The ink blots say “recovery”

Is it just me, or are psychologists raging against Wikipedia stuck in 1938?; Green shoots my ass; AND: Is bandwagon economic nationalism giving you a headache, too, Thomas Walkom?

Actress Lorraine Bracco, as a certain Jersey mob boss’s shrink. | ABC News

Poor psychologists. First, Dr. Phil embarrasses the profession by trying to corner a hairless Britney into admitting she’s a bad mom. Then, uh, this. Now, shrinks with all kinds of couches have their stereotypical mustaches in a bunch over Wikipedia.

A (non-psychologist) doctor for Saskatchewan posted the images from the original Rorschach test on the user-edited encyclopedia page about the psychologists’ tool, and the professionals are complaining that it’ll allow patients to game the test and render its results meaningless.

To psychologists, to render the Rorschach test meaningless would be a particularly painful development because there has been so much research conducted — tens of thousands of papers, by Dr. Smith’s estimate — to try to link a patient’s responses to certain psychological conditions. Yes, new inkblots could be used, these advocates concede, but those blots would not have had the research — “the normative data,” in the language of researchers — that allows the answers to be put into a larger context.

So let’s get this straight. After almost 90 years, psychologists say they’re still tied down by the data from one test administered in one way—with the original 10 images? They haven’t gained any generalized notions about what particular kinds of shapes cause such-and-such reactions, and why?

Sounds like psychology is the last bastion of operationalism, a grand old theory back in the day, but slightly laughable as a scientific method today. Operationalism is the idea that the only thing we can ever get out of science is the strict results of tests. No grand theorizing allowed. No thinking big. Just adding up all the observations and making deductions. In extreme cases, the theory (don’t use that word!!) says the measurements rendered from particular instruments are the only things that matter. In other words, operationalism pretty useless to any progressive academic field that is based on the idea of understanding the world through building a model of it and testing the model with experimentation.

Which makes the shrinks’ legal threats to Wikipedia even more ridiculous.

And, more fundamentally, the psychologists object whenever diagnostic tools fall into the hands of amateurs who haven’t been trained to administer them. “Our ethics code that governs the behavior of psychologists talks about maintaining test security,” Steve J. Breckler, the executive director for science at the American Psychological Association, said in an interview. “We wouldn’t be in favor of putting the plates out where anyone can get hold of them.”

Because you wouldn’t want images of symmetrical ink blots to fall into the wrong hands.

The shoots are always greener...

I’m not an economist, so when I see Paul Krugman musing at the possibility of a shitty almost-recovery, I can’t do much to evaluate the analysis—except by looking at how bad the coverage of the so-called recovery has been. The reporting often feels more like uncritical trusting of the experts, complete with rosy glasses and Wall Street on speed dial—especially on TV.

So here’s the argument (which has only in the last few weeks been met with broad skepticism in the MSM): Wall Street and Bay Street are going gangbusters, and economic indicators, while not glowing, are showing slower decline.

Meanwhile, job growth is negative and is showing no signs of recovery, spending rates are sending signals that only puerile optimists would see as positive, and banks still aren’t lending. I’m no expert, but I think that means there’s no basis for short-term optimism—unless you got a few billion dollars in TARP money, like these guys—and that it’s only a matter of time before the banks start taking hits again.

So when the experts still infatuated with finance say "green shoots," I’ve trained myself to think "bullshit."

Bad accounting, Nortel-style

From Thomas Walkom in The Star, writing about the Nortel deal and cries for economic nationalism:

The key to all of this, apparently, is that Nortel owns patents that the Waterloo-based company Research in Motion wants. Yet for reasons that are still unclear, RIM chose not to bid for assets, including these patents, that were auctioned off under bankruptcy proceedings last week.

It seems that RIM developed a last-minute distaste for the rules governing that auction. Not surprisingly, therefore, the patents were bought by someone else, the Swedish firm Ericsson.

Now Duncan wants Ottawa to veto the Ericsson sale so that RIM can buy the patents it didn’t bid for when they were up for auction in the first place.

Confused? So am I.

The arguments for making this deal—and others like it—some kind of national priority are always nebulous and sinister—something along the lines of "we’re losing great Canadian companies" without telling us what that entails, i.e., lost jobs, lost competitiveness, lost tax revenue, etc.

Aren’t these huge firms in it for themselves? Since when is having a multinational corporation based locally all that different from having a large foreign company, like Toyota, set up shop here? Wouldn’t it depend on the company? Was Nortel ever looking out for national interests? Is RIM? I’m open to persuasion, but I’m not getting any with the arguments I’m hearing. End.