Any study of a program's efficacy has to cut out participants who don't complete enough of the program for it to be effective. If a high school student shows up for class only three days a week, every week, and then gets a poor grade at the end of the year, the course material seems a poor starting point for troubleshooting.
It may be that the kids who do barely half the training tend to be the same ones who use drugs, but the program designers don't know whether that's true at the outset, and they have to draw a line somewhere. Without a separate study to first determine what percentage of students tend both to do drugs and to skip out of anti-drug training, the researchers can't take such associations into account.
It's certainly possible (and maybe likely) that the study's authors chose the most favorable cutoff point. I wonder what it would have looked like if they'd chosen only kids who'd completed 80 percent of the coursework. If the numbers didn't look good from that angle, it would be more damning than the criticism offered by Moilanen. Too bad we'll probably never see the raw numbers required to draw our own conclusions.
Dan Hull
Antelope, CA
Self Delusions
Julian Sanchez's well-reasoned review of Owen Flanagan's The Problem of Soul ("Self Delusions," January) may be further developed on two crucial fronts.
First, Flanagan's general contention (as summarized by Sanchez) that "it would not count as an act of free will if some nondeterministic quantum fluctuation" causally contributed to an eventual action (an argument long rehashed since the advent of quantum physics) presupposes a myopic view of "freedom" and "self-authorship."
As posited by the Oriental doctrine of wu wei, one may freely -- and quite literally -- open one's mind to random neurophysiological inputs and still claim personal responsibility for that act of openness, if not sole authorship for its consequences. On this nontraditional account of free will, we retain self-authorship by virtue of freely deciding to initiate an undetermined "value experiment."
Second, even without a libertarian free will we are still, as Sanchez highlights, left with the option of being more or less reflective with respect to determined actions. In this sense, the real "problem of the soul" may turn out to be that we have been focusing on free will rather than free consciousness.
Christian P. Erickson
San Francisco, CA
I find it interesting that reviewer Julian Sanchez, and apparently author Flanagan, conclude that the absence of a permanent "self" is a new insight, a result of modern neuroscience. The notion is, however, at the very core of Buddhism, a religion and philosophy now about 2,500 years old. Almost every word of the review could have been written by a Buddhist, although the citations (Rand, Wittgenstein, Hayek, Nozick) doubtless would have been different.
Needless to say, there is a profound role for morality in Buddhism, even without a permanent self, due to (as they see it) the law of cause and effect: karma. To oversimplify, we are punished by our sins, not for them. A Buddhist is as free as a libertarian, though: One's karma is one's history, not one's fate; it conditions our actions but does not determine them.
Albert S. Kirsch
Bal Harbour, FL
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.8.10 @ 3:41AM|#
hfh