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Hey folks I wrote a blog post on therapy vs confession. If you want to see the images and stuff go to the substack link, otherwise putting all the text here cuz fk forcing people onto my blog. Hope you're having a good weekend.
People nowadays are always talking about how therapy is the new priesthood. Therapists are just secular priests, therapeutic work is the same as confession, etc etc. While I can understand where people are coming from, I want to tease apart the major differences I’ve found as someone who has done both a lot of therapy, and been blessed with the sacrament of holy confession.
Goals of Therapy vs Confession
What people often think of when they think about this is the traditional stereotypical role of a priest: you go into a little Catholic box that’s dark and has a little wooden screen. You’ve probably seen it in movies or TV shows. You confess all your deepest, darkest sins, etc., etc.
But for most people who don’t do confession anymore (at least in America, where a lot of modern culture and media is produced) most people aren’t going to confession. Even most Christians don’t really do it, as far as I know. Confession isn’t a huge thing in Protestant circles, and most American Christians are still Protestant. So you have this weird situation where the sacrament of holy confession has fallen out of the public consciousness quite a bit.
Therapy, at first glance, seems kind of like confession: you go into a room. Traditionally in psychoanalysis you don’t look at the psychoanalyst, right? Now it’s more common to have a face-to-face chat. You go through all your deepest, darkest secrets. You tell the therapist, and the therapist tries to help you with those deep, dark secrets, like the priest would as well.
But there are some major differences right from the start. First of all, when it comes to the actual rite, there’s a big difference in how you approach your quote-unquote “confessing” in therapy versus confession.
To start with, in confession (as someone who’s done holy confession a number of times and been blessed with that) it’s really a beautiful sacrament. The goal is to confess your sins. You’re going in there saying, “Okay, Father, I have sinned. I have made mistakes. I have done things that I knew were wrong and bad, and this is what they are.” You go in confessing sins (things you’re admitting to the Father are bad) and you ask for forgiveness. You ask for absolution from God, from Christ, the Holy Trinity, etc.
That’s a pretty important distinction because going in and saying, “Hey, I have sinned, I have made mistakes, I have offended God, I have been immoral” (however you want to put it) and asking for absolution and forgiveness is very different from what you’re doing in therapy.
In therapy, the goal is to go to your therapist and say, “Hey, I have some problems. I have mental health problems, interpersonal problems, and I want you to help me fix them.” You’re working together with the therapist. They call it the therapeutic relationship or whatever. But as the client and the therapist, you’re collaborating to solve problems that come up in your mind, your relationships, your job, etc.
While they may seem similar on the surface, these are extremely different things. When you go to confession and tell a priest, “Hey, I’ve sinned,” typically the priest isn’t sitting there hashing out with you how to fix it. That might happen a little, sometimes before or after, but the sacrament of confession is mainly the priest listening, maybe clarifying if something’s a sin worthy of confession, offering a bit of guidance, mostly just letting you confess, and then praying the prayers of holy confession to absolve you of your sin.
As opposed to therapy, where you go deep into it. In therapy the moral category isn’t as central. A therapist might say, “Oh no, that was bad, you shouldn’t have done that,” or “this person shouldn’t have done this,” but usually they have a much more problem-solving approach to interpersonal and mental issues.
So again to emphasize: the overall purpose, the telos, of confession versus therapy is very, very different.
The goal of confession is to absolve you of your sins. Holy confession has that power. This gets tricky depending on how much you believe Christian doctrine, of course? But as someone who’s done a lot of psychotherapy and also holy confession, I can tell you that even just experientially, phenomenologically, it feels extremely different.
In holy confession, you confess your sins. You tearfully tell your spiritual father the things you’re ashamed of, he puts his stole over your head, prays for you, and asks for and receives forgiveness and absolution. It’s beautiful. It’s an incredible experience.
You feel it in your heart and gut: the release of pressure, shame, and guilt. It’s divine.
I’ll add the caveat that you probably have to believe in God for this to work fully. The ritual and religious aspects have psychological effects even if you don’t believe, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s not nearly as impactful. I’ve never done holy confession without believing, so your mileage may vary.
With a therapist, you can have deep emotional experiences too. I’ve had sessions where I’ve gone deep into grief over losing loved ones, deep into childhood traumas, cried for 30 to 40 minutes. It’s meaningful and important to go through that and reach those difficult emotions.
But at the end of the day, it’s not as powerful as holy confession, at least in the moment. Therapy tends to work over far longer time periods, and it’s more of a knowledge-based process of learning and applying mental techniques. It’s in a different ballpark entirely.
Social Roles of Therapist vs Priest
Another important aspect of the distinction here is the different relationship you have with your therapist versus your priest. This gets confused a little in the modern era too. We’re not as tied into our church parishes as we used to be as Christians. I’m going to speak specifically here to priests of the Orthodox/Catholic and other high church groups.
As a client working with a therapist, it’s clear that you’re going to a professional you don’t have a personal connection with, who is “objective” about your situation, and who is using a rationalized set of techniques to help with your problems.
When you confess to a priest, that priest is your spiritual father (whom you literally call ‘father), and at least in the ideal parish situation, he’s someone who knows you well, who has seen you through difficulties and triumphs, and is a crucial part of your church community. You have a connection with him, and not just you: your loved ones, your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends and fellow parishioners, they all have a connection with this man too.
Therapy is by its nature very atomized, very individualistic: it’s you and a therapist talking about your problems. When you’re confessing to a priest, of course the seal of confession means he’ll never (or at least should never) discuss your sins with anyone else. (In my experience it doesn’t happen as much as people think. It’s very rare for priests to break the seal in Orthodox and Catholic churches.)
But you’re still telling your shameful secrets the leader of your community, a spiritual father who has relationships with you and the people around you. You’re inviting him to hear your deepest, darkest problems, sins, mistakes.
On the other hand, a therapist is never (or at least traditionally should never be) integrated into your community. There are many warnings for therapists in training about doing separate therapy with both a person and their spouse or children, for instance. There’s couples therapy and family therapy, but therapy cannot (and I don’t think should) replace the entire parish community. It can’t.
Perspective of a Therapist vs a Priest
So that’s how these two roles are different your perspective as a client or parishioner. But also, from the perspective of the therapist and the priest, the actual person doing the job has a distinct focus depending on the role.
For the priest, holy confession is a very important sacrament and a key part of their role, but it’s still a small part. The priest’s main job is to run the parish as an administrator, preach, pray the liturgy, lead the divine services, however many times a day or week.
So for a priest, hearing people’s deepest, darkest secrets and shames is something they do, and it’s very important. Holy confession is an incredibly beautiful sacrament, vital for healing, but it doesn’t happen every day for most priests, and it’s not what they spend most of their time on. Most of their time goes to leading the parish, the congregation, running the church.
Whereas for a therapist, probably 20 to 40 hours a week they’re hearing people’s shames, difficulties, and problems. So the therapist’s role is much more focused on that deep-dark-secret thing.
Ironically, I think that gives them a very different psychology. Priests in holy confession aren’t as focused on digging into every detail. “Oh, you feel this shame because of this childhood thing” or “maybe if you focus on it this way you won’t feel the shame.” The goal is to hear sins and absolve them.
For the therapist, the goal is to lean (ideally scientifically) into your inner neuroses, emotional issues, and solve them, or at least help you get back to functioning.
That gets to maybe the core distinction: a therapist’s job is to solve your problems and help you become a quote-unquote “functioning” person. The role of the priest in confession is to absolve you of your sins, via divine grace.
A therapist tends to see someone as a problem to be solved, in order to get them functional. A priest sees everyone as equally sinful, only ‘improving’ by the grace of God.
The Deeper Divide between Religion & Secular Technique
The lines between the emotional/mental/therapeutic world and the spiritual/religious world are notoriously blurry. There’s overlap and confusion.
If you talk to genuinely religious people who take faith seriously (and I think this holds for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.), they feel a real difference between psychotherapy and religious rites, rituals, and practices.
We could talk endlessly about why: whether there’s actual grace, or it’s psychological/ritualistic artifacts of our minds. But experientially, as the person actually going through them, you can tell that these two rituals are worlds apart.
I’m not sure why or how exactly, that’s a whole series of blog posts in itself.
Overall it’s easy to look at things with surface similarities and call them the same. We love to do it in the flattened modern world. But ultimately when it comes to therapy and confession, it’s just not true.
The purposes of the role, the experience of working with them, and the overall social context between a therapist and a priest have discrete, and crucial characteristics.
To be clear, both therapy and confession can be helpful and salutary. In general I’d pick holy confession if I had to choose one, but it’s a tight race for me.
Either way, I hope you come away from this article understanding a bit more about the differences, especially if you’ve never gotten the chance to confess your sings.
If you have objections, questions, or your own thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below.
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One view I hold - one I know many people here will be skeptical of - is that the future is partially predictable in a systematic way. Not in a deterministic or oracular sense, but in the limited, Tetlock-style sense of assigning calibrated probabilities to uncertain events and doing so better than baseline forecasters over time.
I’ve spent roughly the last 15 years trying to formalize and stress-test my own forecasting process. During that period, I’ve made public, timestamped predictions about events such as COVID, the Ukraine war, and various market movements. Some of these forecasts were wrong, some were directionally correct, and many were correct with meaningful lead time. Taken together, I think they at least suggest that forecasting can be treated as a learnable, improvable skill rather than an exercise in narrative hindsight.
When I’ve raised versions of this argument in the past (including in The Motte’s earlier Reddit incarnation), I’ve consistently encountered a few objections. I think these objections reflect reasonable priors, so I want to address them explicitly.
1 - “If prediction is possible, why aren’t the experts already doing it?”
My claim is not that expertise is useless, but that many expert institutions are poorly optimized for predictive accuracy. Incentives matter. Academia, media, and policy organizations tend to reward coherence, confidence, and alignment with prevailing narratives more than calibration or long-term scoring.
One reason I became interested in forecasting is that I appear to have unusually strong priors and pattern-recognition ability by objective measures. I’ve scored in the top 1% on multiple standardized exams (SAT, SHSAT, GMAT) on first attempts, which at least suggests above-average ability to reason under uncertainty and time pressure. That doesn’t make me infallible, but it does affect my prior that this might be a domain where individual skill differences matter.
Tetlock’s work also suggests that elite forecasting performance correlates less with formal credentials and more with specific cognitive habits: base-rate awareness, decomposition, active updating, and comfort expressing uncertainty numerically. These traits are not especially rewarded by most expert pipelines, which may explain why high-status experts often underperform trained forecasters.
My suspicion - very much a hypothesis, not a conclusion - is that many people in communities like this one are already better forecasters than credentialed experts, even if they don’t label what they’re doing as forecasting.
2 - “If you can forecast, why not just make money in markets?”
This is a fair question, since markets are one of the few environments where forecasts are continuously scored.
I have used forecasting methods in investing. Over the past five years, my average annual return has been approximately 40%, substantially outperforming major indices and comparable to or better than many elite hedge funds over the same period. This is net of mistakes, drawdowns, and revisions—not a cherry-picked subset.
That said, markets are noisy, capital-constrained, and adversarial. Forecasting ability helps, but translating probabilistic beliefs into portfolio construction, position sizing, and risk management is its own discipline. Forecasting is a necessary input, not a sufficient condition for success.
More importantly, I don’t think markets are the only - or even the most interesting - application. Forecasting is at least as relevant to geopolitics, institutional risk, public health, and personal decision-making, where feedback is slower but the stakes are often higher.
3 - “Where are the receipts?”
That’s a reasonable demand. I’ve tried to make at least some predictions public and timestamped so they can be evaluated ex ante rather than reconstructed after the fact.
Here are a few examples where I laid out forecasts and reasoning in advance:
https://questioner.substack.com/p/more-stock-advice
https://questioner.substack.com/p/superforecasting-for-dummies-9a5
I don’t claim these constitute definitive proof. At best, they are auditable data points that can be examined, criticized, or falsified.
What I’m Actually Interested in Discussing
I’m not asking anyone to defer to my forecasts, and I’m not claiming prediction is easy or universally applicable. What I am interested in is whether superforecasting should be treated as a legitimate applied discipline—and, if so:
Where does it work reliably, and where does it fail?
How should forecasting skill be evaluated outside of markets?
What selection effects or survivorship biases should we worry about?
Can forecasting methods be exploited or weaponized?
What institutional designs would actually reward calibration over narrative?
If your view is that forecasting success is mostly an artifact of hindsight bias or selective memory, I’d be genuinely interested in stress-testing that claim. Likewise, if you think forecasting works only in narrow domains, I’d like to understand where you’d draw those boundaries and why.
I’m less interested in persuading anyone than in subjecting the model itself to adversarial scrutiny. Looking forwards to hearing your thoughts.
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Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I found this insightful, particularly bringing back LLMs into the Yudkowski / Sequences fold, whereas many have claimed the rise of LLMs has shown decades of Yudkowskian AI speculation to be way off base. I don't have enough technical knowledge to evaluate the accuracy of this post, but I am hopeful that large parts of it are true.
The brute-force training process naturally sculpts Transformers into inference engines. They don’t just approximate the math; they build a physical geometry — orthogonal hypothesis frames and entropy-ordered manifolds — that implements Bayesian updating as a mechanical process.
They aren’t Bayesian by design; they are Bayesian by geometry.
To the extent the article has merit, it does seem to explain why CoT and Reasoning models are able to "outperform". The 20 questions model, where we are not merely bisecting the information space, but looking to maximize rejection or filtering, offers a lot of insight into the nature of the problem. When a fixed number of layers gets exhausted, is this where normal models hallucinate? With CoT or reasoning, we can feed the smaller space back into the first layer, and continue filtering down.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Happy New Year to all!
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@gog:
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