It's true

If you're going to play guilt by association, this guy is far worse.



Crazy preachers and their hostility to reason.

Makes me appreciate all that book learnin'.

Disability, mental health, and scientific rigor

Anti-psychotic use soars in U.S. and U.K.

What is more interesting to me, and much more fundamental, is the very low level of scientific rigor that is involved, typically, with the diagnoses of conditions that are the bases for these prescriptions.

That will be the subject of my master's thesis. It is the practical legwork for Stephen Jay Gould's brilliant book on the subject, generally, The Mismeasure of Man.

People are constantly looking for biological, immutable, unchangeable bases for social phenomena. That is the subject of that book. And my work can more squarely explain the phenomena, I think, and why people turn to such diagnoses when they are frustrated with issues in the social world that they do not understand well enough or do not want to take responsibility for.

And we have much to understand and take responsibility for.

Prison policy follies

Fiscal Pressures Lead Some States to Free Inmates Early

How interesting and much more fruitful would it be to base sentencing on its empirical likelihood to contain dangerous individuals and either affect or not affect change in behavior?

We haven't explored it not because such a proposal would not be more intelligent and constructive. It would be both. We have not explored it because we are commited to sentencing as an opportunity for retribution or controlling behavior, like drug use (which it has clearly failed to do, by any measure), rather than more effectively correcting behavior.

Until we do, it is nice to watch us fumble forward while we get this figured out.