Liberal Free Chat Zone

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Heads should roll over Gemini, therapy culture = sad kids and other commentary
By Post Editorial Board Published March 1, 2024, 4:56 p.m. ET

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.”

Conservative: Putin’s Idea of a Fair Peace
Under Russia’s demands for a peace deal with Ukraine, Moscow “gets to decide the size and strength of the Ukrainian military, and it promises to not start another invasion,” notes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Yet “Vladimir Putin insists that Ukraine is not a real country, claims that the entire concept of independent Ukrainian identity was a plot by ‘the Polish elite’.?.?. and that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent nation.” Hmm: “If Ukraine were forced, at gunpoint, to sign a deal like this, who among us is willing to say, ‘Well, Putin would never start an unprovoked war of territorial aggression against Ukraine for a fourth time’?”

Eye on Albany: Redistricting Amendment Sham
New York’s original 2012 anti-gerymandering law created the Independent Redistricting Commission and banned the Legislature from changing the IDC’s districts by more than 2%; then “New Yorkers enshrined the IRC and anti-gerrymandering rules in the state Constitution in a 2014 referendum, but the text left out the two-percent rule,” observes the Empire Center’s Cam Macdonald. Keeping the 2% rule “out of the Constitution, which lawmakers can’t easily supersede, indicates the dealmakers did not intend the limitation to be permanent.” And the Legislature, this year granted itself the right to break the rule. “Any voter who believed in 2014 that a legislature in 2024 would abide by its stated rules got played.” The lesson: “the next time lawmakers offer to amend their Constitution,” get “the whole deal in writing.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

https://nypost.com/2024/03/01/opinion/heads-should-roll-over-gemini-therapy-culture-sad-kids-other-commentary/