Madness solved

Define sanity! No one can because we are all insane to some degree and that degree might change from observer to observer.

Imagine trying to treat people with psychological issues with other people (e.g. therapists)? Since they are both imperfect and slightly insane the whole process is definitely insane. No wonder it hardly works.

A much better approach would be to get a machine to ask questions and a massive friggin’ computer to parse and process the answers. That is, we should pass the problem over to Google and some large evolutionary algorithms.

This would have two benefits. First people are far more likely to be honest when talking to a machine, and, second, by combining all the results of all the people we could start coming up with genuine definitions of psychological issues.

Of course these definitions would be contextual so the solution to a genuine issue might be therapy, drugs or a simple change of environment.

Even the treatments themselves could be tested by the same algorithms for efficacy and a process of continuous improvement instigated.

There are some problems that are simply too complex for people and their simple models – we should hand them over to the computers now that we have them.