I got the privilege to read some of his original Arabic works (being Arabic speaker). Although he used to write directly in English, his works in Arabic are definitely immortal.
Isn't it more like a superstition to assume the placebo effect is real (and not just a measurement artifact or regression to the mean)? It is hard to make a scientific experiment that could show the placebo effect to be real:
> t’s impossible to achieve a blind when comparing placebo to no treatment, since the placebo itself is the main method for blinding in the first place.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away", as Philip K. Dick said.
I don't find it unprobable that a psychological bias of a patient can change the result of an medical observation, since medical problems aren't usually 100% only of physical nature either — when your kid is ill in the morning and they can avoid school they will suddenly feel very unwell, when it is the day you wanted to go to Disneyworld they will suddenly feel very well. This ofc could just be a transparent lie, but often it is not and it truly changes how people feel about their own bodies. Similar that example with the hurt kid being kissed, now the post gives some rational explaination why the pain is soothed, but that doesn't make the effect go away: the psychological presentation of a thing makes an actual difference. A sandwich in a barren break room on a Monday tastes worse than that exact sandwich on a mountain summit after four hours of hiking on a Saturday.
Psychological context won't unbreak a broken leg or anything, so there are clear limits, but I am not convinced that the placebo effect is something that only works when researchers believe in the placebo effect themselves. As a Film student I don't find it unlikely that the acting performance of active anti-placebo critics could be unconvincing, but that just means they didn't do a good study then. If you want to study the effect where people are convinced of a thing (placebo) and you half-ass the convincing-part, then you are not researching the effect. But as someone who worked with actors I can assure everybody that you don't necessarily need to believe in a thing to create a convincing performance.
Now the actual question is how far that psychological effect goes when it comes to actual measurable numbers.
Psychological context won't unbreak a broken leg or anything, so there are clear limits
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I am going to argue against that, proper rest and sleep helps your leg heal faster and you get better sleep when yoi are less stressed. You are less stressed when you believe something is taking care of you.
Yeah sure over time the animal that rests will be better of than the animal that chews on its wounds. But what I meant there is that there are obvious limits to what pure optimism can do.
I had a very optimistic and upbeat neighbour who thought she could beat cancer without modern medicine into which she had zero trust — she died with age 55, having tried literally everything but modern medicine.
>The picture that emerges is that a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect, but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger than all existing treatments when administered by a researcher who really wants the placebo effect to be real.
I expected much more from the article.
It is, especially, poorly argumented.
I feel the author wrote it hastily.
To begin with, the following assumption is false:
>To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing.
>This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism.
What's the percentage of such professors ? In the university I studied, there is no case of plagiarism till today. And plagiarism is not done because professors can't write, but due to other professional factors.
>If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
As if writing is the only way to think well/correctly/effectively. My father never wrote a word: still, some of the most thoughtful statements I ever heard in my life were told to me by him during our conversations.
When you face a situation of danger, such as a wolf is running towards you: will you start to write your thoughts about what you should do, or will you just run right away and decide about the safest paths to follow while you are escaping ?
> For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing.
The problem with "clear thinking" is that it is subjective. I think Paul Graham and Leslie Lamport, have experienced something like this: when they sit down to write about a certain topic, they realize that their initial thoughts were not nearly clear enough, and after a number of iterations they became clearer and clearer. Most of us don't write essays, so we simply don't recognize this feeling.
I think he is hinting to when I said: "For most people, most life situations which require clear thinking have nothing to do with writing."
I meant: since most life situation where we need clear thinking do not involve writing, then we are obviously well equipped to think clearly.
And if thinking clearly is not that problematic for most people, then the author can't say we can't write because thinking clearly is hard/or we can't think clearly.
You're still both missing PG's point, and getting your logic wrong for the point you are on. About the latter:
> "I meant: since most life situation where we need clear thinking do not involve writing, then we are obviously well equipped to think clearly."
That's not the QED you seem to think it is. The statement that "most life situation where we need clear thinking do not involve writing" doesn't give any reason to think that most people are good at clear thinking most of the time, nor whether people find clear thinking easier with the help of writing or if writing has no benefit to the goal of clear thinking. You're just putting two opinions you have next to each other and acting like one confirms the other.
And a friendly tip, "have I explained better what I meant before?" would come off as a lot more polite than "got it?", which to anyone who agrees with the rest of your comment could easily read as snide/patronising, while anyone who thinks you're still wrong will see it as smug and wrongly confident. (Apologies if English isn't your first language, in which case you're very good at it, and apologies if you didn't want unsolicited opinions on how your choice of language makes you seem in my view!)
edit to give an analogy: I feel your argument is like if somebody said "control of body movement is key to being a great athlete", and you replied "everyone is always controlling their body movement, clearly therefore it's not relevant to how good an athlete is".
There is usually some energy cost associated to keeping resistance unless critically needed. Or limited place on genome.
Any organism from virus to human will happily shed over time (generations) any resistance we now consider crucial to survival, just change its environment enough.
They often don't. Consider phenylephrine, the OTC replacement ingredient for the original Sudafed formula. If you ever felt like it didn't do a damned thing for nasal congestion, then you'd be right. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-panel-says-co...
Fortunately, for most carnivores it is difficult to assess whether they are capable of attacking a human or not, so they typically are even more afraid of humans than humans are afraid of them.
Therefore a very small fraction of the carnivores that are capable of attacking a human will actually do it, even when hungry.
In general, all animals in the regions where humans existed had an exaggerate fear of humans in comparison with their fear of any other animals. Only in the regions not yet reached by humans, like various islands, the animals did not fear humans at their first arrival, so both easy hunting for humans and attacks from carnivores were more likely.
Nowadays, when most humans are no longer hunters, this has changed and there are many regions where the animals have become accustomed with human presence, which may also increase the likelihood of a carnivore attempting an attack when there is no other food.
> In general, all animals in the regions where humans existed had an exaggerate fear of humans
Not African animals, humans didn't really tame the land there like they did in other areas. You see this with hippos etc, they aren't afraid of humans yet. Bet they will be in a few centuries.
My cats understand I can (somehow) control their automatic feeder from my phone and when hungry pester me until I pull out my phone and run over as soon as they see the reflection of the splash screen from the feeder app on my face.
They physically defeated the previous few feeders. Unable to do so with this one, they've doubled down on social engineering.
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