin’s desire to recreate Moscow’s Soviet empire and control.

Sarotte ends her essay with these comments:

The outbreak of war in Ukraine means, among many other consequences, that we need to view the cold war’s end through a new lens. Its most lasting consequence, tragically, may not be the optimism that it inspired in the many, but the damage that it did to the one: Vladimir Putin. To assuage his grievance about the loss of Soviet status and above all Ukraine, he has commenced a major land war in Europe — and written the requiem for the post-Soviet peace.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this fascinating article to my attention.

The importance and danger of constant propaganda over years

Phrases like “decades of relentless radical right propaganda,” “decades of Republican dark free speech” and variations thereon (always with “decades” in there somewhere) are pretty common here at Dissident Politics. I use them a lot, or at least it seems that way. 

My understanding of human cognitive biology, such as it is, led me to instinctively intuit that the alt-inconvenient world, alt-inconvenient reality, alt-inconvenient facts and alt-inconvenient reasoning that American fascist propaganda has created and made to look real took decades of trial and error, expertise and discipline to construct. The tens of millions of minds that are now trapped in that alt-everything inconvenient faux world did not get trapped overnight. It took time, expertise, endless repetition and literally billions of dollars to build and keep the radical right’s dark arts machine running and fine-tuned.

An interesting interview the Washington Post published makes the point about the importance of years of propaganda continuity in the context of Russia. The WaPo writes:

Few Americans have parsed Russian propaganda on its various platforms like Maxim Pozdorovkin.

The Russian-born, Harvard-educated filmmaker and thinker is behind several works on the subject, most notably “Our New President” from 2018, an award-winning documentary deconstruction of the Russian media’s portrayal of Donald Trump’s election that was, as he puts it, “a movie based entirely on actual footage without a single true statement in it.”

Far from just an attempt to negate discontent over its Ukraine invasion, Russia’s current state-media approach is, in Pozdorovkin’s view, a continuation of a decade-long campaign to warp Russian citizens’ view of the West. He argues the country’s population has been long primed for this moment — seriously lowering the odds for any tech company or foreign outlet hoping to poke through the veil.

Q: You’ve been very vocal in your work that there’s been a whole narrative about America playing out in Russian media that most Americans aren’t aware of. What exactly has been happening?

A: I don’t think Americans fully understand what’s been fed to Russians about the U.S. and the West for literally the past decade. It’s been an information war — a totally one-sided information war — and it has been waged so fully and artfully that it’s made a lot of what’s happening now preemptively possible. What this information war boils down to is this: “The West is completely against us and trying to stifle and destroy our way of life.” It’s a simple message. But people are told this over and over, in so many different ways.

Q: Like how?

A: The Western sanctions back in 2014 over the war in the Donbas? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. The backlash to the Russian disinformation campaign in the 2016 U.S. election? An attempt to destroy the Russian way of life. Russian-doping punishments at the Olympics? Same thing. You name it, if it has involved Russia and the West, it was the West trying to destroy the Russian way of life. When in reality, of course, most Americans don’t typically spend much time thinking about Russia at all.

Q: And Trump fits neatly into this —

A: Trump fits neatly into this because Trump was the one American leader who wasn’t trying to destroy the Russian way of life.

Q: And in their eyes that’s what caused the U.S. backlash to him.

A: That was the one and only reason.

Q: What effect does this have? Like you said, it’s not like the U.S. or Europe has done much to really feed this narrative.

A: It’s true, the Russian media has been totally shadowboxing for years; no one was fighting back. But that doesn’t really matter. If you ingrain this message of victimhood so completely, what it does is when there’s any kind of [President Vladimir] Putin aggressive action, as there is now, a lot of people in Russia don’t see it as aggressive — they just see it as standing up for their way of life. That’s why the nuclear threat computes. 

Q: Because it’s not viewed as much as saber-rattling as “look at what you made me do.” 

A: Exactly. “We don’t want to take the nuclear option. But what choice do we have? You tried to destroy our way of life.”

Note that last bit about “the nuclear option.” I think he refers to nuclear weapons possibly happening in Ukraine. The New York Times commented on that awful possibility in an article entitled, The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone: 

“Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable. Concern about these smaller arms has soared as Vladimir V. Putin, in the Ukraine war, has warned of his nuclear might, has put his atomic forces on alert and has had his military carry out risky attacks on nuclear power plants. The fear is that if Mr. Putin feels cornered in the conflict, he might choose to detonate one of his lesser nuclear arms — breaking the taboo set 76 years ago after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. .... For Russia, military analysts note, edgy displays of the less destructive arms have let Mr. Putin polish his reputation for deadly brinkmanship and expand the zone of intimidation he needs to fight a bloody conventional war.”

The victimhood card

Also note the bit about a completely ingrained message of victimhood. Who else endlessly and constantly screams victimhood in their/its propaganda? The Republican Party, including its donors, elites, politicians, professional propagandists (Fox News, etc.) and now its rank and file too. GOP messaging is disciplined and professional. Claiming victimhood works so it is used, whether it’s true or not.

Some recent commentary on conservative and Republican victimhood:
Republicans make Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearing all about their own victimhood

How White Victimhood Fuels Republican Politics 

Don’t be fooled: The GOP love affair with Putin is worse than it looks

White Male Conservatives Think They’re America’s Real Victims

Of course, it should be clearly noted that victimhood is claimed by more than just conservatives and Republicans. Some liberal snowflakes claim it, warranted or not. It is a fairly common rhetorical tactic. Sometimes there is more truth than hyperbole and deceit in a particular claim of victimhood. It can be real. 

The importance of statictical power in experimental protocols

In 2016, the book, Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality, was published. It was edited by bioethicist S.M. Liao (book review here). The book was a summary of the current neuroscience of morality as described by leading researchers. Their work was critiqued by philosophers who understood the science and the data analysis. 

A concern the philosophers raised was caution about over interpreting brain scan data. Their concern was that the sample size (number of people in the experiments) of most brain scan experiments was too small, due in part to the high cost of such research. That opened the possibility that results could be misleading. Small sample sizes can lead to insufficient statistical power, leading to irreproducible and thus probably inaccurate results. 

The philosophers' concern appears to have been right. The New York Times writes on a study that analyzed brain scan results from three huge brain scan studies. Based on results from those three, the researchers concluded that sample size in typical studies in the past was usually too small for the conclusions to be reliable. This was not just about studies on morality, but it includes essentially all brain scan research and possibly other areas of research, including cancer research. The NYT writes:

For two decades, researchers have used brain-imaging technology to try to identify how the structure and function of a person’s brain connects to a range of mental-health ailments, from anxiety and depression to suicidal tendencies.

But a new paper, published Wednesday in Nature, calls into question whether much of this research is actually yielding valid findings. Many such studies, the paper’s authors found, tend to include fewer than two dozen participants, far shy of the number needed to generate reliable results.

“You need thousands of individuals,” said Scott Marek, a psychiatric researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and an author of the paper. He described the finding as a “gut punch” for the typical studies that use imaging to try to better understand mental health.

Studies that use magnetic-resonance imaging technology commonly temper their conclusions with a cautionary statement noting the small sample size. .... The median number of subjects in mental-health-related studies that use brain imaging is around 23, he added.

But the Nature paper demonstrates that the data drawn from just two dozen subjects is generally insufficient to be reliable and can in fact yield “massively inflated” findings,” Dr. Dosenbach said.

The authors ran millions of calculations by using different sample sizes and the hundreds of brain regions explored in the various major studies. Time and again, the researchers found that subsets of data from fewer than several thousand people did not produce results consistent with those of the full data set.

Dr. Marek said that the paper’s findings “absolutely” applied beyond mental health. Other fields, like genomics and cancer research, have had their own reckonings with the limits of small sample sizes and have tried to correct course, he noted.

“My hunch this is much more about population science than it is about any one of those fields,” he said.

Another source commented on this research:

Scientists rely on brain-wide association studies to measure brain structure and function -; using MRI brain scans -; and link them to complex characteristics such as personality, behavior, cognition, neurological conditions, and mental illness. But a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota, published March 16 in Nature, shows that most published brain-wide association studies are performed with too few participants to yield reliable findings.

Such so-called underpowered studies are susceptible to uncovering strong but spurious associations by chance while missing real but weaker associations. Routinely underpowered brain-wide association studies result in a glut of astonishingly strong yet irreproducible findings that slow progress toward understanding how the brain works, the researchers said.

A 2011 article commented: Since its inception in 1990, fMRI has been used in an exceptionally large number of studies in the cognitive neurosciences, clinical psychiatry/ psychology, and presurgical planning (between 100,000 and 250,000 entries in PubMed, depending on keywords).

Looks like it's going to take some more time to figure the brain out. Guess that's no surprise. Heck, it took ~42 years and several hundred thousand experiments just to figure out that sample size was too small. It's slow going when one is slogging through the great Grimpen Mire of Dartmoore in Devon, location of Baskerville Hall, in the middle of the night. 

Sigh. Gotta listen to them philosophers more carefully. 

The machine colors in areas of increased or decreased 

brain activity in response to a physical or mental task