Whoops, one more thing.

Mike wrote:

I don't get why conservatives are interested.

I haven't read the conservatives' articles, but I can easy infer why
the conservatives are interested.  There's a considerable amount of
material in the Satel & Lilienfeld book about how we can reconcile a
neurologized view of behavior with the idea of personal responsibility
(and culpability) for one's actions.  I liked their treatment of the
topic; it didn't ping my partisan-politics detector.  But it could
easily be grist for that mill.

And there were some ideas that were conspicuously absent from the
book.  For example, in an otherwise good discussion of evidence that
addiction does not obliterate the capacity for choice (citing the
relevant data on contingency-management treatment), there was no
discussion of the disproportionate conditional probability of
addiction (that is, the probability of addiction given use) among
socioeconomically disadvantaged people whose options are limited and
whose time horizons are short.  The prescription for that problem
should be social-structural change, not just individual treatment.
Satel and Lilienfeld don't say so.

--David Epstein
  [email protected]


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