I have just spent a few hours struggling through the Introduction, Prologue and first three chapters of this difficult book about Putin and the decline of Russian democracy.
IMHO
Kasparov's great humanity and insight comes though . I am less sure about his attitudes to national sovereignty, flexible deterrent responses and foresight. It helped me get a possibly flawed understanding of why he failed to attract the majority of European votes for the FIDE Presidency.
Does anyone know of a serious review anywhere of this book? I guess it really deserves a reviewer who has the talents of Peter Hennessy and John Nunn.
Does anyone have any comments on the book, even if you haven't read it all?
Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
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IanCalvert
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Angus French
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
This episode of Radio 4's Free Thinking programme - with Kasparov and Tony Brenton, former British ambassador to Russia - might be worth a listen.
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IanCalvert
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Angus
Thanks very much. ... BUT
Sad there wasn't any chess in the discussion : on page 54 of Garry's book there is an analogy between real world , ideal (diplomatic) analysis with chess post game, "honest" analysis . "Honest" chess analysis is contrasted with game analysis that is solely focussed on events ( blunders or critical moments).
Thanks very much. ... BUT
Sad there wasn't any chess in the discussion : on page 54 of Garry's book there is an analogy between real world , ideal (diplomatic) analysis with chess post game, "honest" analysis . "Honest" chess analysis is contrasted with game analysis that is solely focussed on events ( blunders or critical moments).
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MJMcCready
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Garry was a great player obviously but I don't think his writings or that which he puts his name to are given the same seriousness as his play was. The only person I've seen review him seriously was Edward Winter, who just tore him apart, the details of which are on Winter's site.
I once got the feeling that many people like to listen to Garry talk about chess and prefer him to only talk about chess. I'm sure you're aware of his appearance on the Bill Maher show a while back where he was told to be quiet but put rather differently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80EnYg6RBmk
I once got the feeling that many people like to listen to Garry talk about chess and prefer him to only talk about chess. I'm sure you're aware of his appearance on the Bill Maher show a while back where he was told to be quiet but put rather differently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80EnYg6RBmk
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IanCalvert
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Thanks for the Edward Winter reference.
Perhaps the final paragraph of his review should be recorded here:
Nothing would induce us to comment on Kasparov's political beliefs or on how they are set out and backed up in his book. On the purely technical question of prose quality, we gladly observe Winter is Coming is the best book that Kasparov has produced.
Maybe Bart Simpson and other chess-players deserve more about new, improved Fide presidential candidates?
Perhaps the final paragraph of his review should be recorded here:
Nothing would induce us to comment on Kasparov's political beliefs or on how they are set out and backed up in his book. On the purely technical question of prose quality, we gladly observe Winter is Coming is the best book that Kasparov has produced.
Maybe Bart Simpson and other chess-players deserve more about new, improved Fide presidential candidates?
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David Robertson
Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Kasparov's book was treated with modest respect by the serious Press last November. The reviews posted here, which I read at the time, give dutiful attention to his argument, and some polite applause. But I felt then, and on re-reading still feel, that were the author other than Kasparov the book would be set aside. Kasparov is no great thinker; he merely knows what he thinks.
The first review is from the New York Times. The second is from the Financial Times. I've published the full text because the review is behind a paywall.
November 8, 2015
by: Review by John Thornhill
At times the reader of Garry Kasparov’s book on Russia gains an unnerving insight into what it must be like to sit on the other side of the board from the intimidating chess champion. His prose, like his chess, is fast, ferocious and unforgiving. Without messing around in the opening, Kasparov quickly launches a full-frontal assault on his target, President Vladimir Putin, whom he likens to Hitler. Bursting with pent-up fury, he argues the west is making a tragic mistake in appeasing Mr Putin over Ukraine. Instead, it should isolate him, slap stiff sanctions on all the Kremlin’s cronies and sell lethal arms to Kiev. “Dictators only stop when they are stopped,” he thunders.
The book — taking its title from the Game of Thrones television series, in which the phrase urges constant vigilance — is in part a history of Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While saluting the courage of Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet president, Kasparov laments his failure to entrench democratic institutions. He then vividly describes the growing authoritarianism of Mr Putin’s regime, culminating in the February murder of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader. As Mr Putin has consolidated his power at home, he has also become more aggressive abroad, in Georgia, in Ukraine and now in Syria.
But the real power of Kasparov’s book lies in his argument that the west must pursue a more assertive and moral foreign policy, something that has faded out of fashion. In his view, the most moral foreign policy is also the most effective. It enhances international security by insisting on observance of law. Here, Kasparov echoes the great Soviet dissidents, Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, who urged the west to press the Soviet Union to uphold its own laws and the human rights commitments it agreed in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. “A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbours,” Kasparov approvingly quotes Sakharov as saying. Mr Putin’s Russia is a perfect example of this truth, he adds, in its treatment of Ukraine.
Kasparov, who emerged as a leader of Russia’s opposition movement in 2011 and now lives in exile in New York, says the west used to be a beacon of moral authority during the cold war, inspiring oppressed peoples and jailed dissidents around the world. In particular, he praises the late US President Ronald Reagan for the clarity of his moral message in denouncing the “evil empire” that was the Soviet Union. But in Kasparov’s view, US President Bill Clinton squandered the chance to advance the international human rights agenda in the 1990s, as the west took a holiday from history. And today the west is too “uninformed, callous, or apathetic” to assert its influence and values. He, rightly, argues that one of the most important aspects of any moral foreign policy is its consistency. Western leaders should keep talking about human rights issues in good times as well as bad. Otherwise, these issues become just another chip on the “geopolitical gaming table”. Those leaders should also insist on raising these subjects with strong autocracies, such as China, as well as the weak.
Kasparov accepts that he deals only in principles not practicalities (emphasis added). He acknowledges that elected politicians have to contend with many conflicting priorities and often indifferent voters. He also skims over the west’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have so undermined its moral authority and fuelled isolationism. But he fears that western voters — and their leaders — are like bad chess players, in danger of losing sight of the big picture. “From Chamberlain in 1938 to Obama in 2015, the people get what they demand — for a while,” he writes. “Main Street and Wall Street reward politicians who produce attractive short-term results no matter how bad the long-term consequences are.”
Despite his excessive pyrotechnics, this is a book that should be read by every policymaker dealing with Russia (or any other autocracy) — especially British ministers who have been so assiduously courting China. Kasparov’s final injunction is always to listen to the dissidents: they know of what they speak.
The author is the FT’s deputy editor and former Moscow bureau chief
The third review is from the Times, again full text to avoid the paywall
Edward Lucas
October 31 2015
Vladimir Putin’s foes are either dead, jailed, cowed into silence or — in the case of Garry Kasparov — in exile. That is bad enough. Even worse is that those who could stand up to the Kremlin fail to do so. The main target of this brave, trenchant and convincing book is not the thuggish and dangerous regime that misrules Russia, but the cowardly wishful thinking in the West that refuses to stop it.
The book is studded with allusions to the author’s beloved chess. If a player has a strong position — “attacking momentum” — but fails to use it, the other side’s counterattack is inevitable and will be very strong, he argues. For this reason the greatest mistake of the West, he claims, predates Putin’s rise to power in Russia in 1999. It was the failure to realise the scale and nature of the victory in 1991. Far from seeing the collapse of communism as the triumph of democracy, the rule of law and freedom, and a chance to advance our cause with redoubled energy, we instead settled down to make money.
That initial mistake has been compounded by our timidity and greed. We are unwilling to see the scope of the threat that we face from anti-western forces such as Putin. Kasparov notes blisteringly: “The western rhetoric of appeasement creates a self-reinforcing loop of mental and moral corruption: speaking the truth now would mean confessing to many months of lies.”
The book gallops through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaotic 1990s and then charges full tilt at Vladimir Putin: a former KGB man who is a far more dangerous adversary than most outsiders realise. His rise to power in 1999 should have been a deafening alarm call to the West: as shocking as an ex-Gestapo officer coming to power in Germany.
The book ably summarises the many other alarm calls the West has missed since then. The seizure of the independent media. The looting of Yukos, once Russia’s largest and best-run oil company. The attacks on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008. The cynical sham of using a pretend election in 2008 to make Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s side-kick, into a pretend president. The dismal failure of the Obama administration’s misbegotten “reset”, which treated Russia as a moral equal of the United States. The attack on Ukraine and the seizure of Crimea. The shooting down of the MH17 Malaysian airliner, and the blizzard of falsehood and obfuscation that surrounds it.
Worse is to come, he argues. The Kremlin needs conflict with the West to fuel the political machine that keeps it in power. “Without real elections or a free media, the only way a dictator can communicate with his subjects is through propaganda, and the only way he can validate his power is with regular shows of force.”
Only outsiders can stop the regime wreaking still more havoc. It is unfair, Kasparov insists, to dismiss the Russian opposition as weak. How could it fail to be? As he notes bitterly: “Our members were banned from the media, slandered, prohibited from holding meetings and rallies, frequently physically assaulted, raided and harassed by the police, and blocked from appearing on ballots. What brilliant and coherent message, what transcendent leader, would have led us to power under those circumstances?”
He is similarly caustic about the western myth of Putin’s popularity. If the Russian leader really enjoyed such stellar opinion-poll ratings, why would he spend so much time rigging the system and eliminating rivals? Given that opinion polls are conducted by telephone, he argues it is a sign of Russians’ courage that these surveys do not record 99 per cent approval ratings for Putin.
Nor does he think much of western Russia-watchers. Mostly they underestimate Putin, lecturing their audiences about things he will supposedly never do, rather than responding to what he actually does. Others overestimate the Russian leader, making him out to be a strategic genius.
His greatest ire is reserved for the leadership of his adopted country. Having squandered the 1990s, America then botched the first decade of this century with ill-run intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama is, in Putin’s eyes, his only real opponent. But his administration wholly misreads the Putin Kremlin, trying to build trust and defuse tension, when it should be launching a resolute counterattack in defence of its friends and allies: “Where Obama sees a gesture of peaceful intent, Putin simply sees more weakness,” he notes.
The chess grandmaster does display an attractive willingness to acknowledge his own mistakes (including, very briefly, hoping that Putin in the early years of his rule might bring welcome stability to Russia). But the tone of the book can be relentless. He leaves little room for honest disagreement. The sequence of events that he describes is as orderly as the account of a misplayed chess match. In real life, things are messier.
In particular, he leaves out some important bits of good news. Nato is getting its act together, with new plans, exercises, military units and bases to counter Russia’s threat to the Baltics. The European Union has demolished Gazprom’s grip on the continent’s energy market (something that seems to have escaped the notice of British eurosceptics). The West is waking up to the threat posed by Russian propaganda, and hunting down the Kremlin cronies’ dirty money. This may be too little, and it has come dangerously late, but it is not nothing. The book would be stronger if it featured such practicalities as well as Kasparov’s philippics.
The biggest problem is that the West that Kasparov longs for does not exist. Western politicians who offer grand visions and bold leadership, such as Senator John McCain, don’t get elected. Voters in democratic countries tend to prefer low-key leaders and a quiet life to blood, sweat, toil and tears. How does one defend a free world that does not want to defend itself? Let us hope that Kasparov’s book becomes a best-seller.
The first review is from the New York Times. The second is from the Financial Times. I've published the full text because the review is behind a paywall.
November 8, 2015
by: Review by John Thornhill
At times the reader of Garry Kasparov’s book on Russia gains an unnerving insight into what it must be like to sit on the other side of the board from the intimidating chess champion. His prose, like his chess, is fast, ferocious and unforgiving. Without messing around in the opening, Kasparov quickly launches a full-frontal assault on his target, President Vladimir Putin, whom he likens to Hitler. Bursting with pent-up fury, he argues the west is making a tragic mistake in appeasing Mr Putin over Ukraine. Instead, it should isolate him, slap stiff sanctions on all the Kremlin’s cronies and sell lethal arms to Kiev. “Dictators only stop when they are stopped,” he thunders.
The book — taking its title from the Game of Thrones television series, in which the phrase urges constant vigilance — is in part a history of Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While saluting the courage of Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet president, Kasparov laments his failure to entrench democratic institutions. He then vividly describes the growing authoritarianism of Mr Putin’s regime, culminating in the February murder of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader. As Mr Putin has consolidated his power at home, he has also become more aggressive abroad, in Georgia, in Ukraine and now in Syria.
But the real power of Kasparov’s book lies in his argument that the west must pursue a more assertive and moral foreign policy, something that has faded out of fashion. In his view, the most moral foreign policy is also the most effective. It enhances international security by insisting on observance of law. Here, Kasparov echoes the great Soviet dissidents, Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, who urged the west to press the Soviet Union to uphold its own laws and the human rights commitments it agreed in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. “A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbours,” Kasparov approvingly quotes Sakharov as saying. Mr Putin’s Russia is a perfect example of this truth, he adds, in its treatment of Ukraine.
Kasparov, who emerged as a leader of Russia’s opposition movement in 2011 and now lives in exile in New York, says the west used to be a beacon of moral authority during the cold war, inspiring oppressed peoples and jailed dissidents around the world. In particular, he praises the late US President Ronald Reagan for the clarity of his moral message in denouncing the “evil empire” that was the Soviet Union. But in Kasparov’s view, US President Bill Clinton squandered the chance to advance the international human rights agenda in the 1990s, as the west took a holiday from history. And today the west is too “uninformed, callous, or apathetic” to assert its influence and values. He, rightly, argues that one of the most important aspects of any moral foreign policy is its consistency. Western leaders should keep talking about human rights issues in good times as well as bad. Otherwise, these issues become just another chip on the “geopolitical gaming table”. Those leaders should also insist on raising these subjects with strong autocracies, such as China, as well as the weak.
Kasparov accepts that he deals only in principles not practicalities (emphasis added). He acknowledges that elected politicians have to contend with many conflicting priorities and often indifferent voters. He also skims over the west’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have so undermined its moral authority and fuelled isolationism. But he fears that western voters — and their leaders — are like bad chess players, in danger of losing sight of the big picture. “From Chamberlain in 1938 to Obama in 2015, the people get what they demand — for a while,” he writes. “Main Street and Wall Street reward politicians who produce attractive short-term results no matter how bad the long-term consequences are.”
Despite his excessive pyrotechnics, this is a book that should be read by every policymaker dealing with Russia (or any other autocracy) — especially British ministers who have been so assiduously courting China. Kasparov’s final injunction is always to listen to the dissidents: they know of what they speak.
The author is the FT’s deputy editor and former Moscow bureau chief
The third review is from the Times, again full text to avoid the paywall
Edward Lucas
October 31 2015
Vladimir Putin’s foes are either dead, jailed, cowed into silence or — in the case of Garry Kasparov — in exile. That is bad enough. Even worse is that those who could stand up to the Kremlin fail to do so. The main target of this brave, trenchant and convincing book is not the thuggish and dangerous regime that misrules Russia, but the cowardly wishful thinking in the West that refuses to stop it.
The book is studded with allusions to the author’s beloved chess. If a player has a strong position — “attacking momentum” — but fails to use it, the other side’s counterattack is inevitable and will be very strong, he argues. For this reason the greatest mistake of the West, he claims, predates Putin’s rise to power in Russia in 1999. It was the failure to realise the scale and nature of the victory in 1991. Far from seeing the collapse of communism as the triumph of democracy, the rule of law and freedom, and a chance to advance our cause with redoubled energy, we instead settled down to make money.
That initial mistake has been compounded by our timidity and greed. We are unwilling to see the scope of the threat that we face from anti-western forces such as Putin. Kasparov notes blisteringly: “The western rhetoric of appeasement creates a self-reinforcing loop of mental and moral corruption: speaking the truth now would mean confessing to many months of lies.”
The book gallops through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaotic 1990s and then charges full tilt at Vladimir Putin: a former KGB man who is a far more dangerous adversary than most outsiders realise. His rise to power in 1999 should have been a deafening alarm call to the West: as shocking as an ex-Gestapo officer coming to power in Germany.
The book ably summarises the many other alarm calls the West has missed since then. The seizure of the independent media. The looting of Yukos, once Russia’s largest and best-run oil company. The attacks on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008. The cynical sham of using a pretend election in 2008 to make Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s side-kick, into a pretend president. The dismal failure of the Obama administration’s misbegotten “reset”, which treated Russia as a moral equal of the United States. The attack on Ukraine and the seizure of Crimea. The shooting down of the MH17 Malaysian airliner, and the blizzard of falsehood and obfuscation that surrounds it.
Worse is to come, he argues. The Kremlin needs conflict with the West to fuel the political machine that keeps it in power. “Without real elections or a free media, the only way a dictator can communicate with his subjects is through propaganda, and the only way he can validate his power is with regular shows of force.”
Only outsiders can stop the regime wreaking still more havoc. It is unfair, Kasparov insists, to dismiss the Russian opposition as weak. How could it fail to be? As he notes bitterly: “Our members were banned from the media, slandered, prohibited from holding meetings and rallies, frequently physically assaulted, raided and harassed by the police, and blocked from appearing on ballots. What brilliant and coherent message, what transcendent leader, would have led us to power under those circumstances?”
He is similarly caustic about the western myth of Putin’s popularity. If the Russian leader really enjoyed such stellar opinion-poll ratings, why would he spend so much time rigging the system and eliminating rivals? Given that opinion polls are conducted by telephone, he argues it is a sign of Russians’ courage that these surveys do not record 99 per cent approval ratings for Putin.
Nor does he think much of western Russia-watchers. Mostly they underestimate Putin, lecturing their audiences about things he will supposedly never do, rather than responding to what he actually does. Others overestimate the Russian leader, making him out to be a strategic genius.
His greatest ire is reserved for the leadership of his adopted country. Having squandered the 1990s, America then botched the first decade of this century with ill-run intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama is, in Putin’s eyes, his only real opponent. But his administration wholly misreads the Putin Kremlin, trying to build trust and defuse tension, when it should be launching a resolute counterattack in defence of its friends and allies: “Where Obama sees a gesture of peaceful intent, Putin simply sees more weakness,” he notes.
The chess grandmaster does display an attractive willingness to acknowledge his own mistakes (including, very briefly, hoping that Putin in the early years of his rule might bring welcome stability to Russia). But the tone of the book can be relentless. He leaves little room for honest disagreement. The sequence of events that he describes is as orderly as the account of a misplayed chess match. In real life, things are messier.
In particular, he leaves out some important bits of good news. Nato is getting its act together, with new plans, exercises, military units and bases to counter Russia’s threat to the Baltics. The European Union has demolished Gazprom’s grip on the continent’s energy market (something that seems to have escaped the notice of British eurosceptics). The West is waking up to the threat posed by Russian propaganda, and hunting down the Kremlin cronies’ dirty money. This may be too little, and it has come dangerously late, but it is not nothing. The book would be stronger if it featured such practicalities as well as Kasparov’s philippics.
The biggest problem is that the West that Kasparov longs for does not exist. Western politicians who offer grand visions and bold leadership, such as Senator John McCain, don’t get elected. Voters in democratic countries tend to prefer low-key leaders and a quiet life to blood, sweat, toil and tears. How does one defend a free world that does not want to defend itself? Let us hope that Kasparov’s book becomes a best-seller.
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Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Anybody who doubts this assertion may wish to try to explain which random number generator Gazza used to come up withDavid Robertson wrote:Kasparov is no great thinker ....
"70% of people alone will help a stranger in distress, it drops to 40% when other people are in the room"
on twitter this morning (https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/7 ... 0009036800)
The Abysmal Depths of Chess: https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspot.com
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MJMcCready
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
As we know 72.4 % of statistics are made up on the spot.
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Ian Kingston
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
It may well be that he's referring to this paper: Latane, B. and Rodin, J. (1969) A lady in distress: Inhibiting effects of friends and strangers on bystander intervention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol 5(2), 189-202. The PDF is online at http://web.natur.cuni.cz/~houdek3/paper ... 201969.pdf (see p. 6 of the PDF or p. 194 of the journal, where the 70%/40% figures are given). It's known as the Bystander Effect.Jonathan Bryant wrote:Anybody who doubts this assertion may wish to try to explain which random number generator Gazza used to come up withDavid Robertson wrote:Kasparov is no great thinker ....
"70% of people alone will help a stranger in distress, it drops to 40% when other people are in the room"
on twitter this morning (https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/7 ... 0009036800)
Ian Kingston
http://www.iankingston.com
http://www.iankingston.com
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Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Ian Kingston wrote: ... It's known as the Bystander Effect.
Indeed so. As the many people who took social psychology classes at university will know. I’m sure the name Kitty Genovese is familiar to many of the folk on these boards.
It’s not that Kasparov’s underlying point is entirely without merit, it’s that he’s come up with some utter guff to present that point. This is, needless to say, not what thinkers do. It is, though, a habit of Gazza's
Maybe he was referencing a paper but
(a) without him actually pointing out which one he might as well have just made up the numbers himself
and
(b) his habit of referencing studies that he doesn’t actually know about is documented. (The fact that it turns out he doesn’t know about them because they don’t actually exist is almost a side issue in this regard).
That’s leaving aside the fact that if you remember your university classes you’ll be thinking that Ben Goldacre’s phrase "I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that", is rather apt here,
This is why I’d never spend time or money on Winter is Coming. It’s not that I doubt the underlying thesis that Putin is a bit of a See You Next Tuesday. It’s not even that I think Kasparov has nothing of interest to say. It’s more that I simply don’t trust him to say it without straying well beyond the borders of his competence.
That’s the problem with the not great thinkers. That tends to happen without them noticing.
The Abysmal Depths of Chess: https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspot.com
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Ian Kingston
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
The point I'm making is not that Kasparov is some kind of great thinker - I'm not a fan either. And spouting raw numbers without attribution on Twitter isn't terribly clever by any measure. But unless he was incredibly lucky in guessing at those two numbers, which I doubt, there was no 'random number generator' involved and that (at least in a psychology experiment conducted 47 or so years ago) the numbers he gave were correct. That's all.
Ian Kingston
http://www.iankingston.com
http://www.iankingston.com
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Michael Farthing
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Assuming he said, as quoted above:Ian Kingston wrote:The point I'm making is not that Kasparov is some kind of great thinker - I'm not a fan either. And spouting raw numbers without attribution on Twitter isn't terribly clever by any measure. But unless he was incredibly lucky in guessing at those two numbers, which I doubt, there was no 'random number generator' involved and that (at least in a psychology experiment conducted 47 or so years ago) the numbers he gave were correct. That's all.
then the numbers he gave were NOT correct.70% of people alone will help a stranger in distress, it drops to 40% when other people are in the room
Had he said:
then the numbers would have been correctA study produced data that suggested..
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Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
No need to assume or take my word for it. The link is there to follow for anybody who wants to check - the very essence of scientific methodMichael Farthing wrote: Assuming he said, as quoted above:
Michael Farthing wrote:
Had he said:then the numbers would have been correctA study produced data that suggested..
I agree with the underlying theme of your post, but disagree with this bit specifically,
Had he said,
One study produced data that suggested that 70% of the kind of people who participated in an experiment that was designed in a particular way helped a stranger in distress. It drops to ....
then perhaps the numbers would be correct. Especially if he’d added something about other studies and whether they back up this particular one. Something about what difference it makes when you very age/gender/ethnicity of bystander and/or stranger when you vary the distress and the scenario in general. Whether it’s all the same if you do something similar today rather than 50 years ago.
In short, whether the claim applies in the real world rather than in experimental conditions.
Of course that would all take time and effort. Gazza - true to form - prefers the scienceyness of "Dr" Gillian McKeith. He wants the kudos of science to back up his opinion without any of the hassle.
This is where I disagree with Ian. Sure the numbers are unlikely to be a coincidence, but there is a random number generator at work. Or perhaps a random meaning generator would be a better way of putting it.
The Abysmal Depths of Chess: https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspot.com
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Michael Farthing
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Re: Garry Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" (2015)
Mea culpa. Delete 'numbers' insert 'statement'.Jonathan Bryant wrote:Michael Farthing wrote:
Had he said:then the numbers would have been correctA study produced data that suggested..