What is your unpopular opinion?

[pmv]

Walls of text are great.

I don't see any walls of text. Long posts, yes, but they are formatted with paragraph breaks, so not 'walls of text'. Though I wonder if it depends on the screen width of the device one views the forum on? Just noticed it makes a big difference to how a post looks.

 

[pmv]

I have further doubts about CBT, but don't know if I want to get into it because it gets a bit personal!

One objection is to its deliberate neglect of a client's past or history. I find this mystifying, because we are _made_ of past and composed entirely out of history. The extreme focus on the "here and now" which CBT is so keen on, seems to imply an impoverished view of what what humans are. The "here and now" is infinitisimal, being just the leading edge of that past, and the past is ever present within us. Maybe it's a function of growing old, but for me there isn't a clearly distinct 'present', it is completely entwined with decades of memories, a huge backstory that is ever-present and has a massive influence on the present moment. In that respect I sympathise with the psychoanalytic tradition's repeated criticism of the CBT trend that has eclipsed them (not that I really agree with their ideology either, but on this it seems to me they have a very valid point. I gather some of them refer with digruntlement to the 'CBT mafia' !).

Another doubt would be that those 'fallacies' listed above, are usually deeply embedded in people due to their histories. They don't come from nowhere, they are wired-in by experience, especially early experience. And in many cases they are a fundamental part of someone's identity. CBT seems to describe thse as 'core beliefs', deeper levels of fallacious thinking than the challengable specific thoughts. But simply telling someone to "stop thinking like that" seems a bit useless, as if they could do that they wouldn't need help in the first place, particularly for modes of thinking that have been present someone's entire life (which is why I still feel CBT is only likely to be useful for the simplest of psychological 'issues', like a simple phobia about of pigeons or dogs, perhaps, rather than traits that are deeply wired into someone's personality)

And those fallacies are also all subjective - all of those things are questions of degree, and how far each can be taken before becoming fallacious is a subjective judgement. Who is to say that wanting things to be 'fair' and being angry or unhappy if it isnt't, is irrational? What's the correct balance between "all" and "nothing" to stop at short of 'all or nothing thinking'? Those things all seem horribly subjective to me.

Also (and I'm not saying this applies to every practioner of the method), at its crudest, CBT seems to overlap with 'positive thinking' and the likes of "prosperity gospel". Those things have a very specific cultural history and clearly gained popularity for political reasons, but seem to have an unnerving overlap with CBT. Which makes me suspicious why CBT has become so dominant in psychiatry in our era, an era in which a neglect of social and and material causes in favour of individualising everything seems to have become a defining cultural trait. It seems almost a kind of neo-liberal approach to problems - promoting both indivdualism and acceptance of the status quo.

Furthermore, the constant claims that CBT is 'evidence-based' to me starts to fall into 'doth protest too much' territory. When looked at more closely that evidence is extremely weak. It has multiple problems, not least the lack of a control group, the absence of follow-up and the cherry-picking of the test population. My suspicion is that a few decades from now it will have fallen out of fashion again, as the results fail to live up to the current hype. It certainly seems to be no more evidence-based than any other form of psychotherapy, yet more than any other it gets that term prefixed to it whenever it is mentioned. This in itself makes me suspicious.

My main personal gripe with CBT though is that it has become _the_ standard treatment for all 'medically unexplained symptoms'. For any pain or disability that medics can't locate the cause of (originally just for chronic fatigue syndrome but now all other undiagnosed physical conditions). In that context it seems as if the practitioners and proponants of CBT are doing that commonly-observed thing of ascribing their good fortune (e.g. not having chronic physical pain) to their intrinsic virtues (being more rational than you are). Which is the flip-side of victim-blaming.

It's the same thing I've observed in various fields of activity, where someone will assume, and attempt to convince themselves, any problem you have is because you aren't as 'expert' as they are, rather than accepting that some things are just not under the individual's control, and that it's often a matter of luck - that some things are caused either by as-yet unidentified physical causes or by larger social ones, rather than being due to something the sufferer is doing wrong. There is something intrindically condescending about the practice of CBT in many cases.

People don't like to acknowledge that much of life is not under the individual's control, because that is a scary thought and makes them feel vulnerable and not in control. Ironically, come to think of it, I guess this is one of the 'fallacies' on that list, but in my experience it's one that CBT itself embodies when it insists that any unexplained physical symptom must be due to the sufferer's mistaken thought processes.

 

[Kaido]

What's the correct balance between "all" and "nothing" to stop at short of 'all or nothing thinking'? Those things all seem horribly subjective to me.

It's not just horribly subjective, it's entirely subjective - CBT is ALL about thoughts & emotions. I think CBT boils down to asking three starter questions:

1. Are you feeling good doing things how you are doing things?
2. Are you getting what you want?
3. Is it the best way available?

The first two are kind of obvious; the third one is a little bit more tricky. If you've ever worked in a corporate office before, then you've probably seen how people with horrible personalities seem to get promoted quite a bit. This tends to happen for two reasons:

1. People want them out of their groups, and relocating them within an organization is easier than getting them terminated
2. They yell & scream & create drama or use manipulation to get their way, which makes people hustle to get them off their backs, which creates the appearance of getting things done, which appears to upper management to deem that manager a good manager, when really, everyone hates that boss, lol

So if you're being a horrible boss, and feel good about what you're doing & are getting the results you want, that's only part of the story, because if you're acting like a psychopath or sociopath & can charm, manipulate, or bully your way up the corporate ladder instead of actually putting in the work & treating people reasonably, that's not really the best method available because it creates a terrible working environment that stresses people out & can cause things like undermining to go on. Subjectively, to a person with antisocial personality disorder, they won't care about right or wrong or lying to people or anything like that...so to them, their way IS the best way available, and they ARE getting the results they want. So this gets into the discussion of morals, what is right & what is wrong, what should be accepted in society, and so on, all of which can be discussed endlessly.

So the point of CBT is really to generate awareness & develop a new line of thinking, and thus feeling. So you run into situations where you are either thinking inaccurately about things (such as "all or nothing" thinking, which means that instead of getting started or actually finishing something, you refuse to do anything because you can't have it perfectly your way) or negative thinking, CBT helps you become aware of those situations, and how you think about them, and how to change them to have a better experience. The process is pretty simple:

1. Identify a situation in your life that you're having trouble in (you have to pick specific scenarios, not just broad, general stuff)
2. Learn about your self-talk in that situation, which consists of how you think about it, how you feel about it, and what you personally belief about it
3. Identify the specific inaccurate or negative thinking associated with that particular situation
4. Change that thinking, which requires a lot of practice, as you're changing an embedded habit that consists of beliefs, emotions, and thinking that get triggered when you encounter that situation

People don't like to acknowledge that much of life is not under the individual's control, because that is a scary thought and makes them feel vulnerable and not in control. Ironically, come to think of it, I guess this is one of the 'fallacies' on that list, but in my experience it's one that CBT itself embodies when it insists that any unexplained physical symptom must be due to the sufferer's mistaken thought processes.

That's a really good point - a lot of stuff is NOT under your control. Even for things as simple as going to a grocery store, you're manipulated from the moment you walk in, as far as choosing from a pool of available options, predesigned by someone else. But if we zoom out, we all have control over a few things in our lives:

1. What we choose to think
2. How we choose to feel emotionally (noting that feelings are different from emotions)
3. The words we speak
4. The actions we take
5. The environments we choose to design & put ourselves into, particularly in America, where no one is holding a gun to your head to force you into a particular job or educational path in school or anything like that

It's an easy road to cop-out & say that life is just how it is, but that's using a fixed mindset, instead of a growth mindset, which is fine if a person, on a personal basis, does not want to make any progress or change anything at all in their life. CBT is simply about recognizing not-so-great situations & changing how you think & feel, and thus behave, in response to them, whether it's something as simply as doing your chores or studying, or something more negative like getting into fights at bars all the time or experience heavy road rage. If life is perfect all the time & you feel great about everything in your life & get things done all day long on a consistent basis, then great! Most people do not get to enjoy that level of bliss, however, which is where CBT comes in. tbh I think they should teach it in school & that students should have access to CBT therapists, and that businesses should offer it for free to workers to help them with different coping strategies. A lot of people go through life stuck on things & not knowing how to get out of those situations or deal with those situations because they don't realize that thoughts create emotions, and emotions govern a lot of how we feel & what we do, and life is too short to not work on making progress on things, imo!

 

[shortylickens]

American blacks havent had it nearly as bad as they think.
American blacks create most of their problems for themselves.
Bill Cosby is still funny even for a rapist.
Harvey Weinstein still made good movies especially for a rapist.
Al Franken did nothing wrong.
Roman Polanski should never have been allowed out of the courthouse.
OJ did it and got away with it.
The majority of America is morons.
The Boomers caused what will eventually be our collapse.
Christans are more dangerous than Muslims.
Israel is its own worst enemy and more dangerous than Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia put together.

Actually I duno how popular or unpopular my ideas are.

 

[pmv]

It's not just horribly subjective, it's entirely subjective - CBT is ALL about thoughts & emotions. I think CBT boils down to asking three starter questions:

1. Are you feeling good doing things how you are doing things?
2. Are you getting what you want?
3. Is it the best way available?

The first two are kind of obvious; the third one is a little bit more tricky. If you've ever worked in a corporate office before, then you've probably seen how people with horrible personalities seem to get promoted quite a bit. This tends to happen for two reasons:

1. People want them out of their groups, and relocating them within an organization is easier than getting them terminated
2. They yell & scream & create drama or use manipulation to get their way, which makes people hustle to get them off their backs, which creates the appearance of getting things done, which appears to upper management to deem that manager a good manager, when really, everyone hates that boss, lol

So if you're being a horrible boss, and feel good about what you're doing & are getting the results you want, that's only part of the story, because if you're acting like a psychopath or sociopath & can charm, manipulate, or bully your way up the corporate ladder instead of actually putting in the work & treating people reasonably, that's not really the best method available because it creates a terrible working environment that stresses people out & can cause things like undermining to go on. Subjectively, to a person with antisocial personality disorder, they won't care about right or wrong or lying to people or anything like that...so to them, their way IS the best way available, and they ARE getting the results they want. So this gets into the discussion of morals, what is right & what is wrong, what should be accepted in society, and so on, all of which can be discussed endlessly.

So the point of CBT is really to generate awareness & develop a new line of thinking, and thus feeling. So you run into situations where you are either thinking inaccurately about things (such as "all or nothing" thinking, which means that instead of getting started or actually finishing something, you refuse to do anything because you can't have it perfectly your way) or negative thinking, CBT helps you become aware of those situations, and how you think about them, and how to change them to have a better experience. The process is pretty simple:

1. Identify a situation in your life that you're having trouble in (you have to pick specific scenarios, not just broad, general stuff)
2. Learn about your self-talk in that situation, which consists of how you think about it, how you feel about it, and what you personally belief about it
3. Identify the specific inaccurate or negative thinking associated with that particular situation
4. Change that thinking, which requires a lot of practice, as you're changing an embedded habit that consists of beliefs, emotions, and thinking that get triggered when you encounter that situation


That's a really good point - a lot of stuff is NOT under your control. Even for things as simple as going to a grocery store, you're manipulated from the moment you walk in, as far as choosing from a pool of available options, predesigned by someone else. But if we zoom out, we all have control over a few things in our lives:

1. What we choose to think
2. How we choose to feel emotionally (noting that feelings are different from emotions)
3. The words we speak
4. The actions we take
5. The environments we choose to design & put ourselves into, particularly in America, where no one is holding a gun to your head to force you into a particular job or educational path in school or anything like that

It's an easy road to cop-out & say that life is just how it is, but that's using a fixed mindset, instead of a growth mindset, which is fine if a person, on a personal basis, does not want to make any progress or change anything at all in their life. CBT is simply about recognizing not-so-great situations & changing how you think & feel, and thus behave, in response to them, whether it's something as simply as doing your chores or studying, or something more negative like getting into fights at bars all the time or experience heavy road rage. If life is perfect all the time & you feel great about everything in your life & get things done all day long on a consistent basis, then great! Most people do not get to enjoy that level of bliss, however, which is where CBT comes in. tbh I think they should teach it in school & that students should have access to CBT therapists, and that businesses should offer it for free to workers to help them with different coping strategies. A lot of people go through life stuck on things & not knowing how to get out of those situations or deal with those situations because they don't realize that thoughts create emotions, and emotions govern a lot of how we feel & what we do, and life is too short to not work on making progress on things, imo!

Wow, you do have a lot to say on this. Which is fine by me, because it's a topic I've brooded about a lot, myself. So I'm going to add to the volume of text (if others don't like it they don't have to read it!).

Trying CBT myself (and knowing people with diagnosed psychiatric conditions who have had many different types of treatment) has caused me to develop some strong opinions about it.

I honestly just feel it's based on an unrealistic view of how humans work. To me, it seems it's more like psychotherapy for robots, for entities of pure reason that are driven by explicitly formulated logical prepositions (maybe a Prolog program?). I don't feel people work that way. We are biological entities, we have bodies, a physical form in which our responses and behaviours are embodied in very complex ways - we aren't computers or systems of pure abstract reason, who can be debugged, with our logical tenets amended. There's just something a bit 'off' for me about CBT's philosophical underpinnings as it relates to the mind/body distinction (or the thought/emotion relationship).

And it never tells you what to do when your 'negative beliefs' turn out not to be irrational, but are supported by the evidence. And in any case with a large variety of issues it's not really possible to definitively compile 'the evidence', as that would require an extensive, well-funded, reseach program and the writing of a thesis! In practice we all form reactions based on evidence we haven't made explicit and comprehensive, because life would be impossible otherwise (that's why P&N forum exists! If one could rationally come to a verdict about everything there'd be no politics)

I found it useless for dealing with chronic physical pain - the issue never involved conscious 'thoughts' that I could challenge. Pain precludes thought. But it did occur to me, maybe it would have helped me decades ago, when I undeniably suffered from some of those 'unhelpful beliefs', particularly that all-or-nothing-thinking. At school I was absolutely of the view that I had to do everything perfectly and get 100% on every exam or it was a disaster. That was undeniably a problem for a long time.

But then I remember the wider context, all the stressful things that were going on in my life then both at school and outside and then I think how inadequate CBT's approach would have been in the context of that real-world situation at that time. Even though I certainly had some of those unhelpful beliefs, and was fully aware that I had them, the thought of trying to apply that CBT approach in that context to me just again highlights the problem with the way it neglects the 'real world'.

The more I think about it the more inadequate CBT seems to me to be for the scale of the real problems real people wrestle with. Outside, perhaps, of fairly simple problems addressed in otherwise healthy circumstances (like a generally functioning person in reasonable economic and social circumstances who just happens to have an irrational fear of dogs, say - I can imagine it might work for that).

And the other point is, I was always entirely aware of those 'unhelpful beliefs', I used to think about them quite explicitly ("why do I find it impossible to do something without doing it obsessively or getting perfectionist about it?"), I didn't need someone to point it out to me. I was constantly trying to find a solution. The problem was more the way that tendency was deeply hard-wired into my nature, into my psychic and biological pain-and-reward system, and that it existed in a context of chaos and stress in the social environment around me.

I find that part of CBT rather patronising, in its assumption that you aren't already aware of the problems. What made change difficult was not a lack of awareness of the problem, but that real-world context I was in (being surrounded by crazy, even sociopathic and violent, adults and a general atmosphere of chaos and crisis both at school and at home). When that improved I found my own workarounds.

CBT seems to have two flaws, it seems to me. It ignores or neglects our nature as biological, physical entities (instead treating us as creatures of pure abstract reason), and also neglects the fact we do not exist in a vacuum, we are embedded in a wider social system that determines much of our life and constrains what we can do and how we feel. It almost seems to demand people be superheros, magically unconstrained by the real world. It hence comes across as patronising, even insulting, at times. Though I'm sure that is very dependent on the specific practitioner.

I gather that behaviourism is very much out-of-fashion, as the idea that we are simple stimulus-response machines was rightly derided as absurd. But I don't think that just adding a 'C' to the 'B' gets us to a complete picture of what it is to be human. It's still a massively incomplete model.

Oh, and your point 5 takes us into politics. I have a strong feeling that CBT appeals particularly to those of a certain political outlook, but I'd like to avoid this turning into P&N because I think this is an interesting topic in itself, and so far it's been a perfectly amicable discussion.

 

[pmv]

It also seems, from what I've read, and seen, that the 'evidence base' for the efficacy of CBT is over-stated. I'm suspicious that it's another psyche fad, as with past drug treatments that got overprescribed and over-rated. On both sides of the Atlantic it seems to have become a dominant approach for institutional and political reasons rather than objective ones. I feel it is currently over-used, for things way beyond the limited problems it might actually be useful for.

 

[Fritzo]

My Hot Take:

Sports player and movie star salaries should be taxed into oblivion, and that tax money should be funding research and development in technologies that will actually advance the human race.

We're paying people that pretend to be other people and guys that can move a leather balloon from point A to point B despite people trying to stop him $20 million, meanwhile a biological researcher investigating a cure for cancer makes $60K a year.

 

[snoopy7548]

My Hot Take:

Sports player and movie star salaries should be taxed into oblivion, and that tax money should be funding research and development in technologies that will actually advance the human race.

We're paying people that pretend to be other people and guys that can move a leather balloon from point A to point B despite people trying to stop him $20 million, meanwhile a biological researcher investigating a cure for cancer makes $60K a year.

And who decided these people should be freaking role models?

 

[nakedfrog]

Pancakes are better than waffles

Beer sucks on a hot day, even cold beer

That's messed up.

Someone mentioned Star Wars and I agree completely. I love a good sci-fi in terms of science and what-could-be but I could never get into the mix of humans with other guys in costumes. Same thing with Star Trek for the same reason. Never watched beyond 20 minutes of that stuff.

Perfect example of what I mean - if you remember Dark Angel it started out with a good sci-fi premise and then season 2+ they started introducing characters in full makeup/costumes. Complete turn-off with the circus in town.

Star Wars is space opera, not sci-fi.
Guess you're mostly into hard sci-fi.

 

[whm1974]

That's messed up.

Star Wars is space opera, not sci-fi.
Guess you're mostly into hard sci-fi.

Are there any SCI-FI shows and movies that are hard core?

 

[snoopy7548]

Are there any SCI-FI shows and movies that are hard core?

2069: A Sex Odyssey?

 

[Unheard]

Just said it in a thread on TWD. The walking dead should have been a 6 part mini-series. After that it turned into a soap opera. "As the world turns.... to zombies"

 

[darkswordsman17]

My Hot Take:

Sports player and movie star salaries should be taxed into oblivion, and that tax money should be funding research and development in technologies that will actually advance the human race.

We're paying people that pretend to be other people and guys that can move a leather balloon from point A to point B despite people trying to stop him $20 million, meanwhile a biological researcher investigating a cure for cancer makes $60K a year.

You're misplacing it. The owners and leagues should be taxed like crazy. That will naturally drive down the player salaries (although honestly I don't have much issue with player compensation, they're often destroying their bodies for the rest of their lives for 5-10 year spans, and even much of that is not max earning potential). Same with the researchers, its because they're stuck working for companies that are looking to maximize profits for the owners/biggest investors.

Of course we could start by simply ending the subsidies for the shitty stuff (i.e. rich owners seeking handouts to build their stadiums and then jacking up ticket prices).

And who decided these people should be freaking role models?

The mere fact that they make lots of money and fame, so of course other people are going to want to attain that. By that token why do we celebrate anyone as a role model if its simply they made a lot of money?

And believe it or not, there's lots of pro athletes that have good stories, of overcoming adversity or just being a good person and working their ass off to get good. The problem is we've built up this idea that people should be perfect beings, when I'd guess that just about everyone has some decent flaws. You see it all the time all over the place. We have this desire for super heroes (that cannot exist), and then we get mad when we find out the mythical being we put on the pedestal turned out to have some issues. Which that's kinda interesting that the Greeks built their mythological gods to be incredibly flawed. Some of that is kinda fucked up (Zeus fucked everything), but I think its in many ways more real than the shit that Americans (and others, probably including modern day Greeks) have deluded themselves into believing. Hell, look at politics where people want some perfect messiah figure, when we just need rational people that adhere to oversight. It leads them to being scammed or hurting themselves by simply dismissing what might be good leaders because they don't live up to stupid ideals ("not good looking enough" "not enough charisma" "this other person is so charming!" etc), and then people complain that politicians are charlatans (and then go and vote for the biggest ones of all, either because they're idiots that believe they'll be different, or because of sheer impotent rage that well if things are gonna be shit they might as well be as shit as they can make them).

Are there any SCI-FI shows and movies that are hard core?

That's the thing, it can be difficult to say as so much of that is futuristic that we don't know how much is feasible and how much isn't. Its further complicated by the fact that fiction can actually adjust things, so that we strive to make the fictional thing instead of the fictional thing becoming reality based on the natural course of development as the fiction predicted.

I think some of them even started to notice that and so started thinking about how their fictional stuff could lead to bad things and wanting to adjust for it, so that we don't end up with the dystopian reality of Skynet, or Robocop, etc. I forget what the group is called but its a real thing and they're asking for sci-fi creators (be it writers, moviemakers, etc) to be mindful so that we don't get a bunch of silicon valley bros going "Robocop was the shit, let's make it for real!"

Plus this modern adoration of science is getting stupid. Durr, he "scienced the shit out of that!"

Just said it in a thread on TWD. The walking dead should have been a 6 part mini-series. After that it turned into a soap opera. "As the world turns.... to zombies"

I honestly don't think that's nearly as unpopular as you think. The production values of the show declined significantly after the first episode, and then were problematic from there on. Hell its like people forget about even the diehard fans raging about, I think season 2 on the farm. Which I think people are kinda stupid as a lot of the rest of the other seasons were a lot more similar to the farm than they seem to want to admit.

 

[Kaido]

Wow, you do have a lot to say on this. Which is fine by me, because it's a topic I've brooded about a lot, myself. So I'm going to add to the volume of text (if others don't like it they don't have to read it!).

Trying CBT myself (and knowing people with diagnosed psychiatric conditions who have had many different types of treatment) has caused me to develop some strong opinions about it.

I honestly just feel it's based on an unrealistic view of how humans work. To me, it seems it's more like psychotherapy for robots, for entities of pure reason that are driven by explicitly formulated logical prepositions (maybe a Prolog program?). I don't feel people work that way. We are biological entities, we have bodies, a physical form in which our responses and behaviours are embodied in very complex ways - we aren't computers or systems of pure abstract reason, who can be debugged, with our logical tenets amended. There's just something a bit 'off' for me about CBT's philosophical underpinnings as it relates to the mind/body distinction (or the thought/emotion relationship).

And it never tells you what to do when your 'negative beliefs' turn out not to be irrational, but are supported by the evidence. And in any case with a large variety of issues it's not really possible to definitively compile 'the evidence', as that would require an extensive, well-funded, reseach program and the writing of a thesis! In practice we all form reactions based on evidence we haven't made explicit and comprehensive, because life would be impossible otherwise (that's why P&N forum exists! If one could rationally come to a verdict about everything there'd be no politics)

I found it useless for dealing with chronic physical pain - the issue never involved conscious 'thoughts' that I could challenge. Pain precludes thought. But it did occur to me, maybe it would have helped me decades ago, when I undeniably suffered from some of those 'unhelpful beliefs', particularly that all-or-nothing-thinking. At school I was absolutely of the view that I had to do everything perfectly and get 100% on every exam or it was a disaster. That was undeniably a problem for a long time.

But then I remember the wider context, all the stressful things that were going on in my life then both at school and outside and then I think how inadequate CBT's approach would have been in the context of that real-world situation at that time. Even though I certainly had some of those unhelpful beliefs, and was fully aware that I had them, the thought of trying to apply that CBT approach in that context to me just again highlights the problem with the way it neglects the 'real world'.

The more I think about it the more inadequate CBT seems to me to be for the scale of the real problems real people wrestle with. Outside, perhaps, of fairly simple problems addressed in otherwise healthy circumstances (like a generally functioning person in reasonable economic and social circumstances who just happens to have an irrational fear of dogs, say - I can imagine it might work for that).

And the other point is, I was always entirely aware of those 'unhelpful beliefs', I used to think about them quite explicitly ("why do I find it impossible to do something without doing it obsessively or getting perfectionist about it?"), I didn't need someone to point it out to me. I was constantly trying to find a solution. The problem was more the way that tendency was deeply hard-wired into my nature, into my psychic and biological pain-and-reward system, and that it existed in a context of chaos and stress in the social environment around me.

I find that part of CBT rather patronising, in its assumption that you aren't already aware of the problems. What made change difficult was not a lack of awareness of the problem, but that real-world context I was in (being surrounded by crazy, even sociopathic and violent, adults and a general atmosphere of chaos and crisis both at school and at home). When that improved I found my own workarounds.

CBT seems to have two flaws, it seems to me. It ignores or neglects our nature as biological, physical entities (instead treating us as creatures of pure abstract reason), and also neglects the fact we do not exist in a vacuum, we are embedded in a wider social system that determines much of our life and constrains what we can do and how we feel. It almost seems to demand people be superheros, magically unconstrained by the real world. It hence comes across as patronising, even insulting, at times. Though I'm sure that is very dependent on the specific practitioner.

I gather that behaviourism is very much out-of-fashion, as the idea that we are simple stimulus-response machines was rightly derided as absurd. But I don't think that just adding a 'C' to the 'B' gets us to a complete picture of what it is to be human. It's still a massively incomplete model.

Oh, and your point 5 takes us into politics. I have a strong feeling that CBT appeals particularly to those of a certain political outlook, but I'd like to avoid this turning into P&N because I think this is an interesting topic in itself, and so far it's been a perfectly amicable discussion.

I think it's important to understand that CBT is only one puzzle piece in a spectrum of solutions. It deals specifically with thoughts, which create emotions, and identifying your thinking & changing it for better outcomes through improved behaviors & emotions, which changes what you do & how you experience your situations.

And it never tells you what to do when your 'negative beliefs' turn out not to be irrational, but are supported by the evidence.

I think this is a personal choice: the way we feel emotionally is a direct result of what we think, and we can choose what to think. This leads into the quote of "your perception determines your reality". Reality is reality, but we all experience it a little bit differently, depending on our own personal worldviews. And we all have the choice to choose how to think, which defines the emotion we feel about a situation. Lots of people have evidence-based beliefs, lots of people have irrational beliefs, etc. Everyone is free to choose to think however they want to, especially in independent issues, despite what other people think.

I found it useless for dealing with chronic physical pain - the issue never involved conscious 'thoughts' that I could challenge.

I also think it's important to realize that feelings (like pain) are different from emotions (generated by thoughts). You have feelings; you create emotions. In the case of chronic pain (sorry to hear that, btw), CBT would apply to how you feel emotionally about the pain, not the feeling of pain itself. A personal example: my friend was involved in a bad car accident & lost the use of his legs. He was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life as a result. That's a really difficult situation to be in, but what made it worse was that he was angry about it & took it out on his wife. After a few years, his wife left him. All of his friends thought she was a real jerk for dumping him after he lost the use of his legs, but we eventually came to see that he had developed a rotten attitude about it, and was driving all of us off as well. It took him a long time to accept not only his situation, but his personal responsibility about how how felt about it & how he treated people...his wife didn't leave him because he had become crippled; his wife left him because he had become a jerk. She waited on him hand & foot & could only take so many years of verbal abuse before she got fed up with his behavior. Zooming out, this is why CBT is a one tool in a set, not a magic "master key" that applies to each & every situation - it's specifically for identifying patterns of thinking & learning how to alter them in order to solve personal problems involving things like emotional regulation.

I find that part of CBT rather patronising, in its assumption that you aren't already aware of the problems.

So I think that's a misconception: CBT exists to help you identify the problem, identify how you feel about it, reverse-engineer it & identify how you think about it, decide how you want to think & feel about it, and adjust accordingly. I think most people are already aware of their problems, at least to some extent. In my art classes, for example, I knew it was horribly dumb to not turn in my artwork & fail, because I felt like it had to be awesome & finished completely to my liking per my all-or-nothing drive, but I had never really sat down & mapped it out & allowed myself to see my distorted thinking on it...I just kept it in my head, never bothered to change how I thought about it, and thus never changed how I felt about it, so it really wasn't until I was in college & got acquainted with CBT that I really started to do some self-examination & not only clearly admit my issues to myself but also discover that I was capable of changing that internal mental script.

What made change difficult was not a lack of awareness of the problem, but that real-world context I was in (being surrounded by crazy, even sociopathic and violent, adults and a general atmosphere of chaos and crisis both at school and at home). When that improved I found my own workarounds.

I think this is hugely important to realize, because this is a different part of the puzzle: if you're in a bad place in different situations like school & at home, no amount of positive thinking is going to fix that for you. To use a commonly-used metaphor, if you're on a bus, headed downhill, with no brakes, and are going to crash - then no amount of changing how you think or feel about the situation is going to fix that - you're going to have to take action to remove yourself from that situation. I suppose CBT could technically be used in this situation to identify the situation & change your behaviors, but CBT is really used to change your thinking, which turns into emotion, so it's more feel-based than action or behavior-based.

If you grew up with a difficult family & went to a difficult school, it's the same type thing - CBT isn't about telling you to smile in hard circumstances, it's about helping you see the situation clearly instead of through inaccurate mental distortions. If the reality of the situation is that the situation is crappy, then that's the reality of the situation. Going home to a violent-adult family is not related to CBT, in terms of realizing that no amount of better thinking is going to change that, aside from perhaps prompting you to find a way of dealing with it, like getting yourself removed from the home or moving out on your own or whatever the best option may be.

I had a friend who was in a similar situation - work & school were fine, but he lived in an intensely verbally-abusive home. As a result of growing up in that situation, he had really low self-esteem & a lot of negative thoughts. Unfortunately, he also had a fixed mindset about it & refused to take any action because he felt like he was stuck & "that was just his life". Fortunately, he met a girl that he started dating who actually treated him nice, and in his mid-20's, he finally moved out on his own & started to work on himself. Extracting himself from a horribly negative situation was technically not related to CBT, because CBT is designed to target specific situations and specifically change how you specifically think & thus specifically feel about that specific situation. CBT is a targeted tool to manage your own internal emotions, not feelings or situations, and I think it's important to separate (1) feelings from emotions, and (2) separate situations that require physical change, apart from changing your emotions (via how you think).

I think CBT can certainly be used to help you identify crappy situations & prompt you to change or remove yourself from those situations, but that's really a separate toolset from what CBT is designed to do:

1. Your thoughts create your emotions, and emotions (a result of what you think) are separate from feelings (ex. pain)
2. CBT is basically designed to help you feel better, emotionally, which results in a variety of effects, such as helping you identify roadblocks to personal success (like turning in your art assignments, lol) or feeling bad about things you shouldn't (there are a variety of effects)
3. We are all responsible for our own thoughts, and thus, our own emotions (separate from feelings)
4. CBT is a specific tool to help solve specific problems involving emotional regulation

There are many therapies available to help us solve different problems...CBT, EDMR, medicine, personal productivity systems, etc. CBT is not a catch-all for all issues, such as pain (feeling) or actually living in really difficult situations (re: the bus analogy - changing how you think about those situations can only take you so far), but it is one option available for solving specific problems that involve thinking & emotions, which can open the door to better behaviors, for sure!

 

[Kaido]

Unpopular opinion: I think AI will create more jobs than it takes away

This is because solving problems requires specifications, options, hardware, development, and most importantly, specialization. For example:

How AI is helping spot wildfires faster

As wildfire season raged in California this fall, a startup a few states away used artificial intelligence to pinpoint the location of blazes there within minutes — in some cases far faster than these fires might otherwise be noticed by firefighters or civilians.

www.cnn.com

Spotting drivers on their phone is just the tip of the iceberg for AI-enabled cameras

AI cameras will put us all under surveillance

www.theverge.com

Nonprofit and IBM to sell 25-cent AI devices for analyzing soil

A piece of paper no bigger than a business card could enrich struggling coffee farmers and their soil, a growing challenge as temperatures rise and prices fluctuate.

www.japantimes.co.jp

 

[snoopy7548]

Unpopular opinion: I think AI will create more jobs than it takes away

This is because solving problems requires specifications, options, hardware, development, and most importantly, specialization. For example:

How AI is helping spot wildfires faster

As wildfire season raged in California this fall, a startup a few states away used artificial intelligence to pinpoint the location of blazes there within minutes — in some cases far faster than these fires might otherwise be noticed by firefighters or civilians.

www.cnn.com

Spotting drivers on their phone is just the tip of the iceberg for AI-enabled cameras

AI cameras will put us all under surveillance

www.theverge.com

Nonprofit and IBM to sell 25-cent AI devices for analyzing soil

A piece of paper no bigger than a business card could enrich struggling coffee farmers and their soil, a growing challenge as temperatures rise and prices fluctuate.

www.japantimes.co.jp

Same here, kind of like how the automobile industry created more jobs than the horse and buggy industry.

 

[ultimatebob]

I guess that depends on how smart you expect AI to get in the future. It's pretty braindead right now, but I think that we're all in trouble if it ever gets smart enough that it can reprogram itself.

 

[snoopy7548]

I guess that depends on how smart you expect AI to get in the future. It's pretty braindead right now, but I think that we're all in trouble if it ever gets smart enough that it can reprogram itself.

Robots can already build things; pretty soon we'll have robots building robots, and the next thing will be robots fixing robots.

 

[Fritzo]

Unpopular opinion: I think AI will create more jobs than it takes away

This is because solving problems requires specifications, options, hardware, development, and most importantly, specialization. For example:

How AI is helping spot wildfires faster

As wildfire season raged in California this fall, a startup a few states away used artificial intelligence to pinpoint the location of blazes there within minutes — in some cases far faster than these fires might otherwise be noticed by firefighters or civilians.

www.cnn.com

Spotting drivers on their phone is just the tip of the iceberg for AI-enabled cameras

AI cameras will put us all under surveillance

www.theverge.com

Nonprofit and IBM to sell 25-cent AI devices for analyzing soil

A piece of paper no bigger than a business card could enrich struggling coffee farmers and their soil, a growing challenge as temperatures rise and prices fluctuate.

www.japantimes.co.jp

Same- what it IS going to take away is unskilled labor. I've always viewed unskilled labor as a training ground, not a career. People in their 40's working as cashiers need to apply themselves a bit more.

 

[BudAshes]

Robots can already build things; pretty soon we'll have robots building robots, and the next thing will be robots fixing robots.

We will just be monkeys in a zoo, but then again maybe we already are.

 

[Kaido]

Robots can already build things; pretty soon we'll have robots building robots, and the next thing will be robots fixing robots.

tbh I dunno about that. A lot of my IT customers are in the shop/manufacturing fields, who have water-cutters, 3D-printers, CNC lathes & mills, robot arms, and other automated tools. There are couple key issues:

1. You still need supplies. So you'd need to automate mining, processing, shipment, loading, etc. All of which could probably be done individually, but everything would have to be pre-defined from the get-go. On a tangent, if you like TV shows, check out Philip K.Dick's "Electric Dreams" series on Amazon, specifically the Autofac episode (no spoilers!).

2. Manufacturing stuff is...finicky. Human finesse is required for custom parts. Tesla has a zillion robots, but all they do is stamp out the same parts all day. I've been learning how to program 6-axis robots arm lately & even something as seemingly simple as a single robot arm is incredibly, tremendously complex!

 

[Kaido]

Same- what it IS going to take away is unskilled labor. I've always viewed unskilled labor as a training ground, not a career. People in their 40's working as cashiers need to apply themselves a bit more.

Honestly, I don't think that's going to disappear either, for two reasons:

1. There will always be people who need those jobs, due to personal motivation issues, mental issues, physical disability issues, etc. And, like you said, it's a training ground - I needed a job mowing lawns & making pizza in high school to earn spending money & save for college, so we're always going to have that flowing pool of unskilled workers with us. That, and places like McDonalds provide jobs to an awful lot of people...over 300,000 people, just in the United States.

2. Even if you built a universal AI, you'd still need to build a universal hardware interface to do all of the variety of jobs that even an unskilled human can do. Maybe they can come up with something like a human being-style robot that can do, but the complexity & cost would be incredible. Costs are coming down, so eventually we may pass the "human labor is cheap" threshold for affordability of robot mechanics, but...I think that's a pretty long ways off. Tesla hasn't even figured out full, hands-free self-driving & they've been working on it (and promising it) for years now.

I do think more automation is coming...driving, food industry, etc. - but I think it's going to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. I can see a future where AI programmers & hardware designers for specific niche applications are in as much demand as app developers are today.

 

[pmv]

Same here, kind of like how the automobile industry created more jobs than the horse and buggy industry.

Not to say I know how things will play out, but I distrust that argument in general. It gets made a lot, but I don't see any reason to believe that all tech revolutions are the same, that just because the steam engine didn't reduce the total number of jobs we can assume the same will always be true for all new technology. I simply don't see the basis for that belief. Different things are different, history is contingent and things are always changing, and the effect of past 'new technology' was dependent massively on political actions and choices.

All I do know is that we'll see a lot more concern about it if it becomes possible to use AI to replace economists, opinion columnists and celebrities.

 

[OccamsToothbrush]

2. Manufacturing stuff is...finicky. Human finesse is required for custom parts. Tesla has a zillion robots, but all they do is stamp out the same parts all day. I've been learning how to program 6-axis robots arm lately & even something as seemingly simple as a single robot arm is incredibly, tremendously complex!

Everything is hard the first time. It takes a billion dollars to get a new drug through testing and into production and then every pill after that costs 2 cents to manufacture. It took thousands of the greatest minds ever to create the first atomic bomb, now a college physics student can build one in his garage. Teaching a 6-axis robot arm to perform a delicate task might be a bitch, but once it's done every other 6-axis robot arm can perform the same delicate task using the same programming.

 

[brianmanahan]

i'm getting burned by all these hot takes