Donald Trump on his pending 2nd term economic policies,

sort of (between innumerable crass pre-adolescent, unresponsive barbs—updated to include his Oct 17th NYC Al Smith Dinner “speech”).

   

Draw your own conclusions.

The equal opportunity insulter.

 

APROPOS, NEW BOOK JUST RELEASED 

Bill Adair, Pulitzer Prize winner, journalism professor, and founder of Politifact, presents an eye-opening and engaging history of political liars and a vision for how to make them stop.

 

Bill Adair knows a lie when he hears one. Since 2008, the site he founded, PolitiFact, has been the go-to spot for media members and political observers alike to seek the truth in an increasingly deceitful world. Since the site’s launching, politics’ tenuous relationship with the truth has only gotten weaker—and weirder.

In this groundbreaking book, Adair reveals how politicians lie and why. Relying on dozens of candid interviews with politicians, political operatives, and experts in misinformation, Adair reveals the patterns of lying, why Republicans do it more, and the consequences for our democracy. He goes behind the scenes to describe several episodes that reveal the motivations and tactics of the nation’s political liars, show the impact they have on people’s lives, and demonstrate how the problem began before Donald Trump and will continue after he’s gone. Adair examines how Republicans have tried to change the landscape to allow their lying by intimidating the news media, people in academia and government, and tech companies.

An award-winning journalist and pioneer in political fact-checking, Adair is uniquely able to tell this story. With humor and insight, this remarkable book unpacks the sad state of our politics, but also, provides solutions to put an end to American political deceit once and for all. [Amazon blurb]

This book just came to my attention via a Substack post.  Of topical relevance to some recent prior posts. (See here as well.)

FRIDAY UPDATE

CLICK

Imagine our surprise.

 

MORE BILL ADAIR

 

MR. PREMIER PANTS-ON-FIRE, OCT 17TH, 2024

 

 

Ahhh... "The Daze of Our Lives."

 

TANGENTIALLY, AS IT GOES TO LYING

 

Saw this in my SciAm:

Donald Trump claims to have "the best words." But, what of his thoughts? (Objection, Your Honor! Assumes facts not in evidence!)

 

Goes to so-called "Deliberation Science" (and perhaps accompanying tech). Only part of human "thinking" rises to the level of rational "deliberation," seems to me.

I have yet another scientist to check out.

…We can measure blood flow changes when people engage in different tasks and ask questions about whether the two systems are distinct or overlapping—for example, whether your language regions overlap with regions that help you solve math problems. These brain-imaging tools are really good for these questions. But before I could ask these questions, I needed a way to robustly and reliably identify language areas in individual brains, so I spent the first bunch of years of my career developing tools to do this.

And once we have a way of finding these language regions, and we know that these are the regions that, when damaged in adulthood, lead to conditions such as aphasia, we can then ask whether these language regions are active when people engage in various thinking tasks. So you can come into the lab, and I can put you in the scanner, find your language regions by asking you to perform a short task that takes a few minutes—and then I can ask you to do some logic puzzles or sudoku or some complex working memory tasks or planning and decision-making. And then I can ask whether the regions that we know process language are working when you’re engaging in these other kinds of tasks. There are now dozens of studies that we’ve done looking at all sorts of nonlinguistic inputs and tasks, including many thinking tasks. We find time and again that the language regions are basically silent when people engage in these thinking activities…

 

Wonder what Dr. Nita Farahany might have to say on these issues?

 

BACK TO LYING...

FOREWORD
Ever since philosophers speculated about a “cerebroscope,” a mythical device that would display a person’s thoughts on a screen, social scientists have been looking for tools to expose the workings of human nature. During my career as an experimental psychologist, different ones have gone in and out of fashion, and I’ve tried them all—rating scales, reaction times, pupil dilation, functional neuroimaging, even epilepsy patients with implanted electrodes who were happy to while away the hours in a language experiment while waiting to have a seizure.

Yet none of these methods provides an unobstructed view into the mind. The problem is a savage tradeoff. Human thoughts are complex propositions; unlike Woody Allen speed-reading War and Peace, we don’t just think “It was about some Russians.” But propositions in all their tangled multidimensional glory are difficult for a scientist to analyze. Sure, when people pour their hearts out, we apprehend the richness of their stream of consciousness, but monologues are not an ideal dataset for testing hypotheses. On the other hand, if we concentrate on measures that are easily quantifiable, like people’s reaction time to words, or their skin response to pictures, we can do the statistics, but we’ve pureed the complex texture of cognition into a single number. Even the most sophisticated neuroimaging methodologies can tell us how a thought is splayed out in 3-D space, but not what the thought consists of… [Forward, Steve Pinker]

From my Kindle stash. Interesting resource. Below, another of my Kindle reads:

Liar, Liar, Everywhere
She is pregnant. Raising a child takes a lot of time and energy, yet she is short of both. Homeless, she has no choice but to find somebody else to take care of her baby—for free. It’s not easy, but she knows how to pull it off. She scouts around and spots a cozy house in a quiet neighborhood. The young wife of the family looks caring and has just given birth to a new baby, so is a perfect choice as a surrogate. She hides herself and waits in the vicinity, keeping watch on the house. Opportunity presents itself when the new mother takes a short trip to get some food. She sneaks in and switches the baby with her own. Then she heartlessly throws the victim’s infant in a dump.

What you have just read is a cold-blooded murder case, one that takes place in nature when a female cuckoo bird sneaks her egg into a warbler’s nest. The cuckoo is cheating, though the scenario doesn’t quite fit Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the verb “cheat”: to “act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage.” Cheating in humans usually involves an element of intention. In the larger biological world, however, establishing intent is neither easy nor necessary. For biologists, as long as organisms act to favor themselves at the expense of others—especially in situations when cooperation is expected—they are cheating.

This book is about the behavior, evolution, and natural history of cheating. Although, in common usage, the word “cheating” is often interchangeable with “lying” and “deceiving,” the three words differ in connotation, nonetheless. Furthermore, lying and deceiving involve two very different biological processes…

Sun, Lixing. The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World (pp. 1-2). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

BRIEF 2015 REMEMBRANCE

I am reminded of professor Harry G. Frankfurter's delightful book "On Bullshit."

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who—with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth—dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right. 

Yet there is something more to be said about this. However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity that resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated, evidently, with simple carelessness or inattention to detail.

Frankfurt, Harry G. (2009-01-10). On Bullshit (pp. 23-24). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

 Yeah.

 

OFF-TOPIC PERSONAL ERRATUM

 

 

I am a Tennessee grad. My wife is Alabama 1972. 3rd Saturday October is always fractious here.

Stay tuned...

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