“It Has Come to My Attention…” How Institutional Complaints Procedures are Being Weaponized (article in Quillette)

Oh, yes I think so. Last time I think it was Harry and the veterans? Before that it was his dad or brother - I forget. And William has just been made an honorary fellow of Royal Society of Medicine by Wessely. (Don't tell anyone but anyone can be a 'fellow' of the RSM by paying £200 a year or something.)

 

"Adam Perkins is a Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at Kings College"

I pity his students. Although presumably if they miss a lecture they can just watch an hour of Fox News to make up for it

 

Looking him up is quite a hoot.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/educati...ondon-accused-no-platforming-itsown-lecturer/

Apparently his book was subtitled 'how state benefits affect personality'. Lovely guy. He thinks people on benefits should not have so many children.

 

'I love it when people who agree with me, the emperor, or when people who come and hang on my every word unquestionably because I am publicly speaking after putting out public notices, but I hate it when people use the same "diary" to come along and disagree with me. Bastards like that can often see I am naked'

 

I wonder if this is a genetic thing. You know, children of people who believe that if it is their football only they are allowed to score goals tend to believe this even more?

 

yes,
https://www.s4me.info/threads/teleg...ss-of-cambridge-bps-back-pain-treatment.3124/
posts
i dont think this was the first time though... i seem to remember something to do with his work with the MOD & Combat Stress charity, maybe when he got his knighthood?

ETA i know what you mean about being out of touch with current events WillowJ, i just glance at the headlines on the BBC news site whenever I'm up to it.

 

This is a great article @James. Thoroughly recommend it!

 

Niiiiice:

 

His thesis is in the opposite direction, that policies meant to help people can instead lead to undesirable personality traits in populations. Look, I can't comment on the quality of his research, or on his motivation for doing it, but there are legitimate lines of inquiry here if done rigorously and in good faith.

This applies to us as noted by a certain goof who says things like 'they shut you down when you try to study aspects of ME/CFS that they don't like'. He's not totally wrong because it is not illegitimate for researchers to examine to what extent ME/CFS is caused or perpetuated by psychological factors. It's not a stupid question. If it had turned out that it was a variant of PTSD or depression or something, we all would have been glad to know that. It's about all of the junk after that which has been a ten-course meal of bad-faith pseudoscience which has hindered actual progress in understanding and treating the condition and that's what we are right to tee off on.

 

Yes, true, what I saw in that article wasn't about personality at all, but rather attitudes (although it is concerning that he uses the terms interchangeably). He thinks welfare recipients should be discouraged from having children.

I've been thinking more on the "stupid question" issue. What makes a stupid question? Its one where the assumptions implicit in the question itself doom the answer from the start. The question incorporates an implicit assumption, which, if not correct, would make it meaningless (e.g., When did you stop beating your wife?).

I've become increasingly concerned about how researchers treat psychological variables as almost factual, when they so aren't. They're messy ideas.

Take the question "Is depression comorbid with MS?". That question makes assumptions about the status of the concept of depression - that it is a real valid and coherent illness, that can be measured transparently, and that it can occur independently of other illnesses (otherwise, we couldn't legitimately look for comorbidity). In reality, you can't actually measure depression, what you do is measure a bunch of self reported complaints that someone decided decades ago might all be linked together and be indicators of this vague and quite primitive concept about feeling low and sad.

Now let's rephrase that question without those assumptions. Replacing the word "depression" with what it really is we're measuring. It becomes "Do people diagnosed with MS self-report more sadness, fatigue and loss of pleasure than those without MS?". You see by avoiding the pitfalls associated with treating the psychological construct as a "fact", we have made the question sensible.

I do feel that a lot of the questions psychologists ask are quite stupid (and I am a psychologist!).

 

I agree with you but its more then this, on top of symptoms linked together and called a disease is the fact that many think mental symptoms causes other diseases, instead of researching does ME/CFS cause depression its does depression cause ME/CFS. A multi layered house of cards...

 

Nicely put @Woolie .
I've been trying to make some sense of what depression really is because it is such a specter over discussions of ME. It does seem to defy useful heuristic classification. In any case, I recall being in a doctor's office, having just had a bad relapse, filling in a questionnaire regarding sadness, etc. The doctor tallied up the numbers and was like 'you have depression!'. I responded to the effect of "I'm not depressed, I'm sad and pissed off because something is terribly wrong. I don't hate myself, and fun things still sound fun - if I could do them. That's the opposite of depression." But, the (totally arbitrary) numbers added up, so it was fact regardless of it actually making any sense. Boggles the mind that something so facile could be seen as so authoritative. I think you put it well to say you really have to spell out what you actually mean by something ('self-reported feelings of [x,y,z]' as opposed to 'depression') or else you can get carried away in dumb directions.

I've had some concerns about 'personality' as well because of the Jordan Peterson craze. I'm worried some people will take as gospel that some body of personality research is so ironclad, clear, and profound when in reality it is probably nuanced and limited in what it can really tell us. But that's pretty off-topic.

Well, anyway, I guess we are in agreement... ...for now

 

Perkins claims that only renumerated employment counts as 'work', so things like child rearing, volunteering, caring etc are not 'work' despite good claims that they are work, just unpaid work.

His personality factors that are the welfare 'trait' are 'low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness.'

He used data from the ONS on workless households to make some points. (How many points I don't know.) The obvious limitation (to me at least) is that a workless household is only workless at the time of the information collected. It tells us little about whether they were workless before or after the collection. It also doesn't even tell us how many children are in the family, because for obvious reasons, children age, and thus move from being classed as children to adults.

Academics who's studies he used have pointed out that he interpreted their studies wrongly https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/blog/2...-reform-affect-fertility-evidence-from-the-uk

He also said that welfare benefits are too generous, and incentivize these welfare traits. His solution is that benefit payments should be limited until a birth rate decline is seen in workless households. Quite how making children living in poor households poorer through no fault of their own is ethical, I don't know.

His comparisons of mice to poor people are 'interesting' although I'm not sure what mice neurons have to do with my own. I'm not aware of a mice welfare state either, although I one day hope to see them fight with each other for a fair share of cheese in accordance with their abilities and needs.

He also comes out with such gems as “If you’re not conscientious in work situations, you’re not going to be conscientious in others, like managing your income to benefit your kids,” which I find personally amusing as having little to do with the world of work that I inhabited. Maybe he thinks that everyone enjoys their jobs?

Statisticians may question why you don't include childless workless households in your calculations that show the likelihood of workless households having children because of the welfare state.

Sociologists might also find the assumptions that the US and UK are so similar that you can extrapolate from one to the other questionable, but that would just be disagreeableness, which is a terrible pathology.

https://twitter.com/user/status/694839978392682496

 

Quite! That's the problem in a nutshell. A soon as you have a label for some psychological construct, regardless of whether its a good or bad one, it takes on a life of its own and becomes a "fact".

Yea, its worrying. Many psychologists believe personality is an empirical science. Because the most widely accepted models draw on factor analyses that help us clarify what aspects of personality are independent of one another. But they forget that its us who came up with the questions, so the entire enterprise is loaded right from the start with assumptions about what is and isn't personality.

There's also the problem that people assume personality is fixed, and there's good evidence now that it isn't.

 

Okay, fine @Luther Blissett . On the strength of your evidence I proclaim that this guy is a turd. But nobody can say I went down without putting up a spirited fight.

 

This is the point, he despises anyone on benefits, sees them as less human then himself and others and wants to use a veneer of science to justify punishing the poor till they behave the way he wants or disappear, which ever happens first.

 

Yes, happened to me too. That's when I decided never to fill out those questionnaires again. It was kind of a fixation on the questionnaire, nothing would change the mind.

 

So people end up on welfare because they're slovenly and disagreeable? Wow.

There was that old music hall song:

It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the pleasure
Ain't it all a bloomin' shame?

Quite