Yet George Bush's presidency is widely acknowledge to be, well, a fail parade. Or perhaps we should go with by their works ye shall judge them. An (extremely brief) overview of Bush's presidency:
* he waved off warnings of Bin Laden ("All right. You’ve covered your ass, now")
* he turned a highly effective -- under clinton -- national disaster agency into a joke, at least in part by putting a failed horse judge in charge of it, then oversaw an ineffective response to one of the largest national disasters to ever strike the US (katrina)
* he lost Bin Laden at Tora Bora
* he and his chosen vp and sec state back channeled incredibly wrong information into the public, in part via the nyt, in order to sell a war with, well, people who had no weapons of mass destruction and who were uninvolved in 9/11;
* by the by on the above, he fired the general (shinseki) who gave an accurate prediction of iraq war costs
* Bush hired wolfowitz, who predicted the iraq war would cost between $10 and $100B (what's $700B and counting between friends)
* Bush ignored, well, basically everyone who understood much of anything about the middle east in favor of a war which wildly destabilized a highly geopolitically important (oil) zone, while empowering iran
So your link, in which the author writes,
[...] President Bush's thinking has several problematic aspects: lack of
intellectual engagement, cognitive inflexibility, need for closure, belief
perseverance, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and insensitivity to
consistency. These are all cognitive characteristics that have been studied
by psychiatrists and that can be measured with at least some precision.
However, they are all examples of thinking styles that are not tapped by IQ
tests. Thus, it is not surprising that someone could suffer from many of
these cognitive deficiencies and still have a moderatively high IQ.
Bush's cognitive deficiencies do not impair performance on intelligence tests,
but they do impair rational decision making. [1]
Even if I grant you all of that, it doesn't change the fact that Stanovich's claims re: the cognitive abilities of George W. Bush are based on extremely flimsy evidence. If he had stronger evidence than the testimony of Frum and a column from George Will (who, as far as I know, never attended a meeting in which GWB made a decision), wouldn't he have used it?
Indeed, in contrast to your laundry list, Stanovich doesn't present a single concrete example of an irrational decision by the former president and the cognitive bias that led to it. He doesn't have to, because he wants to appeal to a readership that is delighted to find that not only is the target of their political animus wrong, but actually suffering from a mental disability!
It's intellectually lazy and unworthy of a serious scholar.
If this had been a dissertation I would completely agree with your point of view. However, serious scholarship has little to do with writing a popular book. If anything Malcolm Gladwell is the gold standard for popular, interesting, and bulllshit books that sell like hot cakes.
Consider his religious affiliation suggests a level of irrational thinking, but you can't say such things if you want a best seller. Yet, there are plenty scholarly works focused on the connection between religion an irrationality because scholars especially those with tenure can get away with such things.
>>Indeed, in contrast to your laundry list, Stanovich doesn't present a single concrete example of an irrational decision by the former president and the cognitive bias that led to it.
This must be some kind of alternate reality where GWB did not declare war on Iraq based on a complete knee-jerk (read: irrational) reaction to 9/11.
And I'm being very generous here. There are many smart people who have provided evidence that GWB's decision to invade Iraq was based on malice.
* he waved off warnings of Bin Laden ("All right. You’ve covered your ass, now")
* he turned a highly effective -- under clinton -- national disaster agency into a joke, at least in part by putting a failed horse judge in charge of it, then oversaw an ineffective response to one of the largest national disasters to ever strike the US (katrina)
* he lost Bin Laden at Tora Bora
* he and his chosen vp and sec state back channeled incredibly wrong information into the public, in part via the nyt, in order to sell a war with, well, people who had no weapons of mass destruction and who were uninvolved in 9/11;
* by the by on the above, he fired the general (shinseki) who gave an accurate prediction of iraq war costs
* Bush hired wolfowitz, who predicted the iraq war would cost between $10 and $100B (what's $700B and counting between friends)
* Bush ignored, well, basically everyone who understood much of anything about the middle east in favor of a war which wildly destabilized a highly geopolitically important (oil) zone, while empowering iran
So your link, in which the author writes,
is, in retrospect, incisive.[1] http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p...