"The shocks I experienced as DOCTOR became widely known and “played” were due
  principally to three distinct events.

  1. A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR
     computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of
     psychotherapy. Colby et al. write, for example,

   #+begin_quote
     “Further work must be done before the program will be ready for clinical
     use. If the method proves beneficial, then it would provide a therapeutic tool
     which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers
     suffering a shortage of therapists. Because of the time-sharing capabilities of
     modern and future computers, several hundred patients an hour could be handled
     by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved
     in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would
     become a much more efficient man since his efforts would no longer be limited
     to the one-to-one patient-therapist ratio as now exists.”[fn::Nor is Dr. Colby
     alone in his enthusiasm for computer administered psychotherapy. Dr.  Carl
     Sagan, the astrophysicist, recently commented on ELIZA in Natural History,
     vol. LXXXIV, no. 1 (Jan. 1975), p. 10: “No such computer program is adequate
     for psychiatric use today, but the same can be remarked about some human
     psychotherapists. In a period when more and more people in our society seem to
     be in need of psychiatric counseling, and when time sharing of computers is
     widespread, I can imagine the development of a network of computer
     psychotherapeutic terminals, something like arrays of large telephone booths,
     in which, for a few dollars a session, we would be able to talk with an
     attentive, tested, and largely nondirective psychotherapist.”][fn:0-3]
   #+end_quote

     I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one
     person might help another learn to cope with his emotional problems, that the
     helper himself participate in the other's experience of those problems and, in
     large part by way of his own empathic recognition of them, himself come to
     understand them. There are undoubtedly many techniques to facilitate the
     therapist's imaginative projection into the patient's inner life. But that it
     was possible for even one practicing psychiatrist to advocate that this crucial
     component of the therapeutic process be entirely supplanted by pure
     technique---/that/ I had not imagined! What must a psychiatrist who makes such
     a suggestion think he is doing while treating a patient, that he can view the
     simplest mechanical parody of a single interviewing technique as having
     captured anything of the essence of a human encounter? Perhaps Colby et
     al. give us the required clue when they write;

   #+begin_quote
     “A human therapist can be viewed as an information processor and decision maker
     with a set of decision rules which are closely linked to short-range and
     long-range goals,...He is guided in these decisions by rough empiric rules
     telling him what is appropriate to say and not to say in certain contexts. To
     incorporate these processes, to the degree possessed by a human therapist, in
     the program would be a considerable undertaking, but we are attempting to move
     in this direction.[fn:0-3]
   #+end_quote
     What can the psychiatrist's image of his patient be when he sees himself, as
     therapist, not as an engaged human being acting as a healer, but as an
     information processor following rules, etc.?

     Such questions were my awakening to what Polanyi had earlier called a
     “scientific outlook that appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of
     man.”"

  [0-3] : K. M. Colby, J. B. Watt, and J. P. Gilbert, “A Computer Method of
     Psychotherapy: Preliminary Communication,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental
     Disease, vol. 142, no. 2 (1966), pp. 148-152.

In actual fact, though, apple is a very effective fifth or sixth mover, and has been for a very long time. They watch everyone else fuck it up and get it wrong a bunch of times, and then throw scads of cash at threading the needle.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46006598

Points: 215

# Comments: 65

you have no reason to believe this is not already the case.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904707

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

I recently heard this referred to as "the Brother Strategy": where you don't do anything, but become market leader because everyone else has been actively working on making their offering _worse_.

I have a graveyard of old blogs and webcomics whose URLs I can't bear to delete. I have a crapton of feeds still happily churning out articles.

> https://www.consumerreports.org/health/nutrition-healthy-eat...

paywalled.

Visual diff. The operation of finding differences between two files by eyeball search. The term optical diff has also been reported, and is sometimes more specifically used for the act of superimposing two nearly identical printouts on one another and holding them up to a light to spot differences. Though this method is poor for detecting omissions in the ‘rear’ file, it can also be used with printouts of graphics, a claim few if any diff programs can make. See diff.

An interesting variant of the vdiff technique usable by anyone who has sufficient control over the parallax of their eyeballs (e.g. those who can easily view random-dot stereograms), is to hold up two paper printouts and go cross-eyed to superimpose them. This invokes deep, fast, built-in image comparison wetware (the same machinery responsible for depth perception) and differences stand out almost immediately. This technique is good for finding edits in graphical images, or for comparing an image with a compressed version to spot artifacts.

Well, it sounds like the Aether, really.

  This paper explores the physics of the what-if question "what if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?" While the assumption may be absurd, the consequences can be explored rigorously using elementary physics. The result is not entirely dissimilar to a small ocean-world exoplanet.

coming from mostly python, i miss a robust stdlib.

handy, if you’re in the emacs ecosystem.

You could be singular or plural, but it was always formal. (compare the vous- form, in french)

Knowing this puts a whole new spin on things like the KJV, since as moderns we hear "thou" and think "fancy old timey speech! very formal!" and it is exactly the opposite.

Quakers/Friends chose the thou- form as the preferred form to address everyone; this was part of their scandalous behavior at the time, because it was heard as being entirely improper. (For their part, Quakers figure we're all equal before God, so why pay too much attention to social status? -- and that's not a bad point, really!)