Well I do now.

- Alan Greenspan.
- Ben Bernanke.
- Mark Carney.
- Christopher Hitchens. 
- Sam Harris.
- Michael Shermer.
- Lawrence Krauss.
- Helmut Kohl.
- Gerald Ford.


ITT: Who has the best avatar(s) on the site?

Dont want to get pregnant?
Dont have sex!

-Nuka

This is Serious.

So you're saying I should have sympathy for a feeble minded psychopath who needs to go out and buy heroin, and not because he's making a stupid choice

I'm saying you should have an understanding that people who act in certain ways are predisposed (I'm purposely ignoring the word 'pre-determined') to act in that manner. You don't need to care or turn into a bleeding-heart for people who get addicted to drugs, and you don't need to feel sorry for the psychopath who murders 20 people, but holding the fact in your mind that they--essentially--can't help themselves is not only a, I think, healthier way of looking at humanity, but incredibly liberating for yourself as well.

If you agree that what people do in the grip of addiction is a medical condition, irrational and not subject to the normal conventions of personal autonomy and its consequences then you must necessarily agree the same is true for the behaviour leading up to the addiction.

Explain to me how someone who had never taken something before could possibly be addicted to it already.

Not quite.

The point is that people predisposed to addiction are also predisposed to make choices which would lead to that state of addiction. There are a whole host of behavioural 'variables' involved in addiction--impulse control, for one--which come together to increase the probability of a person taking an addictive drug in the first place.

It's just a necessary regression--people predisposed to addiction are also predisposed to doing things which would lead to that state of addiction.

If you've never done heroin then how do you know?

Because I understand, at least vaguely, how addiction works at the level of the brain. The reason it is an addiction is because it motivates people to behave in ways they wouldn't otherwise do while not ill in the fashion that they are.

I mean, y'know, why did Ted Bundy go out of his way to murder 20 or so women and then get fried in the electric chair. Because he was a psychopath. And, for that matter, addicted to certain behaviours and impulses.

Everything is reducible to the brain and how it operates. 

failing to follow directions properly.

I think the misunderstanding lies here. I'm saying that, in terms of addiction, the failure to follow directions properly is a result of some sort of addictive predisposition and thus can't properly be condemned as 'stupid'.

I'm probably just not getting what you're saying at this point, though, since I'm flicking between here and work. So, apologies if I've essentially put up a straw-man of your position.

Quote from: Comet on January 22, 2015, 03:05:35 AM

so the base of your argument is, "if you didnt want to get addicted, you shouldnt have taken drugs"?

if you're messing around with stupid and dangerous shit....yes?

That's like telling psychopaths not to be impulsive, or trans people to just not get gender dysphoria. It's not a case of free will, here, the causes of people becoming addicted to drugs--and, yes, taking them in the first place--is reducible to neurocognitive activity in the brain, over which we have no control.

What I mean is that, essentially, addiction to a certain substance is indicative of neurological imbalances.

I'll say it again: addiction is a medical condition arising from certain genetic and neurological predispositions--like all other human behaviour.

Condemning druggies because they 'chose' to take drugs isn't only counter-productive, it's borderline immoral.

Just found this on the AEI website and it talks about Jonathan Haidt's (who, bearing in mind, used to be a partisan Liberal) book The Righteous Mind which, by the way, I can't recommend highly enough.

To be “close-minded” is, according to the dictionary, to be “intolerant of the beliefs and opinions of others; stubbornly unreceptive to new ideas.” To be conservative and close-minded, according to popular portrayal, is a redundancy—a package deal that liberals can and do take for granted.

But University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind doesn’t simply suggest that conservatives may not be as close-minded as they are portrayed. It proves that the opposite is the case, that conservatives understand their ideological opposite numbers far better than do liberals.

Haidt’s research asks individuals to answer questionnaires regarding their core moral beliefs—what sorts of values they consider sacred, which they would compromise on, and how much it would take to get them to make those compromises. By themselves, these exercises are interesting. (Try them online and see where you come out.)

But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-indentified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is. If anyone is close-minded here it’s not conservatives.

Haidt has a theory regarding why this is the case, based on the idea that conservatives speak a broader and more encompassing language of six moral values while liberals embrace three of the six in a narrow set of core values. I see nothing wrong with this explanation.

But let me present a complementary, more practical explanation: If you’re a conservative who lives in a major metropolitan area or who simply reads the New York Times, you get used to being outnumbered by liberals. Liberals, by contrast, get used to being surrounded by other liberals, both in person and in culture and the media. As a result, liberals speak their minds freely, often in ways that are harshly condemnatory of conservatives and their stands on issues. As a conservative, you can defend your values against friends and acquaintances who essentially just called you stupid and evil or you can keep quiet.

Most conservatives, most of the time, choose the latter. That is, they stay in the closet to avoid being accused of hating the poor, gays, or polar bears. As a result, liberals aren’t gaining any commensurate information. In fact, the silence of their conservative friends helps reinforce their views. Much of the time, liberals’ views of conservative positions and values are simply a caricature that bear little resemblance to what conservatives actually think and, more importantly, why they think it.

But during that time when conservatives’ mouths are shut, their ears are open. They’re listening and understanding what liberals think—and what liberals think of them. Conservatives understand their own world—whether it’s of religious organizations, talk radio, Fox News, or whatever—along with the New York Times, network news world of liberals.

That helps explain why a conservative’s reaction to a liberal critique often isn’t “you’re wrong.” It’s “you don’t even know what I’m trying to say.” Haidt’s research seems to show that this reaction is warranted.

Meta's two cents:

Addiction, no matter what anybody says, is a medical issue and not a criminal issue. It's not a case of being idiotic, weak-willed or fundamentally 'problematic' of character. It's just unfortunate that you were probably predisposed to addiction in the first place, in the same way I'm predisposed to things like impulsivity and callousness.

Your news source is BBC...wouldn't they be biased?

The article itself is pretty balanced, but I don't see any reason why they'd be especially biased. The study is legitimate.

And I'm saying this as somebody who, oftentimes, isn't a fan of the BBC.

A God capable of being bored would be no God.

Then again, a God incapable of being bored would be no God.

Maximal greatness is a logically broken concept.

Shoot.

Oh God, I'm fucking dead. I lost it around 5.50.

ITT: Discuss how old people are secretly all psychopaths.