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Comment by ddp26 | Hacker News Reader

What's the base rate of human therapists giving dangerous advice? Whole schools, e.g. psychotherapy, are possibly net dangerous.

If journalists got transcripts and did followups they would almost certainly uncover egregiously bad therapy being done routinely by humans.

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Therapist have professional standards that include a graduate degree and 1000's of hours of practice with supervision. Maybe a few bad ones fall through the cracks but I would be willing to bet that due to their standards most therapist are professional and do not give 'dangerous' advice or really any advice at all if they are following their professional standards.

Therapy gone wrong lead to wide scale witch hunts across the U.S. in the 1980's that dwarfed the Salem Witch trials. A huge number of therapists had come to believe the now mostly debunked "recovered memory" theory to construct the idea that there were networks of secret Satanists across the U.S. that needed to be weeded out. Countless lives were destroyed. I've yet to see therapy as a profession come to terms with the damage they did.

"These people are credentialed professionals so I'm sure they're fine" is an extremely dangerous and ahistorical position to take.

As somebody who has been through various forms of psychotherapy, knows trained professional psychotherapists, knows highly educated personell in the relevant educational institutions, etc. the very mild summary that I think when reading what to my mind is a generalized statements like "Whole schools, e.g. psychotherapy, are possibly net dangerous." is:

Citation needed.

Also: Psychotherapy is not a school but is divided in many different schools.

human therapists don't give advice

Well if she ain't human, what is she?

Someone raises safety concerns about LLM's interactions with people with delusions and your takeaway is maybe the field of therapy is actually net harmful?

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