Monday, October 06, 2025

Monday Links

This is the History of the West you thought you knew. How the West Was Wrought by Razib Khan.Then suddenly, you are looking at things from a different perspective.

I had not heard the term "nut-picking," but I have seen the phenomenon many times. I like the term and will try to remember to use it. 

How Wikipedia Became a Propaganda SiteIts founder left years ago, but has some ideas how to fix it. Behind the paywall, but the intro is worth it. Elon Musk has his own idea, an xAI competitor called Grokipedia.  It doesn't look like much of it has been built yet. But Gizmodo already hates it, which is a good sign.

Therapy by the Numbers We don't always look at whether an intervention "works" in the sense of showing at least some improvement. Psychotherapy works well for some things, not so much for others.  But it helps somewhat for even the lowest-scoring disorders. Good to know.

The Product of the Railway is Always the Timetable.  Benedict Springbett. We shouldn't care about train networks in America as much as they should in Britain. But we do have some, we could do it better and we just like the idea of them.  The reality, not so much. 

 What matters is a passenger’s ability to get from one point on the network to any other point on the network as quickly as possible. This is quite a different proposition from speed on the individual lines that make up the network.

Speaking of things we like the idea of but are disappointed in the reality, socialism is a lovely story. Unfortunately, it is fiction. An author can make her characters say or do whatever she wants: the brother apologises, a child (or a raven) can speak preternatural wisdom, the inspired troops go on to victory. But re-enacting the scene precisely in real life guarantees nothing.  In fact, it may bear no relation to the results at all.

 

4 comments:

Grim said...

Respecting that this is a 'meta-analysis,' which you had just warned us against, I suppose the finding is still encouraging at least where anxieties are concerned.

What I sometimes notice about therapy is that the more therapy there is, the more diagnoses there are (because that's the only way to get paid, finding something you need to be treating); as such, the rate of mental illness reported in the population goes up the more people are exposed to therapy. If that's the case, it's not surprising that these less-severe anxious cases might respond well to treatment, since in an earlier generation in which therapy was reserve only for serious illnesses they'd never have been diagnosed at all. It's probably relatively straightforward to help someone deal with an issue that they would have probably been able to deal with alone, as was usually done in the earlier era.

Therapy may still be helpful. To know whether or not it was desirable, though, I'd want to see some data on whether exposure to it made people more or less self-centered. What I tend to notice about people (admittedly mostly women) who make therapy a center of their lives is that they are really making themselves and 'their problems' the center of their lives. It might be more helpful still to move the center outside of yourself, and find help for one's self in helping others.

Christopher B said...

I used to read Stuart Schneiderman's blog fairly regularly, and recall that he made a pretty big deal about the fact he considered himself a 'life coach' rather than a therapist. As I understand his definition he provided encouragement and suggestions for actionable changes a person might make rather then endlessly rehashing feelings on a regular basis.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

He started as a full-fledged psychoanalyst but moved consistently in the direction of being a life coach

Randomizer said...

Not enough attention is given to Katherine Maher. She was the CEO of Wikipedia and is now the CEO of NPR. Early in her career, she was with the National Democratic Initiative and was at least CIA adjacent. Her job was to influence foreign countries by manipulating information sources.

That's what Wikipedia tells us. It isn't a big step to wonder why she is placed in those roles and who she is intended to manipulate.