I received word from several long-established recovery programs today that they expect to be out of business within days, weeks, or months as a result of these funds being pulled.
The damage being done here will be long lasting, not only due to the employees and clients impacted, but due to the impact on the broader business environment as well.
Until now, the government was viewed as a reliable business partner in these industries, and it definitely won't be viewed that way going forward: the chill on investment will be felt for many years to come.
In some ways, I'm starting to view this and related executive funding cuts as a sort of miniature debt default.
The argument in the paper is about clinical efficacy, but many of the comments here argue that even lower clinical efficacy at a greatly reduced cost might be beneficial.
As someone in the industry, I agree there are too many therapists and therapy businesses right now, and a lot of them are likely not delivering value for the money.
However, I know how insurance companies think, and if you want to see people get really upset: take a group of people who are already emotionally unbalanced, and then have their health insurance company start telling them they have to talk to an LLM before seeing a human being for therapy, kind of like having to talk to Tier 1 support at a call center before getting permission to speak with someone who actually knows how to fix your issue. Pretty soon you're seeing a spike in bomb threats.
Even if we pretend someone cracks AGI, most people -- at least outside of tech circles -- would still probably prefer to talk to humans about their personal problems and complain loudly if pressured otherwise.
Maybe if we reach some kind of BladeRunner future where that AGI gets injected into a passingly humanoid robot that all changes, but that's probably still quite a ways off...
The author's thesis is that the rise in home-schooling is driven by a desire to "opt out of being around average people," and he implies that he is not home-schooling his own children in part because he himself was home-schooled and believes that may have contributed to his own struggles with social stress.
However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.
Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.
When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
Agreed. Titles and credentials do not mean what they used to, in education and a lot of other fields.
Sufficient erosion in the meaning and value of 3rd party teaching credentials then diminishes the relative value of outsourcing the process vs. doing it in-house: literally.
Digital surveillance is often marketed as a form of harm reduction, with a focus on some metric that is easy to measure.
What is more often ignored is the potential for harm creation imposed by the measurement process itself: after all, such externalities are subtle and hard to quantify, even if they may ultimately sum in total to a larger quantity, potentially yielding a net positive harm overall.
Some would likely argue that we should prioritize the known over the unknown, but I'd rather not sign up my kids to be your guinea pig, especially if you have already demonstrated yourself to be a rotten scientist.
https://rollcall.com/2026/01/14/hhs-cuts-2-billion-in-mental...
Damage still done, people.