Training in evidence-based treatment modalities?

Sure, if you had no training at all and had to make someone feel better just by talking with them, you wouldn't be able to help at all unless you'd been through the exact same experience as they did. But someone with clinical training and experience treating similar patients can help a lot even if they haven't gone through the same problem themselves. A psychologist doesn't have phobias to treat people afraid of flying, or have been paranoid to treat people with delusions of persecution.

PTSD can be tough to treat, but according to recent systematic reviews there are a number of treatment methods that provide significant relief for about 2/3 of patients in about four months. There's a lot of room for improvement there, but modern treatments for PTSD are a hell of a lot more effective than having the patient lie down on a couch and tell the therapist about his childhood, if that's what you're picturing your brother doing.

There's different kinds of therapists out there and they receive different amounts of training. At the high end, a psychiatrist receives a pretty comparable amount of post graduate training to a surgeon. At the low end, someone with a master's of clinical psychology might spend five years in post graduate education and supervised practice.

Where things get interesting are all the masters of social work out there who've hung out a shingle as psychotherapists. They have less clinical and theoretical training in psychology than master's level clinical psychologists. I don't think that's so good, but I'd argue that their training is actually complementary to the things clinical psychologists do: MSWs are trained in how to help people get their shit together. That is something that people with psychological problems often need. If a patient hasn't been able to hold down a job because of their psychological issues, a clinical social worker can deal with that better than a clinical psychologist would.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, predictive text techniques, trained on a sufficient corpus of data, will almost certainly *simulate* empathy and feelings most of the time.

The problem is, as with AI image generators creating hands with too many fingers or guns with barrels coming out of both ends, it doesn't have the actual understanding it needs to recognize when it's got things very wrong, and when dealing with vulnerable people this will be dangerous.

Yes, but I think that while art conservators, educators and appraisers do important work worthy of respect, I think the supply of positions in those fields in Europe is quite limited and inelastic.

In STEM, this is a golden opportunity for Europe to turn the tables and inflict some brain drain on the US for a change. Americans forget that we're only about 4% of the world's population. While we do punch above our weight in terms of engineering and science talent, a lot of our preeminence in engineering and science comes from immigrants seeking research opportunities.

The investor class actually admires a good liar. That's how you get CEOs who run a company into a ground and end up getting another CEO gig. The dishonesty is seen as a feature.

Also, for a young kid, old enough to be my father is ancient.

My son is a double major in physics and chemical engineering who is working as a battery researcher at a US firm working on grid storage. He is looking at moving overseas for his PhD, possibly Cambridge or Oxford, because of the bad prospects for research funding at US universities.

That's the kind of people who are looking at leaving the US. It's not the art history and cultural studies majors (no disrespect at all to those fields intended). It's the people with hard core STEM skills who want to do research -- the kind of people the US used to attract as immigrants.

Well, yes. But he's talking about justifying *headcount increases*. It's a really good idea to scrutinize headcount increase requests because they're often mindless and lazy.

The first time I had a management job where I had to do a department budget, I went around to the other managers and asked them how they prepared their budgets. The answers floored me. Typically it was "I take last year's budget and add 5% to all the line items." What about new things the business plan calls for your department to do? Or old things we're doing less of? Most managers weren't connecting their budgets to ways the company needed to change. They weren't even thinking critically about the money they were spending.

My biggest problem here is he's asking people to prove a negative. This isn't really a productive way to think about staffing. What he should do is make them justify the headcount increase. Why do you need more staff? What would the new staff do? Would it be more people doing the same things, or are you reorganizing responsibilities? What ways have you considered to solve this problem by making existing staff more productive (e.g., AI). What are the pros and cons of each?

Then I'd go through the responses and look at the ones that lacked creative or critical thinking, and replace any managers who were just going through the motions of managing.

Damn right. We can make America great again by focusing on the kind of research that takes no money at all: pulling opinions out of our asses.

Which means they *could* train a useful AI. That doesn't mean they have. There's some skill needed to avoid problems like overfitting.

If we step back and look at this as a training tool, successfully training people to sound like the most successful flirters of the past may well undermine that style of flirting.

Ultimately the problem with an AI is that it's not a real person with a real consciousness. The best it can do is train people to be superficially charming. The problem isn't necessarily AI, but the way society has changed so that human interactions are mediated by technological platforms.

Be an insurance company.

That's a very specific, and largely irrelevant question. We're not talking about a *global* hurricane forecast, we're specifically talking about an *Atlantic hurricane season*.

You have to pay attention to the *exact* question you're asking, because questions that sound similar are actually very different:

1. Will global hurricane frequency increase? (no -- models predict a very slight *decrease* in frequency)
2. Will Atlantic hurricane frequency increase? (no -- again they'll decrease slightly)
3. Will more Atlantic hurricanes make landfall in the US? (no)
4. Will there be more years in which unusually large numbers of Atlantic hurricanes make landfall in the US? (yes -- the average number of hurricanes will decrease the but variance will go way up, producing many more outlier years and more outlier storms)
5. Will Atlantic hurricanes cause more damage in the US. (yes, extreme hurricanes will become more common, storms will tend to be geographically larger, move slower, and have more intense rainfall, leading to greater flooding).

So a year with a crazy high number of Atlantic hurricanes is consistent with the predictions of models that *also* predict a slight decrease in the average number of hurricanes.

Er, no. The reason your insurance costs have gone up is the free market calculated a higher equilibrium price as fewer providers can afford to supply coverage at the old equilibrium price. If you recall your Econ 101, the supply curve has shifted to the left.

I know the MAGA types' go-to explanation for everything they don't like is that bad people are engineering it out of spite. That is an easy explanation to understand and requires (for them at least) no proof. But there is clear counter-proof here: if prices were being inflated by the public perception of greater risk, the demand curve would shift right and profits would increase for all the vendors. If competitors were leaving the market because they were fooled by woke journalists, and costs weren't increasing, then the increasing equilibrium price would *also* increase the remaining vendors' profits. In either case where this was all the result of "fake news", insurance companies leaving the market would be a self-correcting problem as ballooning profits drew more competitors into the market.

So assuming insurance companies for the most part are capable of rational economic behavior, and given that demand for storm insurance is mostly inelastic, the only reasonable explanation for prices increasing and vendors leaving the market is that costs are increasing.

I believe the preferred solution is to bomb them with nuclear weapons.

Here's the problem: hurting the group you hate doesn't necessarily help you. When the stock market collapsed in 1929, sure, there were a couple famous cases of bankers who committed suicide, but most rich people were diversified in their assets and did fine. The bulk of the actual pain fell on working people and the poor, and suicide rates actually went up among those groups, not among the rich.

You can't assume what's bad for Wall Street is good for Main Street. It's not that simple. Shit rolls downhill, so any radical attempt to inflict pain on the wealthy classes will inevitably hurt working people more.

You can seem to want to intervene in the economy to produce a society that's better for the average person -- I applaud that sentiment. But I'm wary of half-baked attempts to turn back the clock, because you *can't*. Contrary to myth, the US actually manufactures more stuff than it did in 1990. What's collapsed is manufacturing employment. Back in 1990 you could, as a semi-illiterate high school drop out, get a job at a factory shoving pieces of metal into a machine, or running a sewing machine, and that job would pay a modest middle class wage. Those jobs are never coming back. If the tariffs ever get high enough to offset Vietnam's lower wages, we'll be buying sportswear made by robots rather than by armies of unskilled Americans running sewing machines.

In many cases the attempt to address trade "deficits" don't even try to turn the clock back. They're trying to correct trade "deficits". Take Cote d'Ivoire -- the country that supplies about half of our chocolate. Americans now are paying 21% tariffs on that chocolate. Why? Do you think Americans will suddenly find employment growing cacao beans? Do you think Cote d'Ivoirians, who earn on average 144 bucks a week, will start buying American aircraft and pharmaceuticals?

Worrying about the money flowing out of the country in a trade "deficit" is irrational, because goods of equal value are flowing in. The reason more money is going out than goods is that we're rich and can buy more things than our trading partners can. If we raise the price of chocolate, coffee, and bananas to the point where Americans can't afford to buy them anymore, do you really think that makes us better off?