From Osher Doctorow

As my wife Marleen is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, I'm especially
interested in a part of psychology that's probably little known to
most people, namely:

1) knowing the difference(s) between 2 (or more) stimuli
2) knowing the similarity or similarities between 2 (or more) stimuli.

The first is called "discrimination" in psychology, the second
"integration", although "generalization" is a common popular word for
it (somewhat confused with "over-generalization").

To make a long story short, here's the application of discrimination
and integration to physics and politics.

Currently, USA politics at the Presidential level is torn between Jobs
and Self-Defense, while physics on the internet is torn between
serious presenters of their own theories/ideas and people who do
almost nothing but make derogatory comments about serious presenters
(as on sci.physics) - trolls and graffiti artists.

The deepest cause of both of these problems is, in my view, inability
to discriminate and to integrate stimuli.

For example, trolls and graffiti artists on sci.physics and other
forums can't distinguish who is the Victim and who is the Victimizer -
they think that making derogatory personal and impersonal comments
about other people's ideas does not make them Victimizers but Victims.

Similarly, in politics, the Bush Administration focuses on Self-
Defense to the exclusion of Jobs, and the Democrats focus on Jobs to
the exclusion of Self-Defense, so that they close their eyes to
Victimization in one of the two fields but not supposedly in the
other. They don't see anything common to both problems, and they
don't see any differences in their behavior in regard to both
problems.

I don't think that Graffiti Artists/Trolls and most Politicians are
even legally Sane, since they can't distinguish between Right and
Wrong or Victim versus Victimizer.

Osher Doctorow