January 25, 2009 10:01pm by swood | 
“The Week” magazine is a wonderful resource for tidbits of religiosity in the name of evil and greed. It doesn’t focus on this kind of reporting, it just so happens that religion is so often the genesis[sic] of such things.
This week, because of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme news, “The Week” ran a little blurb about the ironic gullibility of a psychology professor. It turns out that this story is an allegory of the ways in which intelligent people can believe in magical thinking.
Stephen Greenspan is a psychology professor who was about to publish a book entitled, “Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It”. Shortly before publication, Mr. Greenspan realized that Bernard Madoff had duped him out of “a large portion of his retirement savings.” The Week reports, “he was so eager to believe, that when a financially savvy friend warned him against the investment, Greenspan dismissed the warning as ‘knee-jerk cynicism.”
Greenspan went on to say that “only self-deception can account for the foolish choices made by otherwise intelligent people.”
The parallels are there, plain as day.
Wait…what are the parallels? That even skeptics can be wrong? Oh, ok I see that now. Because Stephen Greenspan is a skeptic….at least, a quick google has his name turn up all over skeptic type web sites. Maybe Mr. Greenspan should re-examine ALL of his skeptical thinking in light of making one of the costliest mistakes in his life?
Your argument above is an Ad hominem fallacy, which is a subset of the red herring class of fallacies that attempt to avoid the main argument.
I thought the parallels were rather plain. This is a man, no, THE man who should have known better. He literally "wrote the book" on the subject. And then he goes and gets taken. He was so eager to believe that he continued in a direction that his rational mind should have disallowed. And he discounted naysayers as close-minded cynics. Those are two key qualities in those that adhere to dogma at the expense of rational thought.
You can’t say I’m arguing ad hominem, when you are too. We both blame the man. We are both saying that this man followed the science, the math, the facts when he researched Madoffs scheme and made a rational decision that he was taking the correct course of action. ONE person warned him against it. The full quote is "I chalked the warning up to his sometime tendency towards knee-jerk cynicism". So, for a skeptic to let us know that a friend of his has a "tendency" to knee jerk cynicism….isn’t there a story about a little boy that called wolf?
Only the extreme called cynics close-minded. The rest of us just say they are wrong. There are people who have been saying for years, YEARS, take your money out of the stock market – guess what, they were finally right, around October of last year. But hey, I have a stopped clock downstairs, and its right TWICE a day.
Cheers,
David
NO matter how smart anyone thinks that they are and they have all the answers there is something or someone who can get them. That’s life, never believe that you can not be ripped off. And simply and to the point be made a fool there are a lot of real smart and slick people in this world.