Worst Book Review of All Time

The worst book review I've ever read.

Ehrenreich drives me nuts. She thinks that, without having any background in a subject, she can do a little research and make novel insights that have someone escaped everyone else. In her new book, she takes on positive psychology despite knowing nothing about psychology.

She, as the review notes, doesn't understand regressions or statistical significance. (She's doesn't understand what a categorical variable is either.) She does know how to ask asinine questions about dimensional analysis and note that the functional form might be misspecified. But she doesn't understand non-parametric regression, which makes her criticisms moot. Somehow, the reviewer takes all of this as the mark of genius.

The worst part, though, is the reviewer's conclusion, a collection of platitudes about how knowing the truth is more important than being happy. It makes his ignorance about positive psychology to obvious. Does he know "[s]tudies indicate that depressed individuals have more realistic views than non-depressed people?" Is he saying we should all become depressed, lest (to paraphrase) fantasy take precedence over reality?

Gay people are better justices?

Ruth Marcus informs us that gay people make better judges than straight people:

[A gay nominee would improve] the court because -- as with any additional perspective -- an openly gay justice would add to the richness of the court's understanding of cases, particularly gay rights cases, that come before it.

If that sounds like it made sense, then you've been victimized either by groupthink or a manipulative commentator.

After all, she surely doesn't mean what she says--that any additional perspective would be good. If a former member of the KKK got nominated for the court I'd hope that the "perspective" (read: anti-black bigotry) he'd add wouldn't be celebrated in a major paper of record. There are clearly good points of view and bad points of view, so how do you tell them apart?

It seems to me the only way is to know how they will influence a justice's votes. To the extent a perspective makes judge likely to vote for gay marriage, constraints on corporations and affirmative, a liberal will say it's a healthy, necessary perspective. Mutatis mutandis for conservatives. So, in translation, Ruth was saying "a gay person will make a good judge because gays tend to be liberal and liberals are good justices." Now suppose you were a conservative, do you find that argument convincing?

So my question is "how do smart people end up writing such tripe?" Was she a victim of groupthink in D.C. or did she know she was just jerking people around?