http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/currentview.html#amusing Grab this puppy today. A colleague of mine forwarded to be a URL for this and informs me that it will be moved to the archives shortly. Yet in extract:

I promised you an amusing story.

The Writers of the Future contest was set up by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Dianetics and the Church of Scientology.

It is operated by his literary estate, Author Services Incorporated, which has close ties to Scientology. One may have varying views about Scientology, but the contest is quite straightforward and does a lot of good. The judges are science fiction writers including myself, Larry Niven, Greg Benford, Charles Sheffield, Fred Pohl, Tim Powers, Jack Williamson, and a cast of plaster, and the contest is conducted under the supervision of coordinating judge Algis Budrys whose integrity is unquestionable. If any of the winners of the contest have been Scientologists I don't know it for a fact (no reason why someone might not be) but I do know for a fact that a lot of winners are definitely not.

One of those was Dr. Ilsa Bick. Here she is with her husband Dr. David Bick:

[p9160652.jpg (165459 bytes)] We're riding over to the awards ceremony in a limousine -- ASI does this contest right with a lot of attention to details.

That's Edna Budrys and Charlie Brown of the SF news magazine Locus facing us, and Roberta dressed to the nines next to Dr.

Bick.

[p9160661.jpg (177704 bytes)] And there's Dr. Bick again, in a not very flattering expression but it's the best one I have. The amusement is that she's a psychiatrist, board certified. But when her biography was announced at the awards, all references to that were cut out; it made her sound like a housewife and mother (which she is in addition to her other accomplishments). Now to Scientologists the only group more evil than psychiatrists is the IRS, and apparently someone in the ASI office just couldn't stand it that a contest winner -- the winners are determined by the judges and ASI has no control over that -- was a real live -- horrors! -- shrink.

Incidentally, there was a time when I shared their contempt for psychiatry, but that was back when I was in graduate school, and psychiatrists consisted largely of two groups:

Freudians who talked people to death while charging enormous fees for "analysis" which certainly did no more good than Dianetics auditing; and the ones who took their MD degrees seriously and used insulin shock, electro-shock, hot boxes, and other instruments of torture more appropriate to the middle ages than to the Twentieth Century. The evidence for Freudian theories of personality with its elaborate constructions was certainly no greater than that for Hubbard's Analytic and Reactive Minds, and Hubbard's people didn't administer massive doses of electricity, insulin, etc., nor extirpate part of the forebrain by inserting needles up the eyeball. At the University of Iowa the psychology department did some studies on the effectiveness of psychiatry in diagnosis and treatment and concluded that they didn't know what they were doing, arrogantly asserted that they did, and quite often did more harm than good.

So Hubbard's contempt for these people, who put him out of business -- he didn't claim Church status and Freedom of Religion when Dianetics first came out -- wasn't all that unjustified.

But things change. Most of what I learned in Abnormal Psychology was nonsense, just as most of Freudian analysis is nonsense. Meanwhile the geneticists -- Dr. David Bick is a genetics physician -- and the physiologists and the pharmacologists have found real mechanisms and real cures for a number of "psychological" disorders. Depression is routinely treated with drugs, not long expensive sessions lying on a couch speaking to someone trained in the art of the analytical deadpan. SAMe takes care of depression for a lot of people, and it's now routinely sold in drug chain stores as well as health food stores -- a few years ago the FDA confiscated any shipments of it to the US from Italy and other places where it was widely used. And so forth. We know a LOT more about the mechanisms of the mind than we did when Hubbard's Dianetics book came out.

So I find this rather amusing. It's also the first instance I can think of in which the Scientology belief system seems to have inserted itself into any detail of the Writers of the Future contests, and as I said, I find it amusing. So did Dr.

Bick after some time brooding.

-- The Skeptic Tank http://www.skeptictank.org/ frice@skeptictank.org http://www.nots.org/ http://www.taxexemptchildabuse.net/ http://www.xenu.net/ http://mp3.cafepress.com/skeptictank/ http://www.bobminton.org/

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