domain:alexberenson.substack.com
TowardsPanna
5m ago
Cute. Not sure if it's genuine though.
OliveTapenade
23m ago
This reads like just reposting a news or summary article.
Do you have an original comment or thought, or question to ask?
I don't think there's a difference between a 'sincere' statement and 'signaling' statement - the words emerge from the same processes, the same process that generates 'abortion is a FUNDAMENTAL right', and the same process that 'everyone is beautiful in their own unique way <3'. I wish the average person had a clean separation between signaling beliefs and sincere ones, everything would be so much nicer.
And, of course, if teleported 10 m from a bear with saliva dripping from its canines and 10 m away from a random male, the same woman would run away towards the man, that's a deep instinct one can't deny.
The interesting question here, if any, is whether norms encouraging such long-winded and massive pranks are acceptable or a sign of dysfunction
I think the above belief is closer to just a 'stupid popular belief' than a long-winded prank, and as such is just a universal human phenomena. But long-winded games of social deception are also human universals, small-scale human societies are no more honest and harmonious than we are, and intelligence and self-interest combined necessarily leads to such games.
distic
33m ago
I don't think the main point against eating animal meat is the fact that it kills animals, but the impact on environment and the land efficiency. To eat a pound of beef, you need the cow to eat a lot of grass, which takes a lot more land than producing a pound of vegetables. Moreover, cows produce a lot of CO which has a huge climate impact.
Yes, after about 10 minutes of parsing conversations I realised that no one is actually discussing the mechanics of woodland survival but instead it's largely a rehashed "men bad" struggle session.
At this point I've honestly just embraced being an oppressor. I will never be seen as anything else, so why try and change it?
anti_dan
37m ago
Having updated, I yield to anti-dan that they are more than just technichally correct. They are also correct. I'll also yield to you, for now- that the grazing fields can't be repurposed. I'm skeptical of this but I don't have the means to do a counterfactual analysis on every field at this time.
This was my primary point. That most cows use mediocre land for much of their lives. Some probably do not. Its a big country. There are weird rents all over the place. But pure grain fed beef is way above average market price by 2-3x from what I see.
doantkq
40m ago
He considers himself a white person.
But would the dissident right consider him white?
ulyssessword
40m ago
I do not think 'enabling someone to accuse a 5 year old of sexual harassment' is a problem the median therapist has.
I think that's the wrong standard. It's a problem that one therapist that hasn't been stripped of their license has, and that's concerning enough on its own. Given that this story comes from a relatively small pool (compared to swarms of journalists searching the entire nation for one example to prop up their story), I'd guess that there's more than one.
Any decent self-regulating professional body would immediately (or possibly preemptively) distance themselves from charlatans like that. And yet, there they are.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
40m ago
I went to the trouble of writing an effort post somewhere that was read by like 8 people, so I'll just reproduce the primary bit, and tack on additional commentary at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy
Large-scale international reviews of scientific studies have concluded that psychotherapy is effective for numerous conditions.[8][22]
One line of research consistently finds that supposedly different forms of psychotherapy show similar effectiveness. According to The Handbook of Counseling Psychology: "Meta-analyses of psychotherapy studies have consistently demonstrated that there are no substantial differences in outcomes among treatments". The handbook states that there is "little evidence to suggest that any one psychological therapy consistently outperforms any other for any specific psychological disorders. This is sometimes called the Dodo bird verdict after a scene/section in Alice in Wonderland where every competitor in a race was called a winner and is given prizes".[151]
Further analyses seek to identify the factors that the psychotherapies have in common that seem to account for this, known as common factors theory; for example the quality of the therapeutic relationship, interpretation of problem, and the confrontation of painful emotions.[152][153][page needed][154][155]
Outcome studies have been critiqued for being too removed from real-world practice in that they use carefully selected therapists who have been extensively trained and monitored, and patients who may be non-representative of typical patients by virtue of strict inclusionary/exclusionary criteria. Such concerns impact the replication of research results and the ability to generalize from them to practicing therapists.[153][156]
However, specific therapies have been tested for use with specific disorders,[157] and regulatory organizations in both the UK and US make recommendations for different conditions.[158][159][160]
The Helsinki Psychotherapy Study was one of several large long-term clinical trials of psychotherapies that have taken place. Anxious and depressed patients in two short-term therapies (solution-focused and brief psychodynamic) improved faster, but five years long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis gave greater benefits. Several patient and therapist factors appear to predict suitability for different psychotherapies.[161]
Meta-analyses have established that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic psychotherapy are equally effective in treating depression.[162]
The bolded section is the one I can't easily verify, at least not when it's 9 am and I've been up all night studying.
Specifically regarding CBT, I found the following metanalysis-
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23870719/
Results: A total of 115 studies met inclusion criteria. The mean effect size (ES) of 94 comparisons from 75 studies of CBT and control groups was Hedges g = 0.71 (95% CI 0.62 to 0.79), which corresponds with a number needed to treat of 2.6. However, this may be an overestimation of the true ES as we found strong indications for publication bias (ES after adjustment for bias was g = 0.53), and because the ES of higher-quality studies was significantly lower (g = 0.53) than for lower-quality studies (g = 0.90). The difference between high- and low-quality studies remained significant after adjustment for other study characteristics in a multivariate meta-regression analysis. We did not find any indication that CBT was more or less effective than other psychotherapies or pharmacotherapy. Combined treatment was significantly more effective than pharmacotherapy alone (g = 0.49).
Conclusions: There is no doubt that CBT is an effective treatment for adult depression, although the effects may have been overestimated until now. CBT is also the most studied psychotherapy for depression, and thus has the greatest weight of evidence. However, other treatments approach its overall efficacy.
And when speaking of CBT as applied to more psychiatric conditions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/
We identified 269 meta-analytic studies and reviewed of those a representative sample of 106 meta-analyses examining CBT for the following problems: substance use disorder, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, depression and dysthymia, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, eating disorders, insomnia, personality disorders, anger and aggression, criminal behaviors, general stress, distress due to general medical conditions, chronic pain and fatigue, distress related to pregnancy complications and female hormonal conditions. Additional meta-analytic reviews examined the efficacy of CBT for various problems in children and elderly adults. The strongest support exists for CBT of anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, bulimia, anger control problems, and general stress. Eleven studies compared response rates between CBT and other treatments or control conditions. CBT showed higher response rates than the comparison conditions in 7 of these reviews and only one review reported that CBT had lower response rates than comparison treatments. In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong. However, additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of CBT for randomized-controlled studies. Moreover, except for children and elderly populations, no meta-analytic studies of CBT have been reported on specific subgroups, such as ethnic minorities and low income samples.
Addressing the specific claims of similar efficacy to the forms of therapy based on pseudoscientific principles:
CBT for depression was more effective than control conditions such as waiting list or no treatment, with a medium effect size (van Straten, Geraedts, Verdonck-de Leeuw, Andersson, & Cuijpers, 2010; Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010). However, studies that compared CBT to other active treatments, such as psychodynamic treatment, problem-solving therapy, and interpersonal psychotherapy, found mixed results. Specifically, meta-analyses found CBT to be equally effective in comparison to other psychological treatments (e.g., Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010; Cuijpers, Smit, Bohlmeijer, Hollon, & Andersson, 2010; Pfeiffer, Heisler, Piette, Rogers, & Valenstein, 2011). Other studies, however, found favorable results for CBT (e.g. Di Giulio, 2010; Jorm, Morgan, & Hetrick, 2008; Tolin, 2010). For example, Jorm and colleagues (2008) found CBT to be superior to relaxation techniques at post-treatment. Additionally, Tolin (2010) showed CBT to be superior to psychodynamic therapy at both post-treatment and at six months follow-up, although this occurred when depression and anxiety symptoms were examined together.
Compared to pharmacological approaches, CBT and medication treatments had similar effects on chronic depressive symptoms, with effect sizes in the medium-large range (Vos, Haby, Barendregt, Kruijshaar, Corry, & Andrews, 2004). Other studies indicated that pharmacotherapy could be a useful addition to CBT; specifically, combination therapy of CBT with pharmacotherapy was more effective in comparison to CBT alone (Chan, 2006).
In the particular case of BPD, after talking to @Throwaway05 I looked into the actual benefit of DBT, and was surprised to see that it was genuinely far more effective than I expected. Somewhere around the ballpark of 50% success rates in curbing symptoms and letting quite a few of them lead entirely unremarkable and functional lives. If 50% sounds underwhelming, wait till you hear the typical cure rates I'm used to.
So:
Is therapy and therapy speak actually harmful to people that have mental illness?
A clear no. The evidence base is nigh unimpeachable, even if, as discussed above, the most bullshit insanity inducing forms like Freudian or Lacanian psychotherapy still beat placebo.
My personal working hypothesis is that therapy acts as a decent substitute for a friend, a non-judgemental and understanding one who has seemingly endless time to listen to your problems, and is forbidden, on the pain of losing the way they make a living, from disclosing your troubles. Unfortunately, quite a few people genuinely lack actual good friends, so even such as ersatz substitute has notable effects.
This is an entirely different question from the fad we've been having for quite a few years of "therapy culture", or the insistence of people to co-opt/misuse therapy speak to lend their bullshit legitimacy. Then again, there are practising Freudian and Lacanian therapists, and few other people seem to have the same burning urge I have to burn their houses down. Even then, I must concede they beat placebo, as well as the dead horse that is repressed penis envy.
Anyway, therapy seems to beat placebo, and works synergistically with drugs, even if you cynically notice that therapy based off nonsense does much the same thing as more considered approaches, but it's not in dispute that it works. At least I have the consolation of being able to throw drugs at people instead of just talking at them as a licensed shrink in training, for all the quibbling about if SSRIs work, ain't nobody claiming their ADHD isn't being helped when they're zooted up on stimulants.
To conclude, is therapy helpful when administered by someone who knows what the fuck they're doing? Yes.
Are they/us responsible for random idiots using it as an obfuscation technique? Not really, though the upper echelons of HR are often staffed by people with degrees in psychology where I'm at.
Is it possibly a net negative for the set of {all people subjected to mealy mouthed terminology}? No clue, but you asked about the actually mentally ill, and you have my answer. No surprise that a few of them pick up on the lingo.
distic
47m ago
People here take the view that it is somehow related to modern feminism, but it might not be. Women, for centuries (at least since Lucretia killed herself), have been trained to think that a rape was worse than death, because death takes your life but rape takes your honor, and in this old-fashioned theory a life without honor is not worth living. Moreover, women have also be trained to say they don't want sex ; if they admit they would prefer to be with a man than with a bear, what would people think? Do you really think Lucretia would have preferred the man over the bear?
I'm not saying it has nothing to do with modern feminism. Actually, I think the old fashioned honor is responsible for a large part of modern feminism, as opposed to earlier feminism. In the seventies with the sexual liberation movement the accent was on having more sex, not less. The idea of a rape was somewhat conservative, as it assumed that it was important to women to not have sex in some circumstances. By the way, it also lead to a lot of abuses. With AIDS, Reagan and Thatcher, the conservative gained ground and feminists began to insist on the consent of women and her individual rights as opposed to "sexual freedom". The modern emphasis on rape is a result of both earlier feminism and the conservative ideology.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
49m ago
I would consider a different possibility. These people may or may not be in therapy, I don’t know. But the normalization of therapy, and the normalization of therapy speak is that people are less likely to shame or punish bad behavior when the person doing it is suffering from mental illness. So a lot of people use this to their advantage just like people use minority status or being the son of an executive. Being seen that way is used to engage in bad behavior without having to pay a real price for it.
I do think therapy in wider society and therapy when the person isn’t severely mentally ill can be a problem, but I don’t see that as what is happening here. These people seem to know exactly what they’re doing, and they use therapy as a protection against people calling them out on their behavior.
curious_straight_ca
58m ago
The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded.
If you're a bayesian reasoner, you might have a hypothesis - "white people have a higher average IQ than black people for genetic reasons, and this is a large contributor to political stability and economic success". You might have other hypotheses with other explanations for poor political and economic conditions in Africa. And, reasoning about history is hard, there's a lot of contingency and it's hard to determine causation, but if you add up all the small updates it the probability for the first hypothesis seems to steadily move up. So, as a genuine question from someone who isn't confident either way - what are some pieces of evidence against that hypothesis? Not about IQ and genes, that's been done to death , but specifically it as a contributor to political and economic stability. Similar anecdotes to the quote are fine.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.
What political extremism? "You can't patent chicken" isn't going to work as a slogan when 1) you can, in fact, patent literal breeds of actual chickens and 2) none of the things being patented remotely resemble chickens.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
Taste is just an engineering problem, though. We understand enough about how cells grow and divide to intervene in the process, and understand the chemicals that cause things to taste like so pretty well. I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
I'm confident it's plausible, biotech in general is progressing quickly, and getting something that roughly approximates meat just seems like a series of doable but meaningful technical challenges rather than something daunting like 'solving aging'. Might be a decade or so though.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
A substantial proportion of the US obesity crisis is due to HFCS subsidies for farmers
No evidence, but I honestly doubt this, it's too cute. Americans seem to have a strong desire for unhealthy food in general, I don't think HCFS is more fattening than other sugars, and the amount of sugar in food probably isn't that sensitive to the price given how much Americans seem to like having everything be sweet.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Johnny I hardly knew ya fits the bill. I have sent Blood on the risers to a dear friend before her bungee jump from which she was dearly afraid. https://youtube.com/watch?v=VWgsdexkv18
Military songs are a goldmine. They are cynical enough to be catchy and real.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
I'm pretty sure you're the guy who's ban evaded ten times. Also, wasn't VDARE in the process of being shut down by the NY AG or something?
Law and institutions are passed down as the patrimony of a specific people, and work only for that people
I really doubt that different races have different tendencies towards specific kinds of political or legal institutions. Asians and Jews seem to adapt perfectly fine (as well as anyone else) to liberalism in the US, and whites have presided over a vast design space of political entities over the past few thousand years. And, not confident, I'd expect the non-IQ differences that you'd find between populations to, even if somehow they're important enough to care about race mixing, not look like differences in grand concepts like 'freedom vs authoritarianism'. Because the political thought and organizational complexity involved in such grand concepts is just large, and there's a huge space in between that and the low-level psychological differences you might see between populations. (Compare to, for instance, the hypothetical nebulous tendency among Jews to intellectually or morally subvert their host countries - that's rather questionable for object-level reasons, but you could see differences in psychological instincts leading to that in a way that it wouldn't lead to "asians cant do freedom and democracy"). Individuals that are intelligent enough will, whatever their instincts, try to understand and work within the environment around them, and that together with really basic human instincts is most of what you need to exist within capitalism, or liberalism, or whatever else. As an analogy, in the history of every human population you can find things that clearly resemble religion, and despite whatever differences exist today the smartest people of every race find their way to atheism.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Marry her
Deleted because it was meant to be a reply to the OP.
Goodguy
1hr ago
Mental illness is an extremely broad category. Therapy can help some kinds of it a lot and some other kinds of it likely not at all, as far as I can tell. People who both know a lot about therapy speak and also are predisposed to lie a lot obviously will often use therapy speak as part of their lying. However, that does not necessarily mean that therapy speak is in general a bad thing.
I see a similarity to business-speak ("corporate jargon", if you prefer). Business-speak can be a good thing, a jargon to quickly and effectively express complex specific ideas. But it can also be, and often is, used to lie. So often that the idea of bullshit business-speak is a widely recognized trope. Yet business-speak is not useless for honest communication, and indeed often is used in a helpful way.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
Keep in mind bipolar disorder is treated with medication and therapy, not just therapy. It isn't like depression, where we can debate if medications are effective and if the cause is societal - bipolar severely impacts the lives of those with it, the medications have obvious and dramatic impact and are the difference between living functional lives and just not, the main tradeoff is the crippling side effects. Freddie DeBoer talks about his experience with medication for bipolar here.
It turned out he had taken a bunch of adderal that made him borderline insane and used that therapy speak to deny reality
It's much simpler to blame this on the Adderall or the bipolar disorder than therapy-speak, someone who's tweaked out can deny reality with whatever conceptual framework they want to.
Yet she found a therapist that told her this is true. This clearly isn't a scientific field.
I do not think 'enabling someone to accuse a 5 year old of sexual harassment' is a problem the median therapist has. This is like - accusing medicine of being unscientific because John Campbell and Pierre Kory support it (they are a nurse and a doctor!).
And then, yeah, DEI and wokeness is bad, yep.
All these people that have sued our company for "discrimination" have used bullshit therapy speak to justify their insane claims
It'd improve the post if you provided characterization for this claim - what sorts of insane claims, what therapy-speak, what does an interaction with these people look like?
Goodguy
1hr ago
Harrison Smith of Infowars, in appropriately conspiratorial fashion, said that policies of “infinite immigration forever” are meant to make opposition to technocratic power impossible. He suggested, for example, that one reason no one tries to impose “refugees” or antipollution measures on China — the world’s biggest polluter — is that the Chinese are already under effective control and threaten neither their own regime nor the ambitions of the World Economic Forum.
Simpler and less conspiratorial explanation: "infinite immigration forever" is in place because a large fraction of white people genuinely feel bad for third-worlders and/or want to make up for colonialism and/or simply don't grasp the possible negative consequences of immigration and/or want to use third-worlders for cheap labor. People don't try to impose pro-refugee measures on China because the Chinese would laugh at it and ignore it. People don't try to impose anti-pollution measures on China because the main reason China pollutes a lot is that it makes a lot of the rest of the world' stuff, so trying to push anti-pollution measures there has a real cost for the world economy, whereas pushing anti-pollution measures in the developed world is relatively cheap.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Yeah... I wonder where all this will go. I once knew a psychiatrist who said they deliberately change up the lingo once the plebs starts catching on to it, but I think this become futile in the Internet age. And it's not just the language that creates problems, we were working on the assumption that none of the therapy stuff can have any drawbacks, but I'm pretty sure it can take you to an extreme that's not healthy. Bottling up emotions probably isn't good, but I don't think excessive introspection is either. Having a specialist that will help you deal with the more serious problems might be good in some cases, but it encourages to deal with negative things only in a therapeutic context, and segmenting them off from friends and family, making these relationships more shallow.
If we can fry ice cream…
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