“Conservatives are typically more bothered by oversimplified (mis)representations that sometimes spread through the media (especially the blogosphere), than by the actual details of our research.”

For him to accuse ‘conservatives’ of yielding to oversimplified misrepresentations is quite interesting, since he paints those same individuals with the following broad brush in the second question:

““We’ll kill all the terrorists,” may be an unrealistic goal (even setting aside the question of whether it’s a desirable goal), but it does assuage the fear, at least temporarily, in clear and unambiguous terms. Even with regard to global warming, conservatives (when they admit the problem) state simply that, “The market will fix it.”

I don’t know if he is so poorly educated in politics to actually buy in to such cartoonish depictions of conservative cro-magnons, or if he is simply being dishonest, cowardly hiding his agenda behind a facade of objectivity (I suspect the latter, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt). His language is tantamount to the oversimplifications of a Bill O’Reilly. It’s the equivalent of saying “Barack Obama may want to seize the wealth of upper class for redistribution, but we need to understand this primordial human tendency towards sharing among the tribe”. No sir, stupid assumptions lead to poor conclusions.

While there may be great potential for this line of research in general, he doesn’t show adequate insight into his own political preconceptions necessary to do good science. His faux charitability towards ‘conservativism’ (as he misconstructs it) is particularly silly (i.e., that conservatives are plugged into the brain’s low-level knee jerk fear responses, so points to them for at least knowing how to scare people!).

I appreciated that he speaks directly in the last paragraph about his progressive vision. I would be far more receptive to him if he ceased couching his agenda in pseudoscience with a predetermined outcome, and simply worked on behalf of what he wanted to see happen politically.

What bothers me is this term “liberal”. Have these “scientific” studies included moderates? It seems like we’re only studying the two extremes.

Also, the idea of “letting the market take care of it” baffles me. Yes it may calm people down, but how does that change people’s behavior? It seems like just because it does not backfire does not equal “it works” ;)