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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (152077)	1/15/2009 1:59:05 PM
From: geode00	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

Brumar, your faith in poor quality statistical farce and your belief in resurrecting the dead shows that your ignorance is vast and deep. Repent! Think critically about the author, the ideology, the motivation and the nonsense he is peddling and you are buying. Do you understand the difference between reality and self reported anything? Do you understand the difference between reality and opinion? Do you understand the difference between reality and propaganda? Do you get anything? This is just one criticism and from a right wing source to boot LOL. You didn't even see this irony. Brumar, you are really lacking in basic common sense and you really do not understand propaganda. Hitler would have loved you. ---------------------- Hey, here are some reviews: " What sort of happiness? I just listened to Arthur Brooks discuss this book on public radio KQED's Forum program. He made the point that people who see things in black and white are happier than people who see nuances in things. It sounds like his studies show simple-minded people are happier than those who see the complexities in life. The kind of happiness Mr. Brooks is measuring risks giving justifications to turning a blind eye towards the many problems our country faces today." "Pathetic Example of Research and the Scientific Method, August 9, 2008 I have read 'Gross National Happiness and I am very disillusioned with it. The first few chapters provided some insights but after that it digressed into cherry picking of data and, what I believe is stretching the facts with misrepresentations and misinterpretations of the data, all to foster the author's conservative beliefs. It is really pathetic from a scientific point of view. When I finished, I was totally disgusted. The author is supposed to be an academic (even an economist) and claims the book is research. But it is a polemic, in my view. He refers to "averages" when the distributions are clearly non-Gaussian (such as the distribution of income) so he should be using medians - "averages" is not a statistical definition - he should define it as a mean or median but I assume he uses means as they help to make his argument. He uses regression to argue causality when all it shows is a relationship (that may well be spurious). And he jumps back and forth between "findings", beliefs, personal views and "conclusions" - many of which do not logically follow. I do not recommend this book. If I could, I would have given it zero stars."

To: Brumar89 who wrote (152077)	1/15/2009 2:08:08 PM
From: Steve Dietrich	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

I found this in your linked blog: What you do not learn in the chapter on religion in Gross National Happiness is that countries with some of the lowest levels of religious participation in the world, such as Denmark, Norway, or Finland show up again and again in international rankings as some of the world’s happiest places, usually ahead of the U.S. Moreover, many of the most religious places on Earth are deeply miserable. Seems the religion-happiness correlation is not as direct or simple as you'd make it out to be. SD