Heads should roll over Gemini, therapy culture = sad kids and other commentary

Centrist: Heads Should Roll Over Gemini

“It’s increasingly apparent that Gemini is among the more disastrous product rollouts in the history of Silicon Valley,” thunders Nate Silver at Silver Bulletin. The AI’s results are “heavily inflected with politics” that render it “biased” and “inaccurate” — and Google’s explanations are “pretty close to gaslighting.” Indeed, the programming involved “deliberately altering the user’s language to produce outputs that are misaligned with the user’s original request — without informing users of this,” which “could reasonably be described as promoting disinformation.” Google should “pull the plug on Gemini” and “provide the public with a thorough accounting of how it went so wrong, and hire, terminate or reposition staff so that the same mistakes don’t happen again.” If not, “Google should face immediate regulatory and shareholder scrutiny.”

Social critic: Therapy Culture = Sad Kids

Is “the emergence of therapeutic parenting,” which “encourages children to forsake resilience for introspection at every turn,” producing “a nation of happy, well-adjusted kids?” So asks Mary Harrington at UnHerd in a review of Abigail Shrier’s book “Bad Therapy.” The answer? Nope. Parents “giving children endless meaningless choices while constraining their options to the sanitised and risk-free” yields “an explosion of psychic distress at home and bad behaviour in schools.” No wonder: Kids are “simultaneously under- and over-parented” by “adults who both want to be involved in every detail of their children’s lives but who shrink from being seen as authority figures.” The answer? “Less tech, more agency, better boundaries.” Moms and dads must fight “deep-seated fears” about “being hated for saying ‘no.’ ”

Libertarian: Baseless ‘More Counselors’ Push

As “public schools have more staff than ever and with enrollment projected to continue declining for years to come, the last thing they need is 77,000 more counselors,” argues Aaron Garth Smith at Reason. “Legislators in states such as Minnesota, New York, and Virginia are introducing bills aimed at getting schools closer to meeting the 250-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association.” But that advice, based on “a back-of-the-envelope calculation” that researcher Kenneth Hoyt “did in a short column” in 1955, has “no empirical basis.” Add in “the question of mission creep and whether public schools should be delivering mental health services at all.” This campaign, “using a baseless metric,” simply “undermines ASCA’s credibility and those pushing their narrative.”