I haven't blogged for a while. It is midwinter and there are fewer ragwort stories around. I could still blog more regularly as I regularly see nonsense but I have, as I have said before, got other ways of doing things now so I often don't bother. However, this is an interesting one and it gives me a chance to talk about some of the political psychology surrounding this issue.
I must thank my dear and most excellent friend and colleague Esther Hegt for the background to this. Esther, who I have mentioned before, is a Dutch horse enthusiast who originally belonged to a ragwort extermination group in the Netherlands. However, she is really very intelligent and researched the matter properly, discovering that the information being circulated was hysterical nonsense.
Digressing a little from my main themes of this post I should explain that so many people in the Netherlands have excellent English that our hysteria has spread there. In fact some of my best material came from a friend of Esther's who had kept old copies of British horsey magazines. To digress further this led on to yet more information some rubbishy arguments by Professor Knottenbelt, who regular readers will know talks some real horse manure about ragwort.
He is undoubtedly a fine veterinary surgeon but his comments about the ecology surrounding ragwort are just plain dreadful. He goes outside veterinary matters and he isn't an expert in those other things. Ragwort isn't, despite his quoted protestations, poisoning the cinnabar moth to death. It is the moth's main natural food!
The papers I obtained then were not the worst. The worst was the one I discovered fairly recently. I did eventually get around to putting an analysis on my website. I have been mentioning it in previous blog entries so you might as well see this. Here is the full debunking.
http://www.ragwortfacts.com/professor-derek-knottenbelt-country-illustrated.html
Coming to the main matter in hand, it concerns a court case in the Netherlands and a Freedom of Information request which has led to some documents being released on-line. The court case concerns the Oostvaardersplassen (OVP) a rewilded area and there have been some quite peculiar legal claims made.
One of my constant themes in this blog is that the ragwort bashers actually don't understand the ecology at all and this is what leads to a lot of the hysteria. I will also come later to some of the science around the psychology that governs the political beliefs that motivate some of this.
This court case is a really good example of this. One of the documents contains this very revealing statement.
The one fundamental point to remember is this one. Ragwort is NATIVE in The Netherlands. The OVP is reclaimed from the sea, but surely nobody with a proper grasp of ecology would be so deluded as to believe that a native plant would have to be introduced to bare ground in an area where it could naturally colonise? The OVP has been there since 1968 which means there has been plenty of time for plants to colonise!
Then someone is apparently ignorantly idiotic enough to include it in evidence for a court case!
It seems there is a lot of misinformation being circulated. Both Esther and I are still researching but it would appear that information is being circulated by several Dutch foundations. The Dutch language uses the word Stichting to designate these and it does seem that these are not as well regulated as British charities which are not supposed to make false claims.
From what we've been able to discover in our researches there is a Stichting involved called Stichting Welzijn Grote Grazers, which roughly means The Foundation for the Welfare of Large Grazers.
Esther located a document where there was this absurdly wrong statement.
This brings me on to my second theme. This is turning into a rather long blog posting, but it is a while since I have written anything and this is quite interesting stuff. The psychology of it all is rather fascinating.
Whilst it is often difficult to ascribe these things to single individuals in this case, there is an overarching theme on a lot of ragwort hysteria in that it is linked to right wing and often far right wing ideologies. Esther sent me some information on another ragwort bashing Stichting showing clear links with the controversial Forum for Democracy a hard right eurosceptic nationalist party in The Netherlands.
To me a lot of the ragwort bashers seem not to have a proper grasp of reality.
Part of this the science says, may be due to various poor thinking traits.
To begin, one of the most well-known of personality traits involved here is that of Openness to Experience. Open minded people tend to not be involved in the kind of right wing thinking that is often the problem here. Open minded people aren't racists as they find people from different backgrounds interesting. I am fairly typical of that as I have mentioned before I am so interested in foreigners that if I go to a foreign country I actually take the trouble to learn some of the language before I go. The false claim that ragwort is foreign is a common theme with the bashers and I do wonder whether the closed minded dislike of the foreign is a factor.
One of the converse, closed minded, traits that is clear in a number of ragwort bashers is that they seem not to accept new or strange things and that challenging authority is unacceptable behaviour. One I have seen is the absurd idea that civil servants carry authority and everything they say must be right and that no account should be made of the facts in considering this.
It should be pointed out that the research is rather clear that open minded people tend to be a bit smarter and indeed another concept associated with Openness is that of intellect. One is tempted to think that part of the problem with ragwort bashers is lack of intellect and indeed that does seem to be an issue with some of them.
For those interested in a technical examination of this idea. This is an excerpt from The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research published by Cambridge University Press. It is on Openness to Experience.
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Oleynick-et-al.-2017.pdf
I have encountered a ragwort basher who is always claiming that peer reviewed literature says certain things when either it doesn't or that the arguments made in a paper don't stand up to scrutiny. The person seems to have read different papers to the ones under discussion, despite it is clear that they are the same, and persists with the incorrect claims despite being continually taken on and debunked by various people. This blog , it is argued, cannot be right because it isn't regulated. This is such an authoritarian individual that one almost imagines it is being proposed that some kind of permission needs to be granted to exercise the right of free speech and that criticising the British government's department Defra for their ineptitude should be verboten.
This authoritarian behaviour is well studied. Right Wing Authoritarians are a large part of the studies reflected in the excellent book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer who is a retired professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, where he studied authoritarianism for forty years.
Professor Altemeyer has very kindly made his book available for free on the web. As he himself warns you shouldn't make the assumption that just because it is free it is valueless. There was probably a limited market for the book and after it had sold the professor still wanted people to read the volume that he had worked so hard on. One would imagine that a retired professor would not be in the poor house and would not be desperate for money from the sales. I applaud his generosity.
Here is the link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view?usp=sharing
I also recommend the rest of his website where he has some fascinating ideas on Donald Trump whose rise to power post dates his book.
https://www.theauthoritarians.org
Here to finish the blog posting is an excerpt from the book. This just rings so many bells. The thinking is just like the ragwort bashers. To me it is just too uncanny for this research not to be applicable.
RWA= "Right wing Authoritarian"
Illogical Thinking
Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989,
Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel
universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.
Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who "got it wrong" had been mainly high RWAs. So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they'd encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, theauthoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.
Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large
samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:
reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, "Because sharks are fish." In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don't "get it" that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.
This is not only "Illogical, Captain," as Mr. Spock would say, it's quite
dangerous, because it shows that if authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is pretty irrelevant. The reasoning should justify the conclusion, but for a lot of high RWAs, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Such is the basis of many a prejudice, and many a Big Lie that comes to be accepted. Now one can easily overstate this finding. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning, and high RWAs are only slightly more likely to make such mistakes than low RWAs are. But in general high RWAs seem to have more trouble than most people do realizing that a conclusion is false.
I must thank my dear and most excellent friend and colleague Esther Hegt for the background to this. Esther, who I have mentioned before, is a Dutch horse enthusiast who originally belonged to a ragwort extermination group in the Netherlands. However, she is really very intelligent and researched the matter properly, discovering that the information being circulated was hysterical nonsense.
Digressing a little from my main themes of this post I should explain that so many people in the Netherlands have excellent English that our hysteria has spread there. In fact some of my best material came from a friend of Esther's who had kept old copies of British horsey magazines. To digress further this led on to yet more information some rubbishy arguments by Professor Knottenbelt, who regular readers will know talks some real horse manure about ragwort.
He is undoubtedly a fine veterinary surgeon but his comments about the ecology surrounding ragwort are just plain dreadful. He goes outside veterinary matters and he isn't an expert in those other things. Ragwort isn't, despite his quoted protestations, poisoning the cinnabar moth to death. It is the moth's main natural food!
The papers I obtained then were not the worst. The worst was the one I discovered fairly recently. I did eventually get around to putting an analysis on my website. I have been mentioning it in previous blog entries so you might as well see this. Here is the full debunking.
http://www.ragwortfacts.com/professor-derek-knottenbelt-country-illustrated.html
Coming to the main matter in hand, it concerns a court case in the Netherlands and a Freedom of Information request which has led to some documents being released on-line. The court case concerns the Oostvaardersplassen (OVP) a rewilded area and there have been some quite peculiar legal claims made.
One of my constant themes in this blog is that the ragwort bashers actually don't understand the ecology at all and this is what leads to a lot of the hysteria. I will also come later to some of the science around the psychology that governs the political beliefs that motivate some of this.
This court case is a really good example of this. One of the documents contains this very revealing statement.
"In de rechtszaak van volgende week wordt Staatsbosbeheer beschuldigd dat zij JKK in de OVP geïntroduceerd heeft"Which translates to :-
"In next week's lawsuit, Staatsbosbeheer is accused of introducing ragwort to the OVP."I should explain that Staatsbosbeheer literally translates to State Forest Management but that the organisation also looks after many wild nature areas that are not covered in trees. This includes the OVP.
The one fundamental point to remember is this one. Ragwort is NATIVE in The Netherlands. The OVP is reclaimed from the sea, but surely nobody with a proper grasp of ecology would be so deluded as to believe that a native plant would have to be introduced to bare ground in an area where it could naturally colonise? The OVP has been there since 1968 which means there has been plenty of time for plants to colonise!
Then someone is apparently ignorantly idiotic enough to include it in evidence for a court case!
It seems there is a lot of misinformation being circulated. Both Esther and I are still researching but it would appear that information is being circulated by several Dutch foundations. The Dutch language uses the word Stichting to designate these and it does seem that these are not as well regulated as British charities which are not supposed to make false claims.
From what we've been able to discover in our researches there is a Stichting involved called Stichting Welzijn Grote Grazers, which roughly means The Foundation for the Welfare of Large Grazers.
Esther located a document where there was this absurdly wrong statement.
"Jacobs Kruiskruid is een ingevoerde plant en veroorzaakt niet tot de oernatuur van Nederland wat nagestreefd wordt en Zwarte Mosterd is vermoedelijk overgewaaid van de omliggende akkerbouwers die het vaak als groenbemesting gebruiken."This is the English translation.
"Ragwort is an imported plant and does not engender the emulation of the original nature of the Netherlands and Black Mustard is probably blown over from the surrounding arable farmers who often use it as green fertilizer."This is, of course a bizarrely wrong statement to make but these things are all too regular with the ragwort bashing community.
This brings me on to my second theme. This is turning into a rather long blog posting, but it is a while since I have written anything and this is quite interesting stuff. The psychology of it all is rather fascinating.
Whilst it is often difficult to ascribe these things to single individuals in this case, there is an overarching theme on a lot of ragwort hysteria in that it is linked to right wing and often far right wing ideologies. Esther sent me some information on another ragwort bashing Stichting showing clear links with the controversial Forum for Democracy a hard right eurosceptic nationalist party in The Netherlands.
To me a lot of the ragwort bashers seem not to have a proper grasp of reality.
Part of this the science says, may be due to various poor thinking traits.
To begin, one of the most well-known of personality traits involved here is that of Openness to Experience. Open minded people tend to not be involved in the kind of right wing thinking that is often the problem here. Open minded people aren't racists as they find people from different backgrounds interesting. I am fairly typical of that as I have mentioned before I am so interested in foreigners that if I go to a foreign country I actually take the trouble to learn some of the language before I go. The false claim that ragwort is foreign is a common theme with the bashers and I do wonder whether the closed minded dislike of the foreign is a factor.
One of the converse, closed minded, traits that is clear in a number of ragwort bashers is that they seem not to accept new or strange things and that challenging authority is unacceptable behaviour. One I have seen is the absurd idea that civil servants carry authority and everything they say must be right and that no account should be made of the facts in considering this.
It should be pointed out that the research is rather clear that open minded people tend to be a bit smarter and indeed another concept associated with Openness is that of intellect. One is tempted to think that part of the problem with ragwort bashers is lack of intellect and indeed that does seem to be an issue with some of them.
For those interested in a technical examination of this idea. This is an excerpt from The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research published by Cambridge University Press. It is on Openness to Experience.
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Oleynick-et-al.-2017.pdf
I have encountered a ragwort basher who is always claiming that peer reviewed literature says certain things when either it doesn't or that the arguments made in a paper don't stand up to scrutiny. The person seems to have read different papers to the ones under discussion, despite it is clear that they are the same, and persists with the incorrect claims despite being continually taken on and debunked by various people. This blog , it is argued, cannot be right because it isn't regulated. This is such an authoritarian individual that one almost imagines it is being proposed that some kind of permission needs to be granted to exercise the right of free speech and that criticising the British government's department Defra for their ineptitude should be verboten.
This authoritarian behaviour is well studied. Right Wing Authoritarians are a large part of the studies reflected in the excellent book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer who is a retired professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba, where he studied authoritarianism for forty years.
Professor Altemeyer has very kindly made his book available for free on the web. As he himself warns you shouldn't make the assumption that just because it is free it is valueless. There was probably a limited market for the book and after it had sold the professor still wanted people to read the volume that he had worked so hard on. One would imagine that a retired professor would not be in the poor house and would not be desperate for money from the sales. I applaud his generosity.
Here is the link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view?usp=sharing
I also recommend the rest of his website where he has some fascinating ideas on Donald Trump whose rise to power post dates his book.
https://www.theauthoritarians.org
Here to finish the blog posting is an excerpt from the book. This just rings so many bells. The thinking is just like the ragwort bashers. To me it is just too uncanny for this research not to be applicable.
RWA= "Right wing Authoritarian"
Illogical Thinking
Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989,
Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel
universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.
Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who "got it wrong" had been mainly high RWAs. So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they'd encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, theauthoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.
Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large
samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:
The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say theAll fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.
reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, "Because sharks are fish." In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don't "get it" that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.
This is not only "Illogical, Captain," as Mr. Spock would say, it's quite
dangerous, because it shows that if authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is pretty irrelevant. The reasoning should justify the conclusion, but for a lot of high RWAs, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Such is the basis of many a prejudice, and many a Big Lie that comes to be accepted. Now one can easily overstate this finding. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning, and high RWAs are only slightly more likely to make such mistakes than low RWAs are. But in general high RWAs seem to have more trouble than most people do realizing that a conclusion is false.
