I've long had a love-hate relationship with academia. What I love is the philosophical intellectual rigor that's supposed to characterize true expertise. What I hate is that a doctorate in yoyo building makes some people an expert on everything.

A nice example today in the LA Times.

NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

*Sigh* Daniel Gilbert is a psychologist--at Hahvad no less, which means of course that he's an expert on everything, even when he says stupid things like this. I have no doubt that his description of human psychology is accurate, but his context is risible. The seas are not rising and in fact Antarctic ice is increasing in volume, not melting

Does Dr. Gilbert know more than Dr. Claude Allegre? Probably about psychology, but not about climate change. On the other hand, does he really know all that much about psychology?

It seems to me that Gilbert is actually recommending that Americans adopt a very psychologically unhealthy mindset--quench our alarm over immediate threats like Islamic terrorism, and replace it with an existential threat from climate change. Don't we put people like that in straight jackets?

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which affects about four million Americans (2.8 percent), is characterized by at least six months of a more-or-less constant state of tension or worry not related to any event. If you suffer from GAD, you may always expect a catastrophe to happen. Though you may know your feelings are unrealistic, you cannot control them. The worries that accompany GAD are non-specific; nor are they obsessive as are the thoughts and worries experienced with obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, more than half the people who suffer from GAD also have another anxiety disorder or depression.

Bad science AND malpractice.