More Fun With Numbers

One common thing that AAs do who enter the effectiveness of AA debate, is cite ridiculous sources, or information they do not fully understand. This is the case today with a regular reader of the blog, McGowdog, who cut and pasted from a paper that was written by three AAs, including Glenn Chestnut, who once wrote this about AA:

“…unbelievers will quickly start running you around in logical circles which you will never get out of — so I don’t even try to defend it rationally and logically.”

He was not kidding, either. He and his two cohorts came up with this review of AA’s triennial survey’s. Logical, it was not. It was obviously not written by academics who understand how to interpret the data properly. When I first read this, its conclusions were so far off base, that I gave it to some cohorts of mine at Harvard who specialize in such things. I thought maybe I was missing something. They dismissed it as “junk science”, and we actually wrote about this here last April: How Alcoholics Anonymous Lies With Statistics. It summarizes the way the data in this review was manipulated.

Most of what McGowdog wrote below is plagiarized from this paper. This is another piece of fool’s gold for someone who desperately wants to believe the steps are effective. One rule to remember in reading this: academic language does not make a paper academic.

Quote of the Day

“Interesting statistics — 95% of all people leave AA? I think not. My experience is that real alcoholics who drift away from AA do not live happily ever after….“ – Ken H, explaining how those who can be sober after leaving AA are not “real alcoholics”.

Explaining the 5%

I was up late last night watching the Super Bowl coverage, and I don’t feel like working. So, I thought I would take a quick moment to explain the 5% success rate to those of you who aren’t very good with numbers, like our friend McGowdog, who wrote the following in the comment section:

So there’s your strawman argument right there. Y’all learned it from Agent Orange and are spewing it out right here. The “thousands of interpretations in between” is your assessment of a fellowship that still has recovery rates vastly more successful than the dribble that Orange spews out and you mimic here. Here’s a truer retention rate of A.A.s by length of sobriety which debunks Oranges and others observation of AAWS stats;

A.A. Members’ Length of Sobriety:

Less than one year….. 26%

1-5 years………………. 24%

5-10 years…………….. 14%

10+ years………………. 36%

Yet, y’all are going to gasp with fear when you see this and you all know in your little heads that it’s 5% or less. In fact, you think the retention rate of A.A. is a negative percentage, everybody is drunk, and everybody who gets breathed on by an A.A.er is going to get drunk as well as it’s a contagious disease.

There is a reason why we don’t allow anecdotal evidence in science. It is more often wrong than right. Perception can be a crazy thing sometimes. A person walking into an established AA group might be led to believe that it really is effective in getting people off of the sauce. After all, a good portion of the room is quit, and has stayed quit for some time. Obviously, it works for some folks, right? Well, no. Not really.

The most common reason people fall for pseudoscience is because they mistake correlation with cause. Correlation simply means there is a relationship between two different things. For example, most racing horse jockeys are very short and small, and most professional basketball players are very tall. Does horse racing shorten people, and does basketball make people taller? Of course not. Do hospitals make people sick? No. The reason basketball players are tall, is because tall people congregate to basketball teams. Sick people congregate to hospitals. Likewise, people who quit drinking congregate to AA. There is no difference really.

Straw Man Whack-A-Mole

Straw Man: A logical fallacy by where a person misrepresents an opponents position in an argument, so it can be torn down.

Among the more frustrating things in discussing AA with a twelve-stepper is that every individual has his or her own conception of what is AA. Most of the resident AAs who comment on this blog are hardcore AAs, and tend to have a more fundamentalist view of the organization. Others use AA as nothing more than a support group. And of course, there the thousands of other interpretations that fall somewhere between the two extremes.

Quote of the Week

“The ‘insane’ behavior is that the person continues a certain lifestyle…a certain style of thinking about the world and interacting with it…which remains fundamentally unchanged after the ingestion of the substance ceases. Call it ‘dry drunk’, narcissism, addictive thinking, cognitive distortions, whatever.

Some here have presented convincing statements that AA is the key to progressing from rigidity and limitation to flexibility and possibility….”

-L Ron Hubbard…..No, I’m only joking. It was “Overman” – An AA fundy during a discussion of a dry drunk in the Sober Recovery forum.

Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

When Richard Heene, part time pseudo-scientist and full time wingnut, set his balloon adrift above the skies of Colorado and falsely claimed that his six-year old son was inside the thing, he did so with the expectation that he would not get caught. When he eventually did get caught, he made what appeared to be a heartfelt apology when, choking back tears, he said in court, “I want to apologize to all the rescue workers out there and the people who got involved in the community.” A month later he told Larry King, “It wasn’t a hoax.” He then went on to explain to Larry that his courtroom apology had been misinterpreted, and he wasn’t apologizing for trying to dupe the world, but was apologizing for causing people such an inconvenience. I’m not sure if this guy is a narcissist or a sociopath. I’m not a shrink, and there is a lot of wiggle room in diagnosing him. One thing I know for certain is that he is self serving, and his apology didn’t ring true to me, even before he pulled his 180 apology reversal on the Larry King show. Some things a person just knows, I knew that Balloon Man was only sorry that he got caught.

We see this type of public display of contrition with a lot with sports figures who get caught cheating, or public figures who get their hands caught in the cookie jar (or other their body parts caught in…well, you know). Mark McGwire, Eliot Spitzer, Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan, Charles Barkley, Ted Haggard, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Swaggart and John Edwards are among a long list of famous people who looked us squarely in the eye and told how sorry they were. Tiger Woods will be added to that list once he speaks to his handlers and public relations firm, who will advise him on how sorry he needs to be. The one thing they have in common is that they weren’t sorry until they got caught doing whatever dastardly thing it was that got them into a pickle in the first place. It is much like the time back when I was in grade five, and I got caught sneaking under Becky Johnson’s desk to get a peek up her skirt and at her unmentionables. Our teacher, Miss Scarborough, forced me to confront Becky and apologize. Sure, I was sorry – sorry that I got caught.

Welcome Back, MA!

I thought you needed a new mustache.

The Double Bind – Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t

One of my favorite jokes starts out with a guy on his first day in prison, who upon meeting his new cell-mate is confronted with the question, “would you like to be the ‘husband’ or ‘the wife’?” Neither of those is a particularly favorable answer. Back in the days of the Salem witch trials, defendants were tossed into a pond. Those who sank and drowned were found innocent of being a witch, and those who floated were found guilty and executed. Given the choice of being tried as witch, or confronted with the two options that were given to the new prisoner, I’m not sure which one I would want to take.

The two examples above are known as double binds. A double bind is one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” kind of dilemmas. The term was created by Gregory Bateson, a British linguist who studied schizophrenia, where he used the term “double bind” to describe as a symptom the stress that schizophrenics feel when perceiving two conflicting messages. A double bind as used by Bateson is a communication dilemma, and can be conveyed both verbally and non-verbally. Double binds are used by abusers of all sorts, particularly among authority figures. I recently read about a priest who had molested a number of kids over the years, always telling him that he loved them, God loved them, and they should not tell anyone about the abuse because nobody else would understand, so they should leave it between the child, the priest and God. The double bind for the children were:

If they did tell anyone: They would be breaking a covenant with God.
If the didn’t tell anyone: The abuse would continue.

Thought of the Day

Perhaps those AAs who are getting sober with the help of their Higher Power™ could “go it alone” for a few days so God can sort out things in Haiti.

Nice To Be Back

It has been some time since I have made a post here, but after a hiatus due to both some health issues and just plain tiredness, I am back to post until I once more get burned out and need to take a break.

I like to mock AA, and among the things I enjoyed about writing in this blog is the good nature of many AAs who joined in the conversation. One thing that FTG and I hoped to convey is that although we aren’t big fans of Alcoholics Anonymous, we have no problem with AAs — even those who peer in here every so often and go off on us with a serenity rant. I hope to provide both the hilarity and mockery that the readers came to enjoy, and I hope that many of them find their way back here to join in the conversations. I have noticed that many of the comments made here have either been blocked, or have wound up in our spam bin, left unattended. We don’t block comments, no matter how vulgar or ridiculous they might sound. I’ll approve those comments that have been blocked over the last few months, so you might find some suddenly appear out of context. I apologize for that.

Thanks, folks.

MA