A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “disease classification”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander rebuts Bryan Caplan's arguments about mental illness, criticizing the preference/constraint dichotomy and providing counterarguments to Caplan's claims.
Scott Alexander critiques Bryan Caplan's constraints vs preferences model of mental illness, proposing instead a goals vs urges framework that better explains both mental and physical health issues.
Scott argues that debates about whether conditions like obesity are "real diseases" are ultimately questions about sympathy, blame, and treatment that should be addressed directly rather than through the misleading disease framework.