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Researcher Measures Brain Reactions To Donald Trump (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sam Barnett "has been strapping electrode caps on focus group participants and showing them primary season debates," reports CNN, and there's one clear conclusion. "Seeing Trumps face, hearing Trump's voice, lights up the brain." His data captured big surges in neural activity for hot-button topics like immigration, and revealed that while Marco Rubio actually triggered slightly more brain activity among men, Trump clearly produced the highest reactions among women and overall. "The focus group participants might have been excited by Trump. Or they might have been repulsed," reports CNN. "But one thing was for sure: they weren't bored." Barnett has also used electroencephalography (or EEG) to study advertising, and in the future he hopes to also apply it to other complex forms of brain stimulation like movies and even hedge-fund investing.
I conduct research in a lab that uses EEG to measure a very different kind of processing, so it's possible I'm unaware of the relevant background literature (if indeed there is any), but the most charitable thing I can say is that it is impossible to draw any conclusions at all from the results as they are reported here.
Barnett talks about "neural engagement", but this is not a technical term. Googling around led to his patent on measuring so-called engagement. The relevant part is as follows:
“For example, if a movie was presented to a group of people, the measure of engagement could show the level of engagement the group (or a subset of the group) displayed in response to different scenes in the movie; the measure of engagement could also show how engaging the movie was overall. The method 100 preferably performs cross-brain correlations of neural data, calculated across pairs (a measure of neural similarity), as input for the measure of engagement. The method 100 additionally may function to provide a measure of engagement across small and precise time ranges. Understanding that one characteristic of engaging content is its ability to generate similar neural responses in different individuals, this preferably enables the method 100 to operate without the need to specify a model for the neural processes of engagement.”
So as far as I can tell, the fact that Trump generated higher levels of engagement means the EEG responses he elicited in viewers were more correlated with each other than were the EEG responses elicited by other candidates. This could potentially be interesting, but not without a process model explaining why. Even taking this associative, non-experimental method at face value, here's a plausible hypothesis that would render this result totally uninteresting: Everyone has seen and heard Donald Trump a lot. The same cannot be said for, say, John Kasich. It seems reasonable to me that frequent stimuli would be more likely to elicit common responses.
Maybe this hypothesis is correct; maybe it's not. The point is that without doing the hard work of showing they understand what their analytic technique measures, the results are totally uninterpretable. You can't even say that "Viewers weren't bored" without knowing what the correlations between the EEG responses of bored people would generate!
tl;dr: A poorly-designed and as-yet unpublished EEG study leads to an uninterpretable result that generated news coverage because readers like it when their latent beliefs are covered with a veneer of scientific acceptability.
(Professional quibble with the write-up: The term "lights up the brain" is neuroscientific slang used exclusively with methods like fMRI that tell you which regions of the brain are active. I know no neuroscientist who would say the brain is "lit up" based on an EEG reading.)
This all assumes increased debt is the worst thing which could happen to the economy. It isn't, not by a long shot.
The United States has a net worth of about $124 trillion in 2014 (source). The total federal deficit is about $19 trillion and the federal deficit is $500 billion. But the total US net worth grows by far more than $500 billion per year, so it is very misleading to say the deficit is a large problem. For instance, the total net worth of US households and non-profits grew by $10 trillion in 2014 alone. If I am going $5000 in debt each year, but my total net worth is growing by $10,000 each year, I am still in a pretty good position.
The risk of damaging the economy with drastic measures is far more dangerous than going a few trillion more in debt. Current federal debt levels are really not that bad when put into perspective, although understandably it is very hard for people to put $500 billion in perspective. But to make it easier, the US is a household with a $248,000 house with $38,000 left on their mortgage, and a family budget losing about $100 per month. That is not a dire situation.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Our current President has been impossible to work with, so in return Congress has largely refused to work with him
Bullshit. The Republicans in Congress have opposed practically every goddamn thing he's put forth, starting with "make him a one-term president", to refusing to consider anything he's proposed even when it was something they originally came up with. And now the Republicans won't even consider holding hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, which is their fucking job.
The Republicans shut down the government rather than work with him, or did that little fact slip your memory?
So don't give me this fucking horsecrap about how he's been "impossible to work with", it's just plain bullshit. The obstructionism Obama has received has exceeded anything I've seen in 50+ years of watching our government at work. Form the Birtherism crap to the "he's a Muslim" nonsense, this Congress has been blatantly partisan in the extreme.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You're very wrong. Look at the graph here, and you'll see current debt as % GDP is below the average for the past 50 years.
Learn the difference between debt and deficit and you won't make that mistake...
We're approaching 20 trillion in debt, that is going to kill us sooner or later...
Clinton has pissed in too many cereal bowls, made too many backroom deals. She's damaged goods...
Frankly, the R controlled Congress could work with Sanders better than it could Clinton, he at least is honest about his viewpoints and isn't bought and paid for.
While I disagree with many things Sanders says, I do respect him. Clinton? Nope, she's dog meat as far as I'm concerned, nothing she says means anything because she just lies, lies, and lies.
If she is on the Ticket, then it doesn't matter who the other name is, the ballot might as well say:
[ ] Clinton
[ ] Not-Clinton
If it ended up being Sanders vs. Trump, I'd actually have to give that some thought, because while he is a socialist, Trump is a bit nuts.
Reality is somewhere in between the two of them. Shame we can't toss them in a blender and take the best parts out and throw away the trash of both sides.
The important point (which gets confused) is that the US has one of the higher "official" corporate tax rates BUT the actual amount taxes paid by corporations is among the lowest (because of special deductions and loopholes) .