Laurent Murawiec

Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C., author of the just-released The Mind of Jihad

“Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place,” begins a WIRED piece by Bruce Schneier entitled The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists. In his article, Schneier rejects the “strategic model” interpretation of terrorism, an economic model of rational behavior used by some social scientists and experts in matters of terror; he bases his analysis on a paper by Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation: What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategies.

Abrahms tries to show that this model, often applied to the study of terrorism, is unworkable by outlining seven “puzzles,” seven purportedly flawed assumptions about terrorism. He then proceeds to provide his own recipes to grasp and combat terrorism.

Both the author and his commentator unfortunately proceed and outline yet another radical misunderstanding of the matter at hand.

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True, I’m no expert. Don’t worry, I found one.

Dr. Adut sends his apologies, he was abroad when the whole thing broke, and I commented on it earlier with his book in mind.

But he has a few comments that cut directly to some of the sociological implications of scandal that we overlook during all the drama. Most striking: public moral outrage comes not at the behavior, but on behalf of the family. Whether they want it or not.

The Edwards thing seems to have cooled off, but maybe there will be evidence linking him to the baby. My informal, fast take on this scandal: There is nothing illegal in Edward’s conduct and he is not running for any office either. So those who attack him attack him in the name of his wife. But they almost willfully ignore that the scandal (which is not his adultery but the publicization of the adultery) hurts the wife and children as well - this is one of the main points in the book, the third party-effects of scandals.

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A New Way of Thinking About the Spitzer Scandal

Steven Reiss

To understand him, think: here is guy thinking about sex much more often than he lets on.

I am a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Ohio State University in Columbus who has been studying human motivation for a decade.

The media has been promoting a mostly inaccurate view of why someone would do what Gov. Spitzer did. Mr. Spitzer is not self-destructive. Actually, he has a personality opposite to someone who is self- destructive. Self-destruction is motivated by guilt, but people who practice infidelity often have no guilt because they think they are not doing anything wrong.

It is misleading to say that Mr. Spitzer was motivated by hubris. He may been self-confident and this might have become overconfidence after years of success, but I doubt he started with overconfidence or has a general tendency to think he can get away with things. If he did, he would have been caught a long time ago.

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TIME Magazine sought the, well, expertise of Anders Ericsson, author of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance for its recent cover article on experience. Ericsson is a professor at Florida State University and director of its Human Performance Laboratory.

Ericsson’s findings show that:

rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance.

That’s good news for us. Is everyone ready for the fun path to expertise?

Check out the article here.