domain:jessesingal.substack.com
Throwaway05
3hr ago
- Therapy is better than you think.
I don't really want to write an entire novel on research and stuff but the short version is that medical research is hard and research on anything that involves people and society is also hard. This results in seemingly low effect sizes for therapy but that shit really does work. It's not necessarily going to work for every patient, situation, (and critically) or therapist.
Part of the problem is that we have a large number of low skill therapists, incorrect patient therapist/modality matches, incorrect indications, and the whole therapy culture thing.
CBT and DBT have excellent evidence bases for instance and are meant to be highly structured with clear end points. We also have a pretty good understanding of what patients and situations should use each of those therapy modalities.
PTSD treatment is done through therapy and can be quite effective.
For many common conditions you very much need both medication and therapy (and only using medication leading to poor efficacy is the other side of the psychiatric complaint coin).
However most presentations of therapy you see on the internet are people getting matched to a random low skill therapist they don't vibe with and indefinitely engaged in a process that is never explained to them which therefore feels like just venting.
That's not the real thing, in the same way paying your friend who is a college athlete to help you isn't the same as getting actual PT.
However low skill therapy is probably better to have around for society than nothing and high skill therapy can be extremely expensive so we are stuck with this.
- AI therapy is ASS (well, so is much of real therapy too).
The preliminary research seems pretty good but a lot of psychiatrists are essentially betting their careers that some of the usual business is happening: motivated research looking for the "right" conclusion, poor measures of improvement (patients may feel subjectively supported but don't have an improvement in functional status), and so on. Every time The New Thing comes out it looks great initially and then is found to be ass or a bit more sketchy.
The lack of existential fulfillment provided by AI, overly glazing behavior, and a surplus of Cluster-B users and the psychotic receiving delusion validation will lead to problems including likely a good number of patients who may end up actually dangerous and violent.
If the tools don't improve drastically quickly (which they probably will be) I'd expect a major terror event then STRONG guard rails.
You see some reports on social media of doctors finding their patients encouraged to do some really bad shit by a misfiring chatbot.
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
Even Judas Priest wasn't metal until their second album, the 1976 Sad Wings of Destiny. That's six years between Black Sabbath releasing Paranoid and Judas Priest doing anything that could be called metal. I think much of it is Black Sabbath's influence being so ubiquituous in metal that people don't realize that it's all taken straight from Black Sabbath. Things like heavy power chord riffing, ubiquituous use of tritone as integral part of the riffs / melody, Geezer Butler's bass playing, down tuning etc.
It's a bit like people claiming The Beatles weren't that influential without realizing that the very concept of a rock band as we know it is based on their template.
Corvos
3hr ago
First thought: 'Oh, hey, I can understand this!'
Second thought: 'Oh, Christ, I can understand this.'
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
I think the vibes of applying civil rights law to "white people" have changed drastically since the 1980s. Certainly not unanimously, but witness the Trump administration's consideration of refugee status for white South Africans (I'm going to choose not to express an opinion on that at this time).
But there have IIRC been a few instances of academic conferences having to walk back "International submissions encouraged. Israeli academics need not apply."
roystgnr
3hr ago
it’s still “no evidence” in a statistical sense
In a statistical sense, saying "datum D is no evidence for theory T" is "P(T|D) = P(D)". Here we have "P(T|D) > P(D)", which is "D is evidence".
It's not much evidence. It's not nearly enough evidence. It's outweighed by other evidence to the contrary. It's grossly outweighed by reasonable priors. But it's still evidence.
I hate to pick on anti-Trump folks about this, when Trump's own relationship with truth seems to intersect propositional logic only by random luck; forget about Bayesian statistics. But it's still a red flag to me.
Decades ago I waded into investigation of a controversial belief system, a "religion" or a "cult" depending on who you asked. I debated with folks about evidence for and evidence against many of the beliefs, and my eventual conclusion was basically "false religion" ... but the most memorable part of those discussions was, when one guy I'd been debating with was asked by another interlocutor whether there was any evidence against his religion, his answer was a flat "no". Not "yes, but there's more evidence for it", not "yes, but only if you consider evidence out of context", just "no, there's no evidence against it".
I still had lingering questions (of what I'd later start thinking of as "epistemic rationality") to resolve, but now more pragmatic ("instrumentally rational") concerns were screaming at me to be wary in a way that continuing abstract discussion of science or history couldn't have done. It might not have been his religious leaders' fault, but that guy was in a cult.
Such self-inflicted damage isn't worth it for any ideology. You might still end up at a correct belief, or a dozen, but only by random luck.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
If you want to see this in action, the political arguments are practically reversed on the issue of the "Muslim ban" in Trump's first term: that one even included North Korea! IIRC the administration at the time claimed it was based on security cooperation agreements and just happened to hit mostly Muslim nations (but not all such nations) with poor recordkeeping.
I'm not sure I'm happy with that one either, for the record.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
Knowledge of noun cases is bourgeois. You would be wise to forget it, comrade.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
Yes, because if the judges don't bellyfeel it, they won't make a useful ruling. Yes, the conservatives on the Supreme Court believe as an intellectual matter that anti-discrimination rules cut both ways and disallow discrimination against whites. But in their gut they know it's all about helping blacks and think that's the right thing, so they make sure to leave a hole any time they make a ruling against discriminating against other races. When it comes to Jews, though, their belly is firmly in line with anti-discrimination.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
Note that they've removed this already. It appears they've been adding the same anti-BDS language to various grant proposals; I would guess it's a result of pressure from the State Department, since Rubio is known to be strongly anti-BDS.
nomenym
4hr ago
Bulverism is about 50 percent of Marxism, so it's no surprise Freddie indulges. When you have an implicitly deterministic epistemology, you don't have to explain why an idea is wrong when you can explain how it came about by the wrong causes.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
4hr ago
I expressed my anger and still you replied; I appreciate that and will strive for a more even tone this exchange.
Perhaps you're right and I find the whole concept so odious that I am unable to extend charity that they deserve. I also think charity can be a trap when one extends it well past the point one should.
He even says it, the white populations are healthier so they live longer, so if you just take into account age, you will miss out on morbidity increasing factors
Age was by far the number one predictive factor in covid mortality; controlling for the most significant factor has some... questionable limits? I will extend enough charity to say that I'm saying this with years of hindsight instead of months, so perhaps Schmidt was merely misinformed.
I understand what you're saying about not focusing solely on age, and I agree other factors matter, but the way Schmidt and Lipsitch discuss it sticks in my craw.
The more I read back and rewrite this response, I am regretting introducing the metaphor because it's too one-dimensional, and the more I think about this the more it's the same old issue with intersectionality being nonfunctional. The "correct" matrix of ideal vaccine distribution would be horribly complicated and likely politically impossible.
Why should teachers be deprioritized for whiteness when they're going to be in high-risk environments, and spreading it to black kids who will then spread it to their higher-risk families? So one would assume given Lipsitch says most teachers are white. Excluding them is a strongly racist proposition if one is considering second and third order effects of vaccinations and spread.
The equity cartoon isn't a one to one description of how equity would work in the real world when carried out by real people, nor do people always mean the same thing when they say equity.
It is a notoriously slippery phrase from a notoriously slippery ideology. It means everything and nothing, and no one knows how the equity eschaton would be immanentized.
So is the phrase just useless, an applause/boo light? As a writer I think one should pin down whatever they think it means, and let the chips fall where they may in the degree to which that does or does not match sources they may be citing.
At worst they believe the boxes version of equity, while you believe the machete version of equity.
I know what you mean but I would still like to clarify I don't believe in equity at all; I think the concept is far too slippery, a la "true communism has never been tried."
I do not trust people that claim to believe the boxes version to not, whenever convenient, turn to the machete. That is the fundamental assumption of ideas rooted in disparate impact: it doesn't matter how you get to the same outcomes. There is more than one way to skin a cat, more than one way to equalize heights and health outcomes.
Or less violently and more realistically, they resort to indifference. That is, Schmidt has built a career on the 'marginalized,' and that seems to displace concerns about "how do we save the most lives" and "maybe age is the number one factor in covid mortality." He has chosen populations he cares about, and populations to which he is indifferent.
The vaccine is the boxes or ladders. If you didn't give them to anybody, the tall person would still be tall and the short person would still be short.
Hmm. Action/inaction questions are such a sticky problem. While withholding vaccines from a particularly sensitive group because of their race isn't as actively making them more vulnerable as, say, sending sick people to nursing homes or infecting them all with an autoimmune disease, I am less than confident it's a valuable moral distinction in this case.
The Equality vs Equity cartoon a woke person is likely to point to doesn't involve any machetes at all.
An actual woke believer will not choose the edited version of the cartoon, no. Mao thought the Great Leap Forward was a good thing, et cetera and so forth with history's other examples of horrors spawned by "good intentions."
johnfabian
4hr ago
Top 10%, but it feels like I got off easy, getting all relatively recognizeable phenotypes
johnfabian
4hr ago
All the attempts to claim other bands as progenitors/contemporaries in metal are laughable. Like people will bring up Deep Purple or Hendrix (or more rare bands like Lord Baltimore) but it's so obviously not metal when compared to Paranoid
there really wasn't another metal band until Judas Priest
ulyssessword
4hr ago
Do they need the protections?
I can see the benefit of writing every law broadly and neutrally based on unchanging principles, but at the same time there's no practical difference between "any country affected by X (it's just Israel)" and "Israel (because it's the only country affected by X)".
As an example, Google negotiated an exemption from Canada's Online News Act (otherwise it would have to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to journalists, negotiated individually), and the bill calls out the #1 search engine in Canada instead of naming them explicitly.
georgioz
5hr ago
I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.
I know that this is off-topic - but can somebody explain what is this sentence structure? Is it something similar to the word literally now also having the meaning of metaphorically? So similarly as now it is okay to use X and I in all the formulations - even in those where it does not make sense - we now even upgraded to it into X and I's Y?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
Yeah I was using a Claude script to translate a fic from Russian. I can't read Russian so I can't really tell what I'm missing out on (also the author is not the most amazing wordsmith) but it was quite decent in context even where they were using words like 'necro-energy' that don't even exist in either language.
What a sterling example of making the dream of perfection the sworn enemy of the merely better. As others have pointed out before, the most likely alternative, in the absence of ChatGPT, would have been this poor fellow resorting to Google Translate or other, far simpler ML solutions. There isn't an abundance of fluent English and Japanese speakers willing to proof read random YouTube comments.
I don't speak Japanese, but I see nothing particularly objectionable in the translation. It might not capture all nuance, but it gets the gist of it across. Learning language takes time, probably years, and by the time this gentleman gets good enough that he needs or appreciates the nuance, LLMs will be even better at the job.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
When you told me you're fluent in Japanese the other day, this was really not how I expected it to become relevant haha.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
"Today's stream was perfect! When I commented "Please step on me!" my oshi Haachama reacted by saying "Gross!" and then she even said "You're way too much of a pervert!" - it was incredible!! I'm feeling like I'm in heaven right now. This is the most blissful moment of my life. And what I'm most excited about is that Haachama's birthday live stream is on August 10th (Sunday) at 9:00 PM!! I want to support her with everything I've got. Just imagining that day and the live stream makes me feel like I'm drinking her bathwater."
Claude knocks it out of the park as far as I'm concerned.
Even 4o:
Today's stream was absolutely perfect! When I commented, "Step on me, please!" my oshi, Haachama, actually reacted and said, "Gross!" Then she went on to say, "You're way too much of a pervert!" It was insane!! Right now, I feel like I'm in a sexy kind of heaven. This is the most peaceful moment of my life.
And on top of all that, the thing I'm most looking forward to is Haachama’s birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 9:00 PM!! I'm planning to cheer her on with everything I've got. Just imagining that live makes me feel like I'm drinking her bathwater.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5hr ago
· Edited 5hr ago
Like with your parallel post, I think this is reading too much into a detail. Japanese all but requires having a social directionality suffix when talking about actions done between or on behalf of other people in any remotely polite speech, so just writing ...と反応した, と言った would feel incongruously rude especially in the context of someone gushing about his vtuber idol. To translate it explicitly is to take an unremarkable piece of information that is conveyed by default expectation and elevate it as remarkable - it's as if a Japanese, or English, translator took a German text, where, after the German norm, all occupations must be marked for gender (der Fahrer (the male driver)/die Fahrerin (the female driver) etc.), and took care to translate the markers, turning the neutral "die Busfahrerin hatte einen Unfall" into the potentially sexist "the woman bus driver had an accident". (This would be even worse if you were translating to e.g. Chinese, where not even 3rd-person pronouns are gendered in speech - imagine every he/she turning into a they with an explicit mention of the person's gender!)
SSCReader
5hr ago
Sure, the disparities were not that wide (as far as I know). But do note the article is from before there was a vaccine at all, as they were discussing how it should be allocated when they had them, so reasonably early on.
Having said that if you actually read the paper and not the media phrasing even Dr Schmidts final recommendation was fairly anodyne. Prioritize healthcare workers and then essential workers who are likely to spread to multiple people (so a retail worker who has to come into contact with lots of people each day over say a farmer). In the end he didn't actually recommend that it be decided by race at all. Just worker type. He just talked about it being a factor to consider in his paper, which is the bit he was then asked to comment on for the article, or the article only published his quotes on that section perhaps.
The media version of X may not really represent X very well in actuality.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
Fun stuff, but that's really not post-singularity. It's not even post-scarcity!
The list of countries Trump used was compiled during the Obama administration, four countries in the original "Terrorist Travel Prevention Act" and three more added by Obama's DHS. But, in Obama's term this was a "countries whose citizens and visitors can't travel to the US under the Visa Waiver Program instead of getting a visa first" list, and Trump turned it into a "countries whose citizens and visitors can't travel to the US at all" list.
All 7 countries listed were 95%+ Muslim, but there are another 19 or 20 95%-Muslim countries that didn't make the list.
On the one hand, the popular phrase "Trump's Muslim ban" seems like an inaccurate descriptor for a ban that applied to some non-Muslims and didn't apply to most Muslims based on a list from the Obama administration; he was pretty transparently trying to get as close to his promised "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" as he could get legally, but the end result really wasn't very close. On the other hand, that transparency made the order still a pretty clear match to our "for mumblemumble reasons" hypothetical, which is part of why the courts kept shooting him down until he'd repeatedly watered down the order.
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