American kids are the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. We are seeing a generation of parents simultaneously hyper fixated on the mental health and wellbeing of their children. There has been an increased emphasis in the importance of feelings in parenting and education, and more kids are in therapy today than ever before. And what the author of Bad Therapy raises, what Abigail Schreier argues is, well, all of these parenting and educational developments seem positive on the surface. Is that really the case?
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​Jonathan Haidt talks about phones, wants to put this at the feet of phones and social media. This book puts it at the feet of therapy and sort of an overemphasis on feelings. That's an oversimplification, but that's a big piece of her argument. So what I think is really good about this whole space is that it has gotten people talking about this problem, which I think we can kind of all agree is a problem. What's hard, and I'm sure we will talk a lot about in this conversation, is when you have a long time trend, it's really hard to say that it's due to something in particular.
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You are focusing on safety in this kind of narrow idea of physical safety in this moment, but you are not thinking about the fact that if you don't give them those opportunities, there's all kinds of stuff that's lost in the future, all kinds of other risks. And my sense is, trying to get people to take a wider view of the idea of risks and benefits is pretty helpful in having them recognize. So the phrase I use is no option is completely safe. Like, keeping your kid in their room all the time is not a completely safe option.
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When I say my number one job is to keep my kid safe, I think there's so many ways to think about safe. When I think about safe and when I mean that I want my kid to feel safe in the world, that is really different than always maximizing safety, ironically enough.
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I think to some degree, we unconsciously think that being a good parent is minimization of risk. That's not a parenting strategy. It's not a life strategy. You cannot have a life that's worth living with a minimization of risk approach.​
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​What is my job? Right? My job is to prepare my kid for life. My job is to raise adults. That's what it is.​
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To me, confidence, true confidence, like, adult confidence, is not built when we're successful at something. Because if you actually think about someone who's only confident when they're successful at something, I think we would actually say that person is very fragile. Extremely fragile. To me, confidence comes from the moments where something didn't go your way, and honestly, it's not fancy. You just kind of figure out how to survive them.

17 days after they had been reported missing, Tom Phillips and his three children walked through the front door of his parents’ farm.
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In neighborhood Facebook groups and on playgrounds across New Zealand, parents debated the news. How dare this screw-up risk the lives of searchers and terrify his family because he hadn’t bothered to tell anyone where he was going. Shouldn’t he at least pay the government back for what it spent on that search plane? Or: How dare the government charge a parent for going camping with his children! Wasn’t he the kind of throwback dad we didn’t see enough of anymore, as modern kids become coddled and soft?​
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The same outlet asked a “human rights lawyer” what she thought about a parent taking children out into the deep bush without letting anyone know. “It’s not best practice,” she replied, in a tone I could almost hear from the page.
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As 2022 turned into 2023, Phillips and his children had been missing without a trace for more than a year. Then came the bank robbery...​
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On social media, it’s been a long time since anyone has called Phillips a good dad merely fighting authority. “He’s just a piece of shit human being with anger and control issues who is subjecting his children to child abuse,” went one typical comment.

I watched 15 hours of COVID origins arguments so you don't have to - but you should!
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According to polling, about 66% of Americans believe lab leak, compared to 16% who believe natural origin and 17% who aren’t sure. That means that people with an opinion on the issue are more than 4:1 in favor of lab leak.
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People say it would be a surprising coincidence if a zoonotic coronavirus pandemic just so happened to start in a city with a big coronavirus research lab, and this is true. But it would be an even more surprising coincidence if a lab-leak coronavirus pandemic just so happened to first get detected at a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market!​
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A map of cases at the wet market itself shows a clear pattern in favor of the very southwest corner: The southwest corner is where most of the wildlife was being sold. Rumor said that included a stall with raccoon-dogs, an animal which is generally teeming with weird coronaviruses, and is a plausible intermediate host between humans and bats:
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Scientists were finally able to confirm the existence of the raccoon-dog shop in the funniest possible way: a virologist had visited Wuhan in 2014, saw the awful conditions in the shop, and took a picture as an example of the kind of place that a future pandemic might start.
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​We should learn the lessons of lab leak even if it turns out to be false this time; that hasn’t changed. But this was a good reminder to also learn the lessons of zoonosis, for the same reason.​
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We need more attention on closing wet markets and tracking weird Chinese wildlife. The DEFUSE proposal wanted to immunize bats - is this still a wortwhile idea? The virologists got a bad rap for wanting to gain-of-function exactly the pathogen that caused the century’s worst pandemic, but in a way that speaks well of them - they clearly knew what to be worried about. Has anyone mumbled an apology and asked them if they have any other useful predictions?
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For the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate stayed acrimonious for years to come.
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If the coronavirus’ story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim’s moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.