Grantcoulson's Blog

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

        Social Myth Equals Unquestioned Faith

    Extra ecclesiam nulla salus–No salvation is possible outside the Church.

    As Peter Drucker tells us, "any government activity almost at once becomes moral. . . . They come to be seen as symbols and sacred rather than as utilities and means to an end."

    "Wilson told The Tennessean that her 7-year-old daughter was the big reason to finally finish, saying, ‘I certainly don’t want her to think you can be this successful without an  education." Gretchen Wilson, multimillionaire singing star, on getting her high school equivalent degree. The logic of this eludes me. "I know you must have A to get B, but I got B without A, so to demonstrate the truth of the statement, I have to get A."

    Government schools are presumed to provide everything necessary for a happier life including producing the kind of student necessary to "engage in democratic processes". This assumption is accepted without questioning or data support. None of these pretend reasons for government schooling counts as evidence.

    Education continues to be supported by assumptive knowledge, knowledge without empirical support, by such statements as this: "Everybody knows education is where the real competition takes place these days, because for both nations and families the key to success in the modern information-based economy is educational attainment." As I will show, hysterical, apocalyptic statements such as this are entirely without merit. The key to economic prosperity is entrepreneurship,  productivity and product improvement. If these are allowed, economic progress ensues. People tend to educate themselves as needed.

     Success in most enterprises, whether the person is an entrepreneur or works for others, is based on knowledge so specialized it cannot be taught in general education. The reason that education is given pride of place by socialists is that it is a "collective" (government) enterprise which, by definition, must be superior to the unguided efforts of individuals. Like all social myths, the opposite is true. Education is sold as a "social good", one that benefits the whole of society, so that everyone must bear the cost. The same argument is made for basic research. Everyone benefits, so all must pay. Designation of an activity as a "public good" means, "Grab the money shovel." The other assumption for both is that nothing would get done if public financing were not available. Both of these assumptions are wrong. Public education, and basic science research get lots of money after society can afford them. Hence, both are the result  and not the cause of economic development. The "mechanics" who produced the machines of the Industrial Revolution, like those who produced the revolution in personal computers, were self-taught and owed nothing to public-supported academies. Watt, the improver, not inventor, of the steam engine, worked at a university, as a handyman.

Cheerio and ttfn

Grant Coulson

A local community college was "locked down" when a rifle barrel was seen protruding from a gym bag. It was later determined that the offending object was a camera tripod (or three rifle barrels). When school opened the next day, "trauma counselors" were available to students, presumably to help them get over "post traumatic tripod disorder". Possibly, the students no longer fear tripods, although the data on "trauma counseling" indicate that people do just as well on their own,  and usually better, even when the trauma is real. That doesn’t stop "trauma teams" from arriving at the scenes of disasters where they’re usually ignored by most people who get through difficulties on their own. The reach of the social sciences is wide, but effectiveness is narrow and shallow and application, peculiar, faddish, and, almost always, useless.

What most people think they know about the social sciences comes from entertainment masquerading as information or from government-decreed experts masquerading as experts. We hear about multiple personalities, anti-drug programs,  recovered memories, dramatic interventions, and cures of the month without cease. Most of  this valueless junk is disseminated by relentless self-promoters, government workers who have no obligation to be effective, entertainment pretending to be reality, or worse, by all three together.

The social sciences have much to offer in terms of faster, better and more certain learning, alleviation of some kinds of suffering, improvement in working conditions and happier circumstances in general. These benefits are seldom seen because contingencies almost always prevent effective programs being used, although thousands of ineffective programs, with millions of participants,  are used without restraint.

"The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail (and political fashion, he could have added), is the one that must rule all observation." Adam Smith. Adam Smith is quoted often in this book because he said it earlier, and usually better, than the rest of us. Observations and laws from long ago are as useful then, as now because, as Edna St. Vincent Millay has pointed out, "It is not true that life is one damn thing after another–It’s one damn thing over and over." In spite of promises about "The New Soviet Man" or the "New National Socialist German",  and other Utopian hoaxes, Human Nature has not changed in the more than 200 hundred years since Adam Smith wrote,  nor will it. The main motivation of humans, again quoting Smith is, "The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things towards improvement…" It is the conditions, or contingencies, under which this striving occurs which determine whether the activity results in useful activity or the churn given so much credence by those to whom forced perfection is just out of reach. If one wants to test the progress toward the new kind of human produced by government intervention, interact with a few civil servants and find that most are neither civil nor particularly good at serving.

As Ayn Rand said, ""For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors – between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." Ayn’s analysis comes from a different direction, but she is acknowledging the reality of all planning that the "…uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition…" overrides everything.

The theory that rules this book (Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope), and human behavior,  is the Law of Contingencies, aka as the Law of Consequences, which states that behavior is strongly influenced, sometimes solely determined,  by its consequences, especially in the long term. This Law, may be characterized, without conceit or exaggeration , as the overriding principle of Human Nature. Utopian notions of the Perfect Society, even while they have distorted and abused the Law of Contingencies,  have ignored its importance, thereby producing the many Perfect Failures cluttering, but neither illuminating nor changing history. The Tragedy of Utopia is that academics and politicians believe that it can be achieved and, most distressingly, that they know how to achieve it. This gives them permission to engage in the most bizarre coercive behaviors. The Law of Contingencies, on the other hand,  can absorb the greatest number of facts and has persisted in doing so, through many changes of opinion, detail, and fashion. The ten-year old parachuting from a third floor balcony with an umbrella can pretend to ignore the Law of Gravity, but the Law of Gravity will not ignore him and, if the umbrella catches enough wind, it will reverse candle. Governments routinely ignore the Laws of Economics, but the Laws of Economics must pay attention to their policies and show the greater part to be daft. Similarly, although people can routinely pretend to ignore the Law of Contingencies, the Law of Contingencies will not ignore them. Incorrect contingencies lie at the heart of every inefficiency. The trick is to arrange situations so that the Law of Contingencies can do its useful work. One should always ask, in any situation, "What are the incentives and how do they work?".

Cheerio and ttfn.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H. L. Mencken.

This has only a tangential relation to the social sciences, but it is part of the argument. The G20 and the United Nations are currently meeting to consider “Climate Change” (Global Warming has passed from favor), the devil Carbon Dioxide receiving most of the attention.

Since no century has passed without “Climate Change”, they’re on safe grounds for the data, but not the “solution”. If the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere is a one hundred story building, the amount from man-made activity is equal to the depth of the linoleum on one floor.

The current Cap and Trade bills, passed or pending, are analogous to trading the rights to name leprechauns.

The panic of 1920-1921 was the last time the government was smart enough to do nothing.

Cheerio and ttfn.

I will develop three ideas:

The first is the absolute necessity of using incentives to understand human behavior.

The second is a set of programs which produce outstanding results in a variety of areas such as education, rehabilitation and therapy.

The third is the reason that these programs are rarely used and why nonsensical programs prevail.

As in all human endeavors, successful analysis requires the separation of observation from conclusion, intention from result, and assumption from fact. The first step is shedding standard assumptions. Television, newspapers and popular fiction  show spectacular examples of the extraordinary work done by practitioners of the social sciences. Profilers identify serial killers who get their just desserts. Teachers, using incredible insight and humanity, work miracles with children from hopeless backgrounds. Police officers go through a traumatic experience and sort it out with a therapist, and, if they don’t, must kill themselves. Psychiatrists delve deeply within the psyches of wrongdoers and confused people to come up with insights which astound and heal. Counsellors make wise, court-mandated decisions about custody for children of divorcing couples. Criminals are rehabilitated by insight and understanding. Alcoholics are saved through dramatic interventions and a lifetime of meetings. Adult angst is eliminated by uncovering and dealing with, childhood trauma. Depression, addiction, and marital strife are corrected by the ministrations of insightful and wise mental health experts, bringing unique solutions to unique problems. Alas, this is fiction. In this dark night of hypothetically scripted nonsense there are a few, very small, glimmers of real accomplishment, each like the faint lamplight of a remote farmhouse. In most applications, effectiveness is as far from reality as the unicorn from the horse or stage dialogue from real life.

And, for a musical interlude check out:

http://timhawkins.net/video.php

Cheers and ttfn.

I’ll talk about psychology, incentives, politics, the relations among them and the appalling state of the social sciences that comes from the interconnections or hopeless lack thereof. I’ll be quoting from a book I’m writing, Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope: How the Social Sciences Look Busy Without Accomplishing Anything: Wherein the Iron Law of Contingencies is used to Explain the Consistent, and Embarrassing, Failure of the Social Sciences aka Shadow Dancing or Lotsa Walnuts–No Pea or All Hat–No Cattle. This blog will start out in a plain brown wrapper and may get fancier if I find some graphs worth posting, but concepts need little wrapping or updating, for that matter.

    I’ll talk about Direct Instruction, Precision Teaching,Community Reinforcement and other superior methods in education and therapy ignored in most usage. Economics will get more than passing mention because psychology and economics share the attributes of being counterintuitive and, as a consequence, constantly misapplied and misunderstood. Politics will get a look because almost all of the useless applications are a result of politics.

    I’ll end this with a quote and two stories about incentives.

    "We [should] heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack: "If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason." This maxim is a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives…", (emphasis added) Charlie Munger, financial wizard and partner of Warren Buffet, financial wizard. It’s too late to tell Ben, but I would amend his injunction to read, "…appeal to interest and not to reason or principle." Interests, or incentives, usually win. Most people want to maximize return and minimize output. More eloquently, the old German proverb says, "Whose bread I eat, his song I sing." If you remove the incentive for quality, you remove quality.

    "In the late 18th century prisoners were shipped from England to Australia. Captains were paid a specified amount for each prisoner who boarded their ships in England. Unfortunately, the death rate on these voyages was very high, with a sample from trips between 1790 and 1792 showing a death rate of 12 percent, and an appalling 37 percent on one trip. Most of the fatalities were clearly the result of overcrowding and poor nutrition. There were many pleas for ship captains to obey their moral obligations and provide humane treatment to the prisoners. But these pleas had no noticeable effect on the death rate. Finally, someone suggested improving the incentives instead of trying to improve the ship captains. How? By paying them on the basis of how many prisoners walked off their boats in Australia. The improvement was dramatic. Three ships carrying a total of 422 prisoners made the trip from England to Australia in 1793, and only one prisoner died en route. None of the ship captains became better people, but in response to better incentives they acted as if they had." Peter Geddes,  Bozeman Daily Chronicle, October 13, 2004.

    "I remember, as a small boy in knee britches, going with my father to hear an address given by the Honorable Stephen Pace, then Congressman from the old Georgia 12th District. It was on the banks of the Ocmulgee River. There was a   barbecue, and citizens, especially farmers from all the counties, gathered – this was before the second World War.

    It seemed that someone in the Congress had introduced a bill that would give the farmers some money provided they did something. The Congressman vigorously opposed it. I have no idea what it was, because I was watching a "dirt dobber" making a ball of mud. The Congressman snapped me back to attention, however, when he said "I’m going to tell you a true story about the wild hogs that once  lived about forty miles down river. Years ago," the Congressman said, "in the great Horse-Shoe Bend down the   river, there lived a drove of wild hogs. Where they came from no one knew, but they survived floods, fires, freezes, droughts and hunters. The greatest compliment a man could pay to a dog was to say that he had fought the hogs in   Horse-Shoe Bend and returned alive. Occasionally a pig was killed either by a dog or a gun as a conversation piece for years to come."

    "Finally, a one-gallused man came by the country store on the river road, and asked the whereabouts of these wild hogs. He drove a one horse wagon, had an axe, some quilts, a lantern, some corn and a single barrel shot gun. He was a  slender, slow moving patient man – he chewed his tobacco deliberately and spat  very seldom. Several months later he came back to the same store and asked for help to bring out the wild hogs. He stated that he had them all in a pen over in the  swamp. Bewildered farmers, dubious hunters and store-keepers all gathered in the heart of Horse Shoe Bend to view the captive hogs." 

  
    "It was all very simple," said the one-gallus man, "First, I put out some   corn. For three weeks they would not eat it. Then, some of the young ones   grabbed an ear and ran off into the thicket. Soon, they were all eating it.   Then, I commenced building a pen around the corn, a little higher each day.   When I noticed that they were all waiting for me to bring the corn and had stopped grubbing for acorns and roots, I built the trap door. Naturally,"   said the patient man, "they raised quite a ruckus when they seen they were   trapped, but I can pen any animal on the face of the earth if I can just get   him to depend on me for a free hand-out." J.G. McDaniel, M.D.

     Difficile est saturam non scribere. "It is difficult", wrote Juvenal, "not to write satire.", referring to the general foibles of mankind. Juvenal would have found it more difficult not to write satire about what happens in contemporary social sciences. Later in vintage, but less elegant, "When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show.",George Carlin

Cheerio and ttfn.

I’m Grant Coulson, Psychologist, born on April 12, 1940, less than a month before von Manstein’s right hook through the Low Countries. This blog is about psychology (Psychology is not rocket science–it’s much more difficult.) and other social sciences such as education, psychiatry and social work. There is a chasm between what we know works and what we do. I’ll only point out the useless and harmful to illustrate the useful. We all know we shouldn’t brush our teeth with a sledgehammer or pound fence stakes with a toothbrush so I’ll include the useful. All of the wrong usages are explained with a simple concept contained in the blog name, but I’ll develop this argument.

Cheerio and ttfn.