(The Guardian; Science)
Dean Burnett
The 2015 election campaigns are under way, and it’s clear that doing or saying unintelligent things is no barrier to political success. Unfortunately, there are several psychological mechanisms that lead to apparent idiots being elected into powerful positions. . . . So, for the record, not all politicians are idiots…. But plenty are. The US seem particularly afflicted with them; Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, these people
were/are contenders for the presidency. And the archetype George W Bush WAS the president. For 8 YEARS. The man whose idiotic musings managed to sustain businesses had a nuclear arsenal at his command. . . . Confident people are more convincing. This is has been demonstrated in many studies. …. And politicians are clearly aware of it, hence all the media training and PR management; any politician that doesn’t come across as assured and confident gets (metaphorically) destroyed. So confidence is important in politics. … However, the Dunning-Kruger effect reveals that less-intelligent people are usually incredibly confident. More intelligent people, by contrast, aren’t at all….
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| Dead creep |
Oh, Schuller was a legendary asshole, a pathology he always masked with his grin and grandfatherly ways. He gleefully engaged in the anti-commie witchhunts of the 1960s, a past that he tried to mask long afterwards. He hobnobbed with corrupt politicians like Ronald Reagan, former Congressman James Utt, and OC's felonious sheriff, Mike Carona. Waitresses in South County knew that Schuller was a bad tipper and a terrible customer. Remember that incident where Schuller abused an airline stewardess, and he claimed he was trying to give her a blessing, which led to the Rev getting a misdemeanor? Asshole.
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| The New Yorker, 1926 |
