Paul Erickson > Quotes

“For Osgood, weapons not only made people tense; the arms race made humans positively irrational: Emotional tension produces stereotypy in our thinking; it restricts the range of alternatives we can conceive of, rendering us more rigid than flexible, and shortens our perspective, substituting blind reactions to immediate pressures for long-term persistence toward ultimate goals. In other words, paradoxically, the psychological conditions of prolonged deterrence produce the very states of mind which make it harder and harder to maintain deterrence.”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

“moving”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

“Sarason to analyze. On neighboring atolls, Alice Joseph and Melford Spiro administered the tests to a full population sample of Chamorros and Ifalukans, respectively. (Spiro added to the battery the Bavelas Moral-Ideological test as well.) Speed was of the essence—since the goal was optimally efficient research conducted by means of near-automatic methods—and it often seems (to the onlooker today) as if researchers cared as much about start-to-finish time clocked as the richness of their results. In-depth local knowledge was not an aim, per se. It was typical to note, as Joseph did, that their report was not meant to be a complete, penetrating study, but that “the work was planned experimentally as a deliberate attempt to find out how much information concerning personality structure in a cultural group can be obtained by a relatively short, standardized method in cases where there is not enough time for detailed personal and individual studies or systematic research on social and cultural backgrounds.”5 In the coming decade, these researchers passed their”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

“minds”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

“At the 1964 Berkeley conference “Strategic Interaction and Conflict,” Schelling cast about for a less rubbery, more descriptive term: “It would be useful if rationality were not a loaded term which implies it’s better to be rational, or that people who are rational are socially desirable, so they can’t be eccentric or crazy. If we could Latinize the term so that one word means ‘economic theory of rationality’ and another means something else, we’d be better off.”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality