"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 4 - The Martians" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

situation, this group of experts were doing what they would do to win a grant,
or to win over a committee judging a tenure application package. Something
like that. The fact that they had never faced a task quite like this one was
problematic but not debilitating.
Unless they considered the situation to be unstable beyond the point of
prediction. Some situations were like that; even the best meteorologists could
not well predict hailstorms, even the best battlefield commanders could not
predict the course of surprise attacks. For that matter some recent studies
had shown that it was much the same with psychologists when they attempted to
predict people's future mental diagnoses from their scores on standard
psychological tests. In each case there wasn't enough data. And so Michel
stared intently at their faces, pink or brown summaries of their
personalities, trying to read the whole in the part.

Except it was not really true. Faces could be deceptive, or
uninformative; and personality theory was notoriously vexed by deep
uncertainties of all kinds. The same events and environments produced
radically different results in people, that was the plain fact. There were too
many confounding factors to say much about any aspect of personality. All the
models of personality itself -the many, many theories - came down to a matter
of individual psychologists codifying their guesses. Perhaps all science had
this aspect, but it was so obvious in personality theory, where new
propositions were supported by reference to earlier theorists, who often
supported their assertions by reference to even earlier theorists, in strings
all the way back to Freud and Jung, if not Galen. The fascinating
Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy was a perfect example of this, as was
Jones's classic The New Psychology of Dreaming. It was a standard technique:
citing a guess by a dead authority added weight to one's assertions. So that
often the large statistical tests administered by contemporary psychologists
were designed mostly to confirm or disconfirm preliminary intuitive stabs by
near-Victorians like Freud, Jung, Adler, Sullivan, Fromm, Maslow, etc. You
picked the earlier expert whose guesses seemed right to you, then tested these
intuitions using current scientific techniques. If going back to the original
either/or, Michel chose Jung over Freud; after that he was partial to the
whole utopian self--definition crowd - Fromm,

_Erikson, Maslow - and the matching philosophers of freedom from the same era,
people like Nietzsche and Sartre. And the latest in modern psychology, of
course - tested, peer-reviewed, and published in the journals.
But all his ideas were elaborations of an original set of feelings about
people. A matter of hunches. On that basis he was supposed to evaluate who
would or would not do well if removed to Mars. Predicting hailstorms and
surprise attacks. Interpreting personality tests designed according to the
paradigms of alchemists. Even asking people about their dreams, as if these
were anything more than the detritus of the sleeping brain! Dream
interpretation: once Jung dreamed about killing a man named Siegfried, and he
struggled mightily to figure out what the dream might have meant, never once
wondering if it had anything to do with his immense anger at his old friend
Freud. As Fromm noted later, 'the slight change from Sigmund to Siegfried was
enough to enable a man whose greatest skill was the interpretation of dreams,