I wonder if the fact that the amendment earned "unanimous approval in the senate” is what should really be concerning here. The idea seems clearly a joke but it was voted for by everyone in a senate split 27 Demoratcs/15 Republicans and headed for a house vote with a similar division (46D/24R). Does no one read what they are voting for?
One of my thoughts is that legislatures need more money for staff. Executive branches have billions of dollars to hire experts on long term contracts. How many in house experts does a legislature have?
Maybe 100 years ago this would work, but the modern state is really complex, and the problems are really complex, because if they were easy they would be solved.
The amount of money that state and federal legislatures control is huge, My hunch is that if they spent more on extra staff, the increase in quality of legislation would provide enough economic benefits to cover the cost.
Isn’t this part of the benefit of lobbyists? Assume that every bill that goes before the legislature has someone who cares greatly (because if no one cared, it’s a problem that would have been solved beforehand), and you can guarantee at least two opposing viewpoints being represented by lobbyists, for “free” from the point of the legislative admin budget.
I suppose (and hope) the representatives figured that out themselves, and were simply going along in the same spirit - but one can't be sure, at least these days.
I believe it is totally the opposite. Every single one of the voters has read the bill and agreed unanimously on passing it through, because it makes a lot of sense. Modern psychology is a little better than astrology back in the day.
Psychology is yet to become a proper science, once it accepts proper scientific methods and discards the voodoo of past days.
Until then, hereby I vote for them to wear wizard hats in public!
This is hilarious. Do you genuinely think this little of politicians? No, seriously. I know politicians are easy to dunk on, but do you genuinely think that this is the explanation? That this is even a likely explanation? They weren’t just, you know, having a laugh? This is out of touch, even for HN.
Some of this is a reflection of society not wanting to confront the challenges with mental health. We went from just dumping people in asylums and ignoring issues like PTSD, to acknowledging these things exist, but trying to push everything into therapy and psych evals.
I think at some point we'll have to acknowledge that pscyhology is a fuzzy field and it doesn't always have the correct answers and somehow balance that with but sometimes the experts are right.
The fuzzier the field, the wider avenue for corruption in the courtroom. Declaring someone competent based on the non objective whim of an "expert" can have major monetary consequences.
Our society (well, the US and increasingly Europe where I’m from) has put a lot of resources and effort into mental health, largely by following “expert” recommendations.
Tons of people are being treated for mental health, children are medicalised, employers offer mental health courses and insurance, people sharing experiences about burnout, language being changed to avoid offending people, …
Or more likely, the current approach just doesn’t work very well.
If everyone with a disease starts taking a medicine, and nobody gets better, it doesn’t mean the medicine causes the disease, despite the correlation. It just means the medicine doesn’t work.
I'm not sure I follow your logic. What do you hypothesise to be the causal factor linking these things?
I think we could look to any number of things that could exacerbate mental health issues. Climate disasters, social alienation, rapid inflation, political disillusionment, patriarchy etc.
The current movement focuses almost exclusively on the individual. When the best solution to most problems is collective as part of a society, community, family, team etc. It offloads structural problems on the individual and makes people feel bad when they inevitably can't fix themselves. All whilst making money out of solutions. It is similar to blaming climate change on individuals whilst ignoring massive oil companies.
If experts were the problem, then it would be statistically obvious that people were worse after meeting experts or taking their advice, and better off before.
But, that gets the order reversed. People seek mental health treatment after they already have a problem, not before.
It's much more likely that widespread effects are the cause: pollution, social media, poverty, capitalism, racism, etc.
I don't believe that anyone would sign off on this if they'd actually read it. I doubt this bill was about mental health and America's court system's love of pseudo science quackery; this includes stuff like bite marks, lie detector tests, multiple personalities, "recovery" of repressed memories from decades before, etc. This bill was to show that these lege members pass things they haven't read, often I can't really blamed them because the bills are thousands and thousands of pages long and often contain multiple completely different amendments having nothing to do with the bill.
Recall, the "reproducibility crisis" came to everyone's attention because of how bad the papers from these two camps were. Nothing really changed, no one got fired, and the situation, seems to have not only not improved but the quality has gone DOWN.
Maybe the law should be they have to wear the hats till they un fuck the last 30 years of publishing...
"I know you hear those voices, but unfortunately I have no way of corroborating whether the voices are actually a problem or not. Would you like this pamphlet on how physics understands your brain?"
As a web developer, I’d like to think that we’re effectively alchemists who transmute vague ideas into products held together with absurd magic that’s constantly changing.
Can we get a bill going? I can’t decide between “Webmancer” and “www.izard.com”
Was surprised this was from 1995, I thought it was current.
Note: Psychology is a real science. It replicates as well as a lot of other 'sciences', studying the mind is not worthless just because it is complicated.
I think studies of the mind will always produce less actionable results because at least part of every person's brain develops uniquely. There are structures which have specific purposes and the neurochemical mechanisms for how the brain develops are shared, and these areas are definitely worthy of study. But a lot of the brain's structure is formed by individual experience of the environment, which is impossible to generalize. Other organs are shaped by the environment but less so because they are simpler.
I wish psychologists and neuroscientists all the best and really hope the fields progress, but we'll never achieve a level of understanding of individual brains and how they respond comparable to say, how heart health can vary with diet. I think it's just the nature of the beast that psychology in particular will remain more art than science.
I used to say similar things. But have found that so many things that were considered 'more art than science', after a few decades go by, are solved. Either there was an underlying structure discovered, or different view point, or additional data. Then it become 'oh, that's known, here is the formula'. They become common, are in textbooks.
Every science has gone through something like this.
Neuroscientist have now been able to scan a brain and re-produce the image the person was thinking of. In 2000 that would be called magic, what about in 2040, will they be able to scan and find out what you are feeling, and then apply some magnetic fields and change your mood. It's now in reach, real studies, real science, the mind is being untangled.
Psychologists are made to dress up as wizards to mock and humiliate them, yet priests and preachers who actually believe they have magical powers are taken seriously. Mad world. At least wizards are fun.
In their defense, priests at least used to dress up weird by their own choice, making them easily identifiable as non-credible sources. We really should encourage all religious leaders to go back to that convention.
I do know it's ridiculous and hypocritical to mock psychology as "wizardry" in a culture where ersatz wizards and the people who believe in them still wield far too much influence.
Readit News
Maybe 100 years ago this would work, but the modern state is really complex, and the problems are really complex, because if they were easy they would be solved.
The amount of money that state and federal legislatures control is huge, My hunch is that if they spent more on extra staff, the increase in quality of legislation would provide enough economic benefits to cover the cost.
Specifically, this staff:
https://www.reliks.com/lord-of-rings-hobbit/staff-of-gandalf...
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Servi... and https://crsreports.congress.gov/search/#/?termsToSearch=&ord...
CRS reports are a phenomenal source of information.
prior.... so they knew it was satire.
Does it really sound like the most likely explanation to you? Because I can think about several others.
Until then, hereby I vote for them to wear wizard hats in public!
That really sounds like you're implying that modern day astrology is better.
It's shocking how popular astrology still is.
I think at some point we'll have to acknowledge that pscyhology is a fuzzy field and it doesn't always have the correct answers and somehow balance that with but sometimes the experts are right.
Our society (well, the US and increasingly Europe where I’m from) has put a lot of resources and effort into mental health, largely by following “expert” recommendations.
Tons of people are being treated for mental health, children are medicalised, employers offer mental health courses and insurance, people sharing experiences about burnout, language being changed to avoid offending people, …
Yet the problems keep getting worse.
Maybe the experts are the problem?
Or more likely, the current approach just doesn’t work very well.
If everyone with a disease starts taking a medicine, and nobody gets better, it doesn’t mean the medicine causes the disease, despite the correlation. It just means the medicine doesn’t work.
> Maybe the experts are the problem?
I'm not sure I follow your logic. What do you hypothesise to be the causal factor linking these things?
I think we could look to any number of things that could exacerbate mental health issues. Climate disasters, social alienation, rapid inflation, political disillusionment, patriarchy etc.
And employers will pay for some cheap benefits to minimize chances of employees being able to win a lawsuit against them.
But, that gets the order reversed. People seek mental health treatment after they already have a problem, not before.
It's much more likely that widespread effects are the cause: pollution, social media, poverty, capitalism, racism, etc.
PS Apart from psychiatrists and priests. Probs they should all wear magic hats when pulling out their expert opinion in court.
Dead Comment
Does therapy help some people. It sure does.
Recall, the "reproducibility crisis" came to everyone's attention because of how bad the papers from these two camps were. Nothing really changed, no one got fired, and the situation, seems to have not only not improved but the quality has gone DOWN.
Maybe the law should be they have to wear the hats till they un fuck the last 30 years of publishing...
Dead Comment
However, I move that the hat should have "Wizzard" written on it.
Can we get a bill going? I can’t decide between “Webmancer” and “www.izard.com”
- Terry Pratchett
Was surprised this was from 1995, I thought it was current.
Note: Psychology is a real science. It replicates as well as a lot of other 'sciences', studying the mind is not worthless just because it is complicated.
I wish psychologists and neuroscientists all the best and really hope the fields progress, but we'll never achieve a level of understanding of individual brains and how they respond comparable to say, how heart health can vary with diet. I think it's just the nature of the beast that psychology in particular will remain more art than science.
Every science has gone through something like this.
Neuroscientist have now been able to scan a brain and re-produce the image the person was thinking of. In 2000 that would be called magic, what about in 2040, will they be able to scan and find out what you are feeling, and then apply some magnetic fields and change your mood. It's now in reach, real studies, real science, the mind is being untangled.
I do know it's ridiculous and hypocritical to mock psychology as "wizardry" in a culture where ersatz wizards and the people who believe in them still wield far too much influence.