Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Conspiracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conspiracy. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Bombshell 400-page report finds Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors

Robert Downen and John Tedesco
Houston Chronicle
Originally posted 22 MAY 22

For 20 years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention — including a former president now accused of sexual assault — routinely silenced and disparaged sexual abuse survivors, ignored calls for policies to stop predators, and dismissed reforms that they privately said could protect children but might cost the SBC money if abuse victims later sued.

Those are just a few findings of a bombshell, third-party investigation into decades of alleged misconduct by Southern Baptist leaders that was released Sunday, nearly a year after 15,000 SBC church delegates demanded their executive committee turn over confidential documents and communications as part of an independent review of abuse reports that were purportedly mishandled or concealed since 2000.

The historic, nearly 400-page report details how a small, insular and influential group of leaders “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations” to prevent abuse. The report was published by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm that conducted 330 interviews and reviewed two decades of internal SBC files in the seven-month investigation.

“Survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its (structure) — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” Guidepost’s report concluded.

Guidepost investigated the SBC’s 86-member executive committee, the convention’s highest governing entity. The firm’s investigators had unprecedented access to the SBC’s leadership and reviewed thousands of internal documents — including previously confidential communications between SBC lawyers.

The investigation sheds new and unprecedented light on the backroom politicking and deceit that has stymied attempts at reforms and allowed for widespread mistreatment of child sexual abuse victims. And it exhaustively corroborates what many survivors have said for decades: that Southern Baptist leaders downplayed their own abuse crisis and instead prioritized shielding the SBC – and its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual donations — from lawsuits by abuse victims.

Among the findings:

A small group of SBC leaders routinely misled other members of the SBC’s executive committee on abuse issues, and rarely mentioned the frequent and persistent warnings and pleas for help from survivors.
  • Fearing lawsuits, leaders similarly failed to inform the SBC’s 15 million members that predators and pedophiles were targeting churches.
  • Longtime SBC leaders kept a private list of abusive pastors and ministers despite claiming for years that such an idea was impractical for stopping predators and impossible to adopt because of the SBC’s decentralized structure. Compiled since 2007, the roster contained the names of 703 offenders, most with an SBC connection. A few still work at churches in the SBC or other denominations.
  • Former SBC President Johnny Hunt is accused of sexually assaulting a woman weeks after his presidential tenure ended in 2010. The woman said Hunt manipulated her into silence by saying a disclosure of the incident would harm the SBC’s churches. Four other people corroborated much of the woman’s allegations to Guidepost. Hunt denied the allegations, but resigned from the SBC’s North American Mission Board days before the report was published.

Monday, September 6, 2021

Paranoia and belief updating during the COVID-19 crisis

Suthaharan, P., Reed, E.J., Leptourgos, P. et al. 
Nat Hum Behav (2021). 
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01176-8

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the world seem less predictable. Such crises can lead people to feel that others are a threat. Here, we show that the initial phase of the pandemic in 2020 increased individuals’ paranoia and made their belief updating more erratic. A proactive lockdown made people’s belief updating less capricious. However, state-mandated mask-wearing increased paranoia and induced more erratic behaviour. This was most evident in states where adherence to mask-wearing rules was poor but where rule following is typically more common. Computational analyses of participant behaviour suggested that people with higher paranoia expected the task to be more unstable. People who were more paranoid endorsed conspiracies about mask-wearing and potential vaccines and the QAnon conspiracy theories. These beliefs were associated with erratic task behaviour and changed priors. Taken together, we found that real-world uncertainty increases paranoia and influences laboratory task behaviour.

Discussion

The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with increased paranoia. The increase was less pronounced in states that enforced a more proactive lockdown and more pronounced at reopening in states that mandated mask-wearing. Win-switch behaviour and volatility priors tracked these changes in paranoia with policy. We explored cultural variations in rule following (CTL) as a possible contributor to the increased paranoia that we observed. State tightness may originate in response to threats such as natural disasters, disease, territorial and ideological conflict. Tighter states typically evince more coordinated threat responses. They have also experienced greater mortality from pneumonia and influenza throughout their history. However, paranoia was highest in tight states with a mandate, with lower mask adherence during reopening. It may be that societies that adhere rigidly to rules are less able to adapt to unpredictable change. Alternatively, these societies may prioritize protection from ideological and economic threats over a public health crisis or perhaps view the disease burden as less threatening.

Friday, November 9, 2018

Believing without evidence is always morally wrong

Francisco Mejia Uribe
aeon.co
Originally posted November 5, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

But it is not only our own self-preservation that is at stake here. As social animals, our agency impacts on those around us, and improper believing puts our fellow humans at risk. As Clifford warns: ‘We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to …’ In short, sloppy practices of belief-formation are ethically wrong because – as social beings – when we believe something, the stakes are very high.

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Translating Clifford’s warning to our interconnected times, what he tells us is that careless believing turns us into easy prey for fake-news peddlers, conspiracy theorists and charlatans. And letting ourselves become hosts to these false beliefs is morally wrong because, as we have seen, the error cost for society can be devastating. Epistemic alertness is a much more precious virtue today than it ever was, since the need to sift through conflicting information has exponentially increased, and the risk of becoming a vessel of credulity is just a few taps of a smartphone away.

Clifford’s third and final argument as to why believing without evidence is morally wrong is that, in our capacity as communicators of belief, we have the moral responsibility not to pollute the well of collective knowledge. In Clifford’s time, the way in which our beliefs were woven into the ‘precious deposit’ of common knowledge was primarily through speech and writing. Because of this capacity to communicate, ‘our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought’ become ‘common property’. Subverting this ‘heirloom’, as he called it, by adding false beliefs is immoral because everyone’s lives ultimately rely on this vital, shared resource.

The info is here.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Science Journal Pulls 60 Papers in Peer-Review Fraud

By Henry Fountain
The New York Times
Originally published July 10, 2014

A scientific journal has retracted 60 papers linked to a researcher in Taiwan, accusing him of “perverting the peer-review process” by creating fraudulent online accounts to judge the papers favorably and help get them published.

Sage Publications, publisher of The Journal of Vibration and Control, in which the papers appeared over the last four years, said the researcher, Chen-Yuan Chen, had established a “peer-review and citation ring” consisting of fake scientists as well as real ones whose identities he had assumed.

The entire story is here.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

L.A. Psych School Lied, Class Claims

By WILLIAM DOTINGA
Courthouse News Service
November 15, 2012


Students claim in a class action that the Los Angeles campus of the Chicago School of Professional Psychology recruited them by lying that it was accredited by the American Psychological Association.

Miranda Jo Truitt and three other named plaintiffs sued the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and its subsidiaries, including TCS Global, in Superior Court. They allege fraud, conspiracy, false advertising and consumer law violations.

Also named as defendants are the California Graduate Institute and the school's national president Michelle Nealon-Woods and "lead faculty" member of the Los Angeles campus, David Sitzer.

The students claim the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, or TCS, was "ostensibly formed, organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code for the 'advancement of education and science,' but in fact is being operated by its management team for the benefit of private interests for financial profit and personal gain through a network of interrelated companies and entities owned and controlled by TCS.

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this story.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Physician Guilty of Medicare Fraud Put Patients at Risk


By Robert Lowes
Medscape Medical News
Published January 18, 2012

A stiff prison sentence handed down to a physician in Los Angeles, California, last week for his role in a massive Medicare scam highlights how a seeming burlesque of medicine posed a danger to patients.

Alexander Popov, MD, was sentenced to 8 years and 1 month in prison in a federal court in Sacramento, California, after a jury last year found him guilty of conspiring to — and committing — healthcare fraud. An indictment issued in 2010 stated that Dr. Popov and 4 other physicians allowed a man named Vardges Egiazarian, who owned 3 clinics in the California cities of Carmichael, Richmond, and Sacramento, to submit Medicare claims in their names. Dr. Popov took on the role of co-owner and practitioner at the Sacramento clinic but never saw a patient there, according to federal prosecutors.

Over the course of 2 and a half years, Dr. Popov and the other physicians submitted more than $5 million worth of bogus claims to Medicare for nonexistent or unnecessary services, of which they received $1.7 million. The physicians' share of the take was 20% of what was paid out under their Medicare provider number.

In a sentencing memo filed in the case, federal prosecutors credit Dr. Popov and the other conspirators with doing "everything necessary to establish and operate a health clinic, with the exception of actual healthcare." As part of their hustle, they paid "cappers" to recruit and transport patients to the clinics, and the patients themselves received $100 each for showing up — a kind of reverse copay.

The patients, who were predominantly elderly immigrants who did not speak English, received little if any medical care during their visits. Clinic employees nevertheless recorded in their charts that they had received a comprehensive exam and a broad array of diagnostic tests. Staff would plug in off-the-shelf test results or would run tests on themselves and use those numbers. Dr. Popov, who lived in Los Angeles, saw none of these patients in person, but signed the charts anyway, according to prosecutors.

The entire story can be found here.