Ein Passant fragt: „Wo geht’s denn hier zum Bahnhof?“ Es antwortet ihm ein:

Gesprächspsychotherapeut: „Sie wissen nicht, wo der Bahnhof ist und das macht Sie nicht nur traurig, sondern auch ein Stück weit wütend.“

Verhaltenstherapeut: „Heben Sie zuerst den rechten Fuß und schieben Sie ihn vor. Setzen Sie ihn auf. Sehr gut. Super!“

Psychoanalytiker: „Sie meinen diese dunkle Höhle, wo immer was Langes rein und raus fährt?“

Familientherapeut: „Was glauben Sie, denkt Ihre Schwester, was Ihre Eltern fühlen, wenn die hören, dass Sie zum Bahnhof wollen?“

Provokativtherapeut: „Ich wette, da werden Sie nie drauf kommen!“

Lösungsorientierter Therapeut: „Gab es schon mal die Ausnahme, dass Sie den Bahnhof gefunden haben? Was hatten Sie da anders gemacht?“

NLPler: „Stell dir vor, du bist schon im Bahnhof — welche Schritte hast du zuvor getan?“

Gestalttherapeut: „Du, lass es voll zu, dass du zum Bahnhof willst.“

Psychodramatherapeut: „Zum Bahnhof. Fein. Das spielen wir mal durch. Geben Sie mir Ihren Hut, ich geben Ihnen meine Jacke und dann…“

Hypnotherapeut: „Schließen Sie die Augen. Entspannen Sie sich. Fragen Sie ihr Unterbewusstsein, ob es Ihnen bei der Suche behilflich sein will.“

Tiefenpsychologe: „Sie wollen verreisen?“

Pädagoge: „Ich weiß natürlich, wo der Bahnhof ist. Aber ich denke, dass es besser für dich ist, wenn du es selbst herausfindest.“

Sozialpädagoge: „Ich weiß es auch nicht, aber ich finde es total gut, dass wir beide so offen darüber reden können.“

Sozialarbeiter: „Keine Ahnung, aber ich fahre Sie schnell hin.“

Bioenergetiker: „Ihr Körper kennt die Antwort schon. Machen Sie mal: sch… sch… sch…“

Esoteriker: „Wenn du da hin sollst, wirst du den Weg auch finden.“

Neurologe: „Sie haben also die Orientierung verloren. Passiert Ihnen das öfter?“

Psychiater: „Bahnhof? Zugfahren? Welche Klasse?“

Coach: „Wenn ich Ihnen die Lösung vorkaue, wird das Ihr Problem nicht dauerhaft beseitigen.“

Lehrer: „Wenn Sie aufgepasst hätten, müssten Sie mich nicht fragen!“

Priester: „Heiliger Antonius, gerechter Mann, hilf, dass er ihn finden kann. Amen!“

(Quelle, leicht verändert und gekürzt)

First a rough translation of the text: Jesus came to the world to save us from sins. Thor came to the world to save us from ice giants. Now: The world is full of sins… But there isn’t a single ice giant. Thor wins. Where is your god now?

The first and obvious problem is the absence of a pre-intervention „baseline“ measurement. We don’t know if there were even any ice giants around when Thor came here — he could have played a great trick on us. Also, we have few information on how much sin there was in the world over 2000 years ago. The Thor issue reminds me of a joke I can’t tire of telling people for its deeper implication about anxieties: The psychiatrist sees a patient who has just been admitted to the psychiatric hospital. Already during the first sentences he notices the patient keeps clapping his hands. „What do you clap your hands for?“ he asks. The patient replies: „To scare away the elephants“. Psychiatrist: „But — there are no elephants here.“ Patient, triumphantly: „See how well it works!“

Apart from that, even if we set out to measure the amount of sins in the world, we would have trouble coming to a good definition and measurement procedure. Also, you can safely assume that a lot of sins are committed in private, making the practical measurement even more problematic.

The most stunning objection, and one which immediately reminded me of issues in psychotherapy research, was my friend saying: „Jesus didn’t come to save us from sins. He came to forgive them.“ It’s often not as easy as you would think to tell what somebody (or a group of people) is aiming at with a complex intervention, especially when you’re not part of that group. And so outside measurements and comparisons can get really tricky.

The last and somewhat nerdy (ok, even more nerdy than before) point concerns standardized effect sizes. As success of Thor’s and Jesus‘ social intervention is obviously on different scales (reduction in ice giant population vs. reduction in (frequency? intensity? of) sins), how do you compare them? What you would typically do is compare the change that is attributable to the intervention to natural fluctuations in the phenomena of interest. That would be hard to do here, even though theoretically possible — how did ice giant population and sins change over time before our two so different saviors came along? But of course, it doesn’t actually tell you anything about the clinical significance of each change. Maybe something similar to a change of quality occurs at some point of the scale — if ice giant population falls below a certain point, they retreat to their mystical homelands and leave humans alone. If sins are reduced beyond a certain point, society changes, preparing the earth for eternal heavenly rule. In psychotherapy, we mostly assume something like that actually, where the clinical disorder or syndrome (of, say, depression or phobia) is seen as no longer existing after a certain threshold, but often still measured as a severity of symptoms.

This randomness is of course the source of what we often deplore as procrastination, but I’m realizing it can also set free creativity, by presenting side by side concepts that seem only very loosely related at first. So here is my starting point, a very insightful remark on what difference it makes if we speak about Capitalism or Free Market Economy, from John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-American economist and author, published in the article Free Market Fraud in The Progressive magazine in 1999:

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes–indeed, deletes–the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

He goes on to denounce many instances where we (as a society as well as our appointed specialists on that matter, economists) fail to see the power workings of the „Free Market Economy“ and especially its influence over the government.

This argument, including its reference to how the public discourse about the issue is confused by objectivist language, could come straight out of a sketch-book of my own critiques of Capitalism (see NeuerPlan, „new plan“), even though the article is very short, and mostly stays on common knowledge grounds using the american military industry as its main example. (Oh I wish I’d come around to completing my own series of critique begun long ago!)

Now, this thought is not new to me in itself, but became more urgent when I came across a definition of Fascism that has some authority, coming from the Italian self-described „philosopher of Fascism“ Giovanni Gentile and being endorsed by Mussolini:

Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

(This, by the way, is quoted from the FAQ of the „Political Compass“ where you can localize yourself and some historical figures politically on the dimensions of „Economic Left/Right“ and „Social Libertarian/Authoritarian“. The FAQ is much more interesting than the actual test, though.)

And the suggested consequence, that increased influence / merger of corporate interests and government leads onto the continuum of fascist politics, is pretty plausible to me. And reminded me of a (only partly humorous) postcard I found when I was in Stanford almost three years ago, which features a summary of „Early Warning Signs of Fascism“ (claiming to be from independent research on actual fascist regimes, but according to a quick search more plausibly just written down in an Op-Ed in 2004, itself still worthy reading and considering):

The argument, which the author (Laurence W. Britt) also put forward in his book „June, 2004″ is that in the Bush era, America was visibly moving in that direction. How implausible is it to assume that again, corporate interests‘ hold of the government had a role to play in this?

True to my current randomness, and to end on a more cheerful tune on this sunny Sunday afternoon, here a cartoon of Capitalisms core problem by Dan Perjovschi.

You see, the thing about shock… is not that it upsets some people, I think; I think that it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realised in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important.

And earlier, this is what he says about „Gray“ in that respect:

He loved to shock. In fact, Gray, more than anyone I knew, embodied and symbolised all that was most offensive and juvenile in Monty Python. And his delight in shocking people led him on to greater and greater feats. I like to think of him as the pioneering beacon that beat the path along which fainter spirits could follow.

Nothing to add, really. Oh, maybe this.

In a geometric progression, the sum of the second and third term is 6, and the sum of the third and fourth term is –12. Find the first term and common ratio of the progression.

I will post my solution after some comments come in, or I get bored waiting

PS: Some more awesome comics from the same source:

• Pain Rating & Imagination
• Statistical Significance, Jelly Beans and Cancer
• Science & Wonder
• The Secret Behind Productivity
• Charity
• Mathematical Look at Advertising
• IPv6

According to a classical view of the market, buyers and sellers find one another immediately, without cost, and have perfect information about the prices of all goods and services. Prices are determined so that supply equals demand; there are no supply or demand surpluses and all resources are fully utilized.

But this is not what happens in the real world. High costs are often associated with buyers’ difficulties in finding sellers, and vice versa. Even after they have located one another, the goods in question might not correspond to the buyers’ requirements. A buyer might regard a seller’s price as too high, or a seller might consider a buyer’s bid to be too low. Then no transaction will take place and both parties will continue to search elsewhere. In other words, the process of finding the right outcome is not without frictions. Such is the case, for example, on the labor market and the housing market, where searching and finding are essential features and where trade is characterized by pairwise matching of buyers and sellers.

Granted that the theory is probably far more complicated and formula-laden, I still get the impression that the recent decades of economic research have been spent mostly trying to get common sense back into economic theory. And I am reminded of a wonderful cartoon by the „Standup Economist“ Yoram Bauman about Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who got the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for basically this finding:

Taken from an excellent humorous presentation held at the 2010 American Economic Association Annual Meeting (originally coming from his book).

Apparently, even the Invisible Hand doesn’t want to pick beans. — Stephen Colbert, Opening statement during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Security (from C-SPAN 9/24/10 coverage)