That is too easy. When you see "someone choose to X", you'll usually take it to mean that the bloke could've done otherwise, ergo, if he choose to do something that did him wrong, he's responsible and hence, deserves the result he's obtained.

Maybe you can stretch the definition of responsibility too (stretch away http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth ), but the idea that people could do otherwise, or deserve their fate if they chose to do something 'wrong', knowing it was wrong to do it ... even barring the idea of a deserved fate, people often fall back to human nature, resorting to their heuristics and "general feeling about doing this or that".

That's not a choice. That's more like a curse, when your environmental conditions are just right and strong enough to give such processes PREDOMINANCE over your own 'rational' sophisticated mind. In such cases, you won't act rationally anymore; you've already been taken over, even if temporarily. We've been discussing akrasia and ego depletion a bit lately, this falls in the same category. Rationality is but the last layer of your mind. It floats over all those hardwired components of your mind. It is pretty fragile and artificial, at least when it comes to act rationally, as opposed to thinking rationally, or even easier, thinking about rationality.

So whether someone "choose it", or not, whatever meaning is bestowed upon the word choice, is not the most important thing. It's to understand why someone did something of a disservice to himself, and how he could be helped out of it, and if he should be helped out of it in the first place.

They are presented with situations in which multiple alternatives are possible, and they select one.

This does not cut it. First, you need to additionally specify that they are fully aware of these multiple possibilities. When a man decides to cross the street and gets killed by junk falling from the sky, he didn't choose to die.

Second, the word "select" fully encapsulates the mystery of the word "choose" in this context.

Third (I didn't originally make this clear), I'm not looking for a fully reductive explanation of choice, so the "explaining away" discussion isn't relevant. The statement "Believe me - they choose" appears to be attempting to communicate something, and I believe the payload is hiding in the connotation of "choose" (because the denotation is pretty tautological: people's actions are the result of their choices).

Belatedly I recall prior discussion of connotation. I've edited my original reply to include the flashy LW keyword "ADBOC".

Sounds like a sucker's game to me and I doubt I have any responsibility for your connotations [...] I have no idea where you connotations are - so you have all the cards.

This isn't an adversarial game. How do you know I will disagree with you? Even if you did know, why avoid it?

In a sense you are butting in on another conversation - where connotations are linked and have grown in context.. My use of the word choose is related to infotropism's descripiton of a hobo.

You uttered a statement of the form "Believe me - <tautology>" in direct reply to a comment I found fairly insightful. Infotropism laid out the connotation of his use of the word "choose" quite well, IMO, and your statement seems at odds with that.

When you are in the middle of an orgasium, come out of it, you want in again - Big Time.

If you define "choice" to cover this scenario in the context of a "who is worth helping" discussion, I question the value of the definition.

Connotations on the word "choice" are many, dialectical and necessarily VAGUE.

When that is the case for a word, you cannot use it to make a clear point without a supporting explanation. I'm assuming you didn't intend to make a vague point.