“Something Interesting” is now retired, but in service of of digital housekeeping, here are some reflections that didn’t make it into the 2025 publication schedule.
Some of these pieces aren’t fleshed out as much as they should be. Others suffer from burdensome Twaininess (as Mark Twain or maybe someone else observed, I’d have written shorter posts if only I had more time). Some overlap with past posts. Some drill down into a topic of interest to few.
And do not ignore that all of these posts lost out to others when it came to filling my limited slots in a publication schedule. So be it. These are, as advertised, loose ends. But what the hell? Maybe you’ll find some useful food for thought in here somewhere.
And there’s one post that I never quite got ’round to writing. Much has been said about whether Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is “real” behavior analysis versus. I really wanted to write on how anything that works — and ACT works, as 1000 randomized controlled trials testify — necessarily taps into Nature’s laws of behavior. If behavior analysts who look into ACT’s mirror don’t see their own reflection, what does that tell us? Really there are only two choices. Either, as I suppose some critics would argue, ACT should to become more like traditional applied behavior analysis. Or, just maybe, conceptually and methodologically, behavior analysis needs to adapt so that it can comfortably encompass what ACT does. I’m not the only one to think this (e.g., see here and here), but that’s far from the majority view. Apologies for not giving this topic the attention it derserves.
