Paul Ornstein, Psychoanalyst and Holocaust Survivor, RIP

Dr. Ornstein in 1950.

NYT

"Paul Ornstein, who died at 92 on Jan. 19 in Brookline, Mass., could recall digging trenches for German troops as part of a forced labor battalion in Ukraine during World War II. After managing to escape, he hid for months in 1944 in the basement of the Swiss Embassy annex in Budapest.

Once the Red Army routed the Germans, he returned to his hometown in Hungary to search for his parents, his four siblings and his girlfriend, Anna Brunn, a distant cousin with whom he had fallen in love before the war, when he was 17 and she was barely a teenager.None appeared to have survived the Holocaust; he assumed they had been killed in death camps or in forced labor. Alone, he considered leaving his homeland behind and moving to Palestine. But with no way to get there, he instead enrolled in medical school in Hungary to pursue a career in psychoanalysis, inspired by his curiosity about what had motivated the anti-Semitism he experienced.   

Six months later, he learned that his father and Anna were still alive, liberated from separate concentration camps.

“As it happened, Anna returned from Auschwitz with her mother, and my father returned from Mauthausen during the same week,” Dr. Ornstein recalled in a memoir.

Reunited, he and Anna, who had lost two brothers and her father in the Holocaust, enrolled in the Heidelberg University School of Medicine in Germany, where their classmates included former Nazis.

They married in 1946 and moved to the United States, where they became major figures in the self-psychology movement, a provocative and evolving theory that challenged traditional Freudian analysis.

Dr. Ornstein embraced and advanced the theory, which encourages therapists to be more empathetic — “vicarious introspection,” Dr. Kohut called it. Instead of dealing primarily with individual guilt, sex and aggression, as Freudians do, self-psychology postulates that parents’ failure to support a child’s sense of self leads to later personality disorders.

Dr. Anna Ornstein said in an interview on Monday that she believed that her husband’s self-esteem, and hers, enabled them to survive and that it shaped their outlook on the academic discipline they chose.

“It was never easy to be a Jew in Hungary, but when the ultimate hell broke loose, we were extra fortunate in terms of the parenting, the care and love we had as children,” she said. “We had very sturdy self-esteem. As much as we were humiliated, we never felt demeaned because we came from a culture and emotional environment that we could be proud of. We were called ‘dirty Jews,’ but we knew who we really were.”

Julius Caesar and the pirates

New Criterion, Roger Kimball

"[Julius] Caesar cultivated a reputation for clemency towards those he defeated—provided they didn’t cross him a second time. In some respects, it is worth noting, the clemency was merely relative. When Crassus finally managed to crush the slave rebellion of Spartacus in 71 BC, he ordered that six thousand slaves he had captured be crucified in regular intervals along the Via Appia from Capua to the gates of Rome. He also ordered that the bodies of the unfortunate victims not be taken down but be left to rot as a grisly object lesson to others who might be contemplating rebellion. Six thousand rotting corpses along the main road leading south from Rome. No doubt it was a sobering sight. Contrast Caesar’s behavior. When he was still in his early twenties, he was captured by some pirates as he crossed the Aegean Sea. They held him for ransom and were amused by the jocular arrogance of their young patrician charge. He joined in their games. He claimed to be insulted that they had asked for only twenty talents for his release and demanded they increase it to fifty. And he promised that one day he would return and have them all crucified. The fifty talents were duly paid, Caesar was released, and he soon managed to raise a fleet and capture his former captors. He did have them crucified, but had their throats slit first, sparing them a long, agonizing death.

That was a sort of clemency, I suppose."

Plutarch's account of the incident:

"2 1 To begin with, then, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty. 2 In the next place, after he had sent various followers to various cities to procure the money and was left with one friend and two attendants among Cilicians, most murderous of men, he held them in such disdain that whenever he lay down to sleep he would send and order them to stop talking. 3 For eight and thirty days, as if the men were not his watchers, but his royal body-guard, he shared in their sports and exercises with great unconcern. 4 He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians, and often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth. 5 But after his ransom had come from Miletus and he had paid it and was set free, he immediately manned vessels and put to sea from the harbor of Miletus against the robbers. He caught them, too, still lying at anchor off the island, and got most of them into his power. 6 Their money he made his booty, but the men themselves he lodged in the prison at Pergamum, and then went in person to Junius, the governor of Asia, on the ground that it belonged to him, as praetor of the province, to punish the captives. 7 But since the praetor cast longing eyes on their money, which was no small sum, and kept saying that he would consider the case of the captives at his leisure, Caesar left him to his own devices, went to Pergamum, took the robbers out of prison, and crucified them all, just as he had often warned them on the island that he would do, when they thought he was joking."

The Author's Abstract of Melancholy -- Robert Burton (1638)

THE AUTHOR'S ABSTRACT OF MELANCHOLY, Διαλογῶς

When I go musing all alone

Thinking of divers things fore-known.

When I build castles in the air,

Void of sorrow and void of fear,

Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,

Methinks the time runs very fleet.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

When I lie waking all alone,

Recounting what I have ill done,

My thoughts on me then tyrannise,

Fear and sorrow me surprise,

Whether I tarry still or go,

Methinks the time moves very slow.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so mad as melancholy.

When to myself I act and smile,

With pleasing thoughts the time beguile,

By a brook side or wood so green,

Unheard, unsought for, or unseen,

A thousand pleasures do me bless,

And crown my soul with happiness.

All my joys besides are folly,

None so sweet as melancholy.

When I lie, sit, or walk alone,

I sigh, I grieve, making great moan,

In a dark grove, or irksome den,

With discontents and Furies then,

A thousand miseries at once

Mine heavy heart and soul ensconce,

All my griefs to this are jolly,

None so sour as melancholy.

Methinks I hear, methinks I see,

Sweet music, wondrous melody,

Towns, palaces, and cities fine;

Here now, then there; the world is mine,

Rare beauties, gallant ladies shine,

Whate'er is lovely or divine.

All other joys to this are folly,

None so sweet as melancholy.

Methinks I hear, methinks I see

Ghosts, goblins, fiends; my phantasy

Presents a thousand ugly shapes,

Headless bears, black men, and apes,

Doleful outcries, and fearful sights,

My sad and dismal soul affrights.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

None so damn'd as melancholy.

Methinks I court, methinks I kiss,

Methinks I now embrace my mistress.

O blessed days, O sweet content,

In Paradise my time is spent.

Such thoughts may still my fancy move,

So may I ever be in love.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

When I recount love's many frights,

My sighs and tears, my waking nights,

My jealous fits; O mine hard fate

I now repent, but 'tis too late.

No torment is so bad as love,

So bitter to my soul can prove.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so harsh as melancholy.

Friends and companions get you gone,

'Tis my desire to be alone;

Ne'er well but when my thoughts and I

Do domineer in privacy.

No Gem, no treasure like to this,

'Tis my delight, my crown, my bliss.

All my joys to this are folly,

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

'Tis my sole plague to be alone,

I am a beast, a monster grown,

I will no light nor company,

I find it now my misery.

The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,

Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so fierce as melancholy.

I'll not change life with any king,

I ravisht am: can the world bring

More joy, than still to laugh and smile,

In pleasant toys time to beguile?

Do not, O do not trouble me,

So sweet content I feel and see.

All my joys to this are folly,

None so divine as melancholy.

I'll change my state with any wretch,

Thou canst from gaol or dunghill fetch;

My pain's past cure, another hell,

I may not in this torment dwell!

Now desperate I hate my life,

Lend me a halter or a knife;

All my griefs to this are jolly,

Naught so damn'd as melancholy.

Atlantic City -- Levon Helm (1999)

1. Well they blew up the chicken man
   In Philly last night
   Now they blew up his house too

   Down on the boardwalk they're gettin'
   Ready for a fight,
   Gonna see what them racket boys can do

   Now there's trouble busin' in
   From outta state,
   And the D.A. can't get no relief

   Gonna be a rumble
   Out on the promenade and the
   Gamblin' commission's hangin'
   On by the skin of its teeth

   [Chorus]
   Well now everything dies, baby that's a fact,
   But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back
   Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
   And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

   Well I got a job and tried to
   Put my money away,
   But I got debts that no honest man can pay

   So I drew what I had,
   From the Central Trust,
   And bought us two tickets on that City Coast bus

   [Chorus]

   Now our luck may have died,
   And our love may be cold,
   But with you forever, I'll stay

   Now I been lookin' for a job,
   But it's hard to find
   Down here it's just winners and losers

   Honey, last night,
   I met this guy,
   And I'm gonna do a favor for him.

   Everything dies, baby that's a fact,
   But maybe everything that dies
   Someday, comes back

   Put your hair up nice and sit up pretty,
   And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
   Meet me tonight in Atlantic City
   Meet me tonight in Atlantic City

   Songwriters: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

"My God, what have we done?"

"My God, what have we done?" -- log entry by Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, August 6, 1945.

 

 





If you haven't read John Hershey's Hiroshima, you should. Most of the book is free on the New Yorker website, but the book as a good "whatever happened to..." final chapter.

 

"On the train on the way into Hiroshima from the country, where he lived with his mother, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, the Red Cross Hospital surgeon, thought over an unpleasant nightmare he had had the night before. ...In his dream, he had been at the bedside of a country patient when the police and the doctor he had consulted burst into the room, seized him, dragged him outside, and beat him up cruelly. ...

At the terminus, he caught a streetcar at once. (He later calculated that if he had taken his customary train that morning, and if he had had to wait a few minutes for the streetcar, as often happened, he would have been close to the center at the time of the explosion and would surely have perished.) He arrived at the hospital at seven-forty and reported to the chief surgeon. A few minutes later, he went to a room on the first floor and drew blood from the arm of a man in order to perform a Wassermann test. The laboratory containing the incubators for the test was on the third floor. With the blood specimen in his left hand, walking in a kind of distraction he had felt all morning, probably because of the dream and his restless night, he started along the main corridor on his way toward the stairs. He was one step beyond an open window when the light of the bomb was reflected, like a gigantic photographic flash, in the corridor. He ducked down on one knee and said to himself, as only a Japanese would, “Sasaki, gambare! Be brave!” Just then (the building was 1,650 yards from the center), the blast ripped through the hospital. The glasses he was wearing flew off his face; the bottle of blood crashed against one wall; his Japanese slippers zipped out from under his feet—but otherwise, thanks to where he stood, he was untouched.

Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon and rushed around to the man’s office and found him terribly cut by glass. The hospital was in horrible confusion: heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the patients were running about screaming, many more lay dead. (A colleague working in the laboratory to which Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr. Sasaki’s patient, whom he had just left and who a few moments before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis, was also dead.) Dr. Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the hospital who was unhurt.

Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit only the building he was in, got bandages and began to bind the wounds of those inside the hospital; while outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the Red Cross Hospital to begin an invasion that was to make Dr. Sasaki forget his private nightmare for a long, long time."

This American Life

Allison Silverman

Captain Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, shares a handshake with Tanimoto, who then backs, up putting him at an awkward distance between Lewis and Ralph Edwards, who's still consulting his book. Captain Lewis explains haltingly how they got the order to target Hiroshima, how the bombardier aimed, how they dropped the bomb and then turned fast to avoid the blast.

Captain Robert Lewis

And then the two concussion waves hit the ship. Shortly after, we turned back to see what had happened. And there in front of our eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared.

Ralph Edwards

Now you entered something in your log at that time.

Captain Robert Lewis

As I said before, Mr. Edwards, I wrote down later, "My God, what have we done?"

Ralph Edwards

And so, Reverend Tanimoto, you on the ground, and you on your military mission, Captain Lewis, in the air, both appealed to a power greater than your own.

Allison Silverman

Lewis is the one you're most worried about watching this bizarre blind date. Ralph Edwards is pleased. Tanimoto is respectful, but Captain Lewis looks like he's breaking down. People say he went to a bar before the show and came back drunk.

Ralph Edwards

Thank you, Captain Robert Lewis, now personnel manager of Henry Heide Incorporated in New York City.

Allison Silverman

In 1971, Lewis sold his famous log from the flight and used the money in part to buy Italian marble for his new hobby, sculpture. The piece he's known for is a mushroom cloud, with streams of blood flowing down the side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Public education: Lots more bucks for the same modest bang

Source: Cato Institute. Public education, in its current manifestation, is a sickening waste of taxpayer dollars.

Neuroenhancers boost chess performance

If you are not already using coffee as a neuroenhancer, perhaps you should consider starting. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams says, "I feel sorry for people who don't drink coffee." Two to four cups a day ought to do the trick. Any more and you build up too much tolerance and get a paradoxical fatigue. 

worldchess.com

"A landmark study published in European Neuropsychopharmacology, the official publication of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, has found that there are two prescription drugs that seem to enhance chess-playing ability.

The drugs are methylphenidate, which is most commonly marketed as Ritalin (by Novartis), and modafinil, which is sold as Alertec, Modavigil and Provigil. The study also measured the effects of caffeine and found, not surprisingly, that it also had an ameliorative impact.

When adjusting for an unexpected side-effect of the drugs on decision-making behavior – paradoxically, that they made the subjects play slower — the study found modafinil improved the players’ performances by an average of 15 percent, methylphenidate by 13 percent, and caffeine by around 9 percent....

...The new study, which was conducted by 13 professors and researchers from several German universities and the University of Stockholm, is titled, “Methylphenidate, modafinil, and caffeine for cognitive enhancement in chess: A double-blind, randomized controlled trial.”

Methylphenidate and modafinil have been around for years – in the case of methylphenidate, since the early 1960s. Both are stimulants. Methylphenidate is commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), while modafinil is often used for narcolepsy and other sleep-related disorders.

Dr. Klaus Lieb, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at the University of Mainz in Germany, and one of the study’s main authors, said that the researchers wanted to see whether people who already were performing at a high level mentally could have their performance enhanced through chemicals.

“There are lots of data showing that a subject in a sleep-deficient state or exhausted people do profit from an enhancer,” Dr. Lieb said. “We were really interested to show whether it is possible to show an enhancement effect, or a hyper performance effect in subjects who already perform at the top level of their cognitive performance.”

Dr. Lieb said that the researchers went into the study with the expectation that the stimulants would not show much benefit. “We primarily thought that it is not possible to enhance high cognitive tasks and were astonished to find such results,” he said.

Chess players were chosen as the subjects in part because several of the researchers play. (Harold Ballo, who works with Dr. Lieb, has a FIDE rating of 1981.) In addition, the fact that computers could be used as sparring partners and their strengths calibrated to equal that of the subjects made chess an ideal laboratory.

The study recruited 39 rated players (40 when it began, but one dropped out). Each player was given a series of neuropsychological tests and questionnaires and then asked to play against computers running the chess-playing program Fritz 12. In their games, the players had 15 minutes total for their moves, the computers had six. Before each set of 10 games, the players were given either methylphenidate, modafinil, caffeine, or a placebo. In total, 3,059 games were played over a several-week period.

The results contained one surprise: The amount of time that the players took in their games when they were on the stimulants increased, so much so that more games were lost on time when players were taking the drugs than when they had taken a placebo. That skewed the results. When those losses were factored out, leaving 2,876 games (or data points) the benefits of the drugs became clearer.

The study’s conclusion addressed the additional thinking time as a critical component of the effect of the stimulants. The authors wrote, “This suggests that neuroenhancers do not enhance the quality of thinking and decision-making per time unit but improve the players’ ability or willingness to spend more time on a decision and hence to perform more thorough calculations.”

The secular world is "insipid and slightly insane" -- Thomas Merton

I had always kind of wondered if he had invented the "Clown Cigarettes" detail. Apparently not.

"Back in the world [after finishing a retreat at a monastery], I felt like a man who had come down from the rare atmosphere of a very high mountain. When I got to Louisville, I had already been up for four hours or so, and my day was getting on towards its noon, so to speak, but I found that everybody else was just getting up and having breakfast and going to work. And how strange it was to see people walking around as if they had something important to do, running after busses, reading the newspapers, lighting cigarettes.

How futile all their haste and anxiety seemed.

My heart sank within me. I thought: “What am I getting into? Is this the sort of a thing I myself have been living in all these years?”

At a street corner, I happened to look up and caught sight of an electric sign, on top of a two-storey building. It read: “Clown Cigarettes.”

I turned and fled from the alien and lunatic street, and found my way into the nearby cathedral, and knelt, and prayed, and did the Stations of the Cross.

Afraid of the spiritual pressure in that monastery? Was that what I had said the other day? How I longed to be back there now: everything here, in the world outside, was insipid and slightly insane. There was only one place I knew of where there was any true order."

— Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Deprived of all knowledge"

"Hey U.S. public high school graduates!  Who wrote The Aeneid? Who said, 'My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country'? Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?"

About half of the high school graduates I meet tell me that the author of Hamlet is "Um...Hamlet?" About a quarter of them can place Brazil on the correct continent. Fewer than one in ten can multiply 12 by 8 in their head.

Something is dreadfully, horribly wrong.

"But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential."

-- President Donald J. Trump, 01/20/2017

A Thought from Propertius -- William Butler Yeats (1919)

SHE might, so noble from head
To great shapely knees,
The long flowing line,
Have walked to the altar
Through the holy images	5
At Pallas Athene’s side,
Or been fit spoil for a centaur
Drunk with the unmixed wine.

Heaven Sent -- The Steeldrivers (2006)

I know our days are heaven sent
Lord knows I know not where they went
Shake my head and I wonder how
I'll ever get to heaven now

 

An angel came one winter dawn
You shoulda seen what she had on
Wind was whistlin' like its rain
She left again just like she came

 

I move around a lot these days
Honky tonks and broad freeways
The same thing that I've always done
But I'm older now and I get tired some

 

Those who think they hold the cards
I send out my kind regards
Those who love to who care
I'll meet you down the road somewhere

 

Songwriters
STAPLETON, CHRIS/WELCH, KEVIN

Public High Schools Produce Empty Vessels

I often give the follow quiz to my college students on the first day of class:

1.       What is the last name of the man most commonly associated with the Theory of Relativity?

2.       What is the name of the author of The Republic?

3.       Of which country is Buenos Aires the capital?

4.       What is the last name of the author of the book 1984?

5.       In what European city is the Parthenon located?

6.       What is the last name of the monk who first studied genetic inheritance in plants?

7.       What is the name of the captain of the Pequod in the book Moby Dick?

8.       What is the name of the ship on which Charles Darwin made his scientific voyage?

9.       What is the last name of the author who wrote The Old Man and the Sea?

10.   What is the last name of the astronomer who in 1543 published his theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun?

They are encouraged to guess if they are not sure of the answer. They are assured that they will be credited for even misspelled responses.

The modal score is typically 2 correct out of 10.

This last round, only 4 out of 38 students got 6 or more items correct.

So much for a generation of "education is about starting a fire, not filling a vessel" and "education is about teaching students how to learn, and not memorizing facts and dates." Yeah, except the only problem is that we have ended up with a generation that knows nothing about its own culture. 

95% of American secondary school students are "educated" in public high schools. The results are disastrous. How about scrapping the entire American system of public secondary education and starting over with something that isn't crap?

Our new President could instantly revolutionize education in this country just giving making elementary and secondary school tuition -- for ANY school, or independent private tutor -- 100% tax deductible.

Leo Strauss: Liberal Education versus "apeirokalia"

"Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: It demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for ‘vulgarity;’ they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful."

 — Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern

The Reading and Writing of Presidents

 

 

NYT, 1/16/17

"Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped — in his life, convictions and outlook on the world — by reading and writing as Barack Obama."

Oh, please. Talk about recency effects!

What about James Garfield ("the professor President" and one of the last Presidents fluent in Ancient Greek), Theodore Roosevelt (who wrote 20 books before becoming President, and then a score more afterwards), the odious but certainly bookish Woodrow Wilson ("the scholar-President"), and even, saints preserve us, Richard Nixon (about whom this anecdote is instructive) -- all of whom most certainly were more fundamentally shaped by "reading and writing," and who wrote many more books, than Mr. Obama.

This New York Times piece is sickening hagiography. Oh for the days when journalists despised and mistrusted politicians!

Declining Quality of U.S. Marine Corps Officers, 1980-2014

 

The GCT has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 20. A score of 120 is roughly equivalent to an IQ of 115.

I wonder what the IQ scores of the Chinese officer class look like? 

 

 

Brookings Institute

 

"Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Marine Corps, Klein and Cancian received data on the GCT scores of all officers—46,000 altogether—from Fiscal Year 1980 to Fiscal Year 2014.

After analyzing the data, the authors uncovered a startling trend: A statistically significant decline in scores over the past 34 years, the magnitude of which, the authors say, “is relevant given the distribution of the scores.” 

Other key findings include:

1. Eighty-five percent of those taking the test in 1980 exceeded a score of 120, which was the cut-off score for officers in World War II. In 2014, only 59 percent exceeded that score.
2. At the upper end of the distribution, 4.9 percent of those taking the test scored above 150 in 1980 compared to 0.7 percent in 2014.
3. Over 34 years, the average score decreased by 6.6 percent, from 130.9 to 122.1.
4. Taken together, the 8.2-point drop in average score represents 80 percent of an entire standard deviation’s decline (from 10.5 in 1980 to 9.6 in 2014). In other words, today’s Marine officers scored nearly an entire standard deviation worse, on average, than their predecessors 34 years ago.Klein and Cancian stress the importance of acknowledging and reversing the decline in officer quality as measured by the GCT score not just for the short-term impacts it has. The junior officers of today will become the generals of tomorrow; if the military does not receive the intelligent young leaders today that it used to receive in the past, it will not have high quality generals in the future.

“What has been the impact of this drop in quality on the effectiveness of the military? Answering this question is beyond the scope of this paper. Given the myriad studies associating performance with intellect, however, it is hard to imagine anything other than a seriously deleterious impact on the quality of officers and, by extension, on the quality and efficacy of the military,” say the authors.

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

Declining IQ scores due to natural selection, says Icelandic study

Source: zerohedge.com

"A study from Iceland is the latest to raise the prospect of a downwards spiral into imbecility. The research from deCODE, a genetics firm in Reykjavik, finds that groups of genes that predispose people to spend more years in education became a little rarer in the country from 1910 to 1975.

The scientists used a database of more than 100,000 Icelanders to see how dozens of gene variants that affect educational attainment appeared in the population over time. They found a shallow decline over the 65 year period, implying a downturn in the natural inclination to rack up [academic] qualifications.

But the genes involved in education affected fertility too. Those who carried more “education genes” tended to have fewer children than others. This led the scientists to propose that the genes had become rarer in the population because, for all their qualifications, better educated people had contributed less than others to the Icelandic gene pool.

Spending longer in education and the career opportunities that provides is not the sole reason that better educated people tend to start families later and have fewer children, the study suggests. Many people who carried lots of genes for prolonged education left the system early and yet still had fewer children that the others. “It isn’t the case that education, or the career opportunities it provides, prevents you from having more children,” said Kari Stefansson, who led the study. “If you are genetically predisposed to have a lot of education, you are also predisposed to have fewer children.”

...

Robert Plomin, a behavioural geneticist at King’s College London said that the paper was a demonstration of how polygenic scores – which measure a person’s genetic strengths and weaknesses – are at the frontline of the DNA revolution. “They have already changed science and will soon affect the clinic and society,” he said.

“Although the effect of the polygenic score for educational attainment on fertility is weak and needs replication in populations other than Iceland, this study is a harbinger for the new directions in research that will be possible as bigger and better polygenic scores come online,” Plomin added."

Morning Song -- Alan Dugan

Look, it’s morning, and a little water gurgles in the tap.
I wake up waiting, because it’s Sunday, and turn twice more
than usual in bed, before I rise to cereal and comic strips.
I have risen to the morning danger and feel proud,
and after shaving off the night’s disguises, after searching
close to the bone for blood, and finding only a little,
I shall walk out bravely into the daily accident.

The Way You Look Tonight -- Fred Astaire (1936)

 

Some day, when I'm awfully low
When the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And the way you look tonight

Oh but, you're charming, with your smile so warm
And your cheeks so soft
There is nothing for me but to love you
Just the way you look tonight

With each word your tenderness grows
Tearin' my fear apart
And that laugh wrinkles your nose
Touches my foolish heart

Charming never, never change
Keep that breathless charm
Won't you please arrange it 'cause I love you
Just the way you look tonight

Just the way you look tonight

Songwriters
KERN, JEROME / FIELDS, DOROTHY

HARKing and P-hacking

HARKing = Hypothesizing After Results are Known.


"Data dredging (also data fishing, data snooping, and p-hacking [cool interactive tool in linked article]) is the use of data mining to uncover patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, without first devising a specific hypothesis as to the underlying causality." [Wikipedia]


Interesting chapter on bias in Randomized Controlled Trails



Publication bias: "a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it. " [Wikipedia]


Meta-analysis of stereotype threat on girls' math scores showing asymmetry typical of publication bias. From Flore, P. C., & Wicherts, J. M. (2015)

Urie Bronfenbrenner: "Somebody's got to be crazy about that kid."

Granta, Lizbeth Zornig Andersen

"I didn’t grow up in an orderly middle class family with cosy Sunday lunches, people laughing and talking. I was brought up in a shabby cottage outside a remote Danish village, with cold water and a lavatory in the back garden. Hot dogs were a special treat on Sundays. My mum and stepdad were always drunk and didn’t work – they lived off benefits. It was not the sort of environment that teaches you universal moral values and ethics.

And yet, I learned – mostly from my three brothers – that people look after one another. We help each other. Even if we don’t have much, even if we wear hand-me-downs to school and dig up raw potatoes for dinner, we still help each other. It’s when life is tough and your back is to the wall that we matter the most to each other.

When I was introduced to the Bible and Christian teachings as a teenager – nobody ever took me to church as a child – I learned the story about the good Samaritan. I knew what that meant already. Where I grew up, if you saw somebody walking along the road and you were fortunate enough to have a car, you stopped and offered them a lift. That was normal – it’s what we all did.

My brothers were removed from our family home one at a time and put into institutions. All three turned to crime and drug abuse. Two are dead, much too young; the third has AIDS. They never had a real chance at life. Not really. The abuse and the beatings they took at home – they protected me from that – crippled their hearts, their minds and their souls.

For some reason I managed to escape and make it through school. I graduated from the University of Copenhagen as an economist, and got a job at Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark. At school I was lucky enough to meet good people, who understood how to coach the aggressive and emotionally disturbed young girl that I was – believe me, it was no easy task. At one institution for especially difficult girls, I met Karen, who saw through my anger and loathing, and was patient enough that I eventually came to trust her. She became my mentor. Today, thirty-four years later, she still is. She was the person who pushed me on to university – I would never have thought it possible without her.

...

Karen always believed that I could do anything. She’s a follower of the developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, who writes: ‘In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. What do I mean by “irrational emotional relationship”? Well, somebody’s got to be crazy about that kid.’ I think that’s Bronfenbrenner’s way of saying ‘love’. Which is a difficult thing to implement in a professional institution where many children would never have experienced it at home. But Karen managed it for me."

Freud pities physicians who dismiss the psychic lives of their patients

There's not a psychologist alive who can write one-tenth as well as Freud (even in translation).

"Nothing takes place in a psychoanalytic treatment but an interchange of words between the patient and the analyst. The patient talks, tells of his past experiences and present impressions, complains, confesses to his wishes and his emotional impulses. The doctor listens, tries to direct the patient’s processes of thought, exhorts, forces his attention in certain directions, gives him explanations and observes the reactions of understanding or rejection which he in this way provokes in him. The uninstructed relatives of our patients, who are only impressed by visible and tangible things—preferably by actions of the sort that are to be witnessed at the cinema—never fail to express their doubts whether “anything can be done about the illness by mere talking.” That, of course, is both a shortsighted and an inconsistent line of thought. These are the same people who are so certain that patients are “simply imagining” their symptoms. Words were originally magic, and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair, by words the teacher conveys his knowledge to his pupils, by words the orator carries his audience with him and determines their judgments and decisions. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men. Thus we shall not depreciate the use of words in psychotherapy, and we shall be pleased if we can listen to the words that pass between the analyst and his patient.

Psychoanalysis is not to be blamed for a difficulty in your relation to it; I must make you yourselves responsible for it, ladies and gentlemen, at least insofar as you have been students of medicine. Your earlier education has given a particular direction to your thinking, which leads far away from psychoanalysis. You have been trained to find an anatomical basis for the functions of the organism and their disorders, to explain them chemically and physically, and to view them biologically. But no portion of your interest has been directed to psychic life, in which, after all, the achievement of this marvelously complex organism reaches its peak. For that reason psychological modes of thought have remained foreign to you. You have grown accustomed to regarding them with suspicion, denying them the attribute of being scientific, and handing them over to laymen, poets, natural philosophers, and mystics. This limitation is without doubt detrimental to your medical activity, since, as is the rule in all human relationships, your patients will begin by presenting you with their mental facade, and I fear that you will be obliged as a punishment to leave a part of the therapeutic influence you are seeking to the lay practitioners, nature curers, and mystics whom you so much despise."

-- Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 

Hey heroin users! Take care not to shoot up in novel locations!

Ozzy and John, like 500,000 other heroin addicts in the US, getting ready for their busy day.

Psychology Today

"K.J. and his wife were heroin addicts. They would shoot up together at home, and they’d been doing it for about four years. When his wife decided it was time to quit, K.J. reluctantly agreed. But the next day he was hanging out with friends, and they bought some heroin together. Because he didn’t want his wife to know, he stopped instead at a public toilet and shot up. He never made it home.

The authorities attributed K.J.’s death to overdose, but Canadian psychologist Shepard Siegel thinks there’s something mysterious about this case (link is external). First, K.J. had taken no more than his usual dose, not enough to kill a seasoned addict whose body had built up significant tolerance. Second, none of K.J.’s friends who’d bought from the same dealer overdosed, so the batch clearly wasn’t tainted or especially potent.

We think of an overdose occurring when a person takes more of a drug than the body can handle. Heroin is an opioid painkiller, but if you take too much, it suppresses the respiratory system. You go to sleep, you stop breathing, and you never wake up.

However, Siegel maintains that K.J. didn’t die because he’d taken too much heroin. Rather, he died because he’d taken the usual amount in an unusual place. Apparently, doing drugs has something in common with investing in real estate—location is key. But why?

First-time drug users tend to start with a small, relatively safe dosage. But as they use the drug over and over again, their body learns to accommodate by adjusting its chemical processes. As tolerance develops, the addict needs a larger dose to get the same effect, and as the body adjusts to the new level, the user boosts the dosage once more. Eventually, the seasoned addict takes as a normal dose an amount that would kill a novice.

Because heroin is such a quick-acting drug, the body needs to prepare itself before the injection takes place. But how does the body know it’s time to ramp up its defenses? It takes its cues from the environment. If you always shoot up at home in the evening with your spouse, then these all become environmental cues that a jolt of heroin is coming, and the body prepares to chemically deal with the drug.

This is why, when K.J. took a similar dose in a familiar environment the day before he died, he was able to handle it. But the next day, when he shot up in an unfamiliar location, his body wasn’t expecting a hit of heroin, and so it wasn’t prepared to process it. The sudden influx of the drug overpowered his system and killed him.

Environmental cues serve as conditioned stimuli signaling to the addict’s body that the drug is coming, and the body prepares itself in response. This works the same way that Pavlov trained dogs to salivate to a bell. Ring a bell, give the dog some food, and it salivates. Repeat this several times, and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell. That is, the bell serves as a cue that food is coming, and the dog’s digestive system responds by preparing for it.

The idea that familiar environmental cues can help protect an addict from overdose may sound far-fetched. But in fact, Siegel argues, there’s considerable evidence to support the hypothesis. For example, several studies have found that the majority of apparent heroin overdoses did not involve lethal levels of the drug in the blood stream."

Siegel, S. (2016). The heroin overdose mystery. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25, 375-379.

Fort Lauderdale Shooter: A Failure of Public Education?

Interesting idea in the article: If only public education wasn't so girl-centric and PC, maybe this guy, and other fatherless boys on the fringe, could have formed an identity that would have been more resistant to radicalization.

American Thinker, Thomas Lipscomb

"As Santiago's story emerges from the usual fog bank of confusion the press and law enforcement conspire to maintain in all these cases, we will see an all too familiar pattern.  A decent enough kid, caught between a background in Puerto Rico and the United States, joins the military but hasn't enough of a sense of self motivation to resist a strong strain of Islamic idealism which appears more attractive than the Army.  At least the Muslims appear not to engage in double-talk, to have clear objectives and a higher purpose in their lives than following orders in a military mission that doesn't make much sense even to those who run it.  Santiago becomes mentally confused and gets kicked out with a general discharge by a smart colonel who senses an opportunity to get rid of a problem in the making before things get worse for the Army.  The colonel sees cases like this all the time these days.

Santiago then gets a security job in Alaska, moves a little over a mile from the only mosque in that state; knocks up a local girl he doesn't marry; and, under the pressure of all this and a new baby and no resources, starts to hear voices in his head he believes are from the U.S. government, trying to get him to look at Islamic terrorist websites.  In a last pathetic call for help, he goes to the FBI, which does its usual CYA look-over and does nothing in this case, as it has done nothing in so many others once it has the paperwork to prove it saw him.  The FBI takes no interest in his access to firearms or perhaps placing him on a watch or no-fly list until some follow-up check on him.

The local police get Santiago a hospital mental checkup, and then he is given some counseling.  Then he drops out of sight of his worried family.  Something is happening

Friday afternoon, we found out what he finally chosen, on Epiphany, as the ultimate meaning in his confused life."

The Magi -- Louise Glück (b. 1943)

Adoration of the Magi -- Gentile da Fabriano (1423)

Toward the world's end, through the bare
beginnings of winter, they are traveling again.
How many winters have we seen it happen,
watched the same sign come forward as they pass
cities sprung around this route their gold
engraved on the desert, and yet
held our peace, these
being the Wise, come to see at the accustomed hour
nothing changed: roofs, the barn
blazing in darkness, all they wish to see.

Night and Day -- Fred Astaire (1932)

 

Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom
When the jungle shadows fall
Like the tick, tick, tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall

 

Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops
When the summer shower is through
So a voice within me keeps repeating you, you, you

Night and day, you are the one

 

Only you beneath the moon or under the sun
Whether near to me or far
It's no matter, darling, where you are
I think of you

Night and day, day and night, why is it so
That this longing for you follows wherever I go?
In the roaring traffic's boom
In the silence of my lonely room

I think of you
Night and day, night and day
Under the hide of me
There's an, oh, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me

And its torment won't be through
'Till you let me spend my life making love to you
Day and night, night and day

Night and day
Under the hide of me
There's an, oh, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me
And its torment won't be through
'Till you let me spend my life making love to you
Day and night, night and day

 

Songwriters
PORTER, COLE