Ah, the hallmark of 20th century pseudo-intellectualism: operationalize an ill-defined concept (e.g. "free will," "rationality," "empathy"), produce a dubiously reproducible experiment, maybe write a controversial paperback making ridiculously hyperbolic claims, let the press go apeshit, $$$.<p>Other flavors include:
Pluck a plausible, edgy explanation out of a vast hypothesis space (e.g. evolutionary psychology), over-reductively apply a catchy theorem to a vastly complicated domain (looking at you, game theory). Take a thin, ecologically invalid model and claim "that's how the brain works!" (both neural networks and sybolic reasoning systems).<p>I feel like in this century, we've realized that all of this was maybe useful as a reference point to formulate hypotheses, but become less stupid about the conclusions we're willing to draw (as a population).<p>The wonderful reality is that we don't really have strong opinions about free will, because we're not sure we really know what that could mean or why precisely it seemed so important a century ago.