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Wasn't the someone who dismissed Dropbox when they first launched Steve Jobs?


Arguably one reason those two businesses were successful in areas with entrenched players and business practices was because they handle the money. If AirBnB was asking either travelers or hosts to pay $X to be on a recommendation site, probably very few people would. There's always a cheaper competitor when you're selling information. Because you book through AirBnB, for a service which is relatively expensive, they can skim off quite a lot of money in an opaque way.


The Law of Large Numbers is an actual math theorem. The Law of Averages is a non-technical name for various informal reasoning strategies, some fallacious (like the gamblers fallacy), but mostly just types of estimation that are justified by more formal probability theory.


More generally, see "concentration of measure".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_measure


Yes, this is a problem that a heavily regulated free market actually solved pretty well.

I go to my local grocery store and look at the painkillers they have. There are generic aspirin and Tylenol available for a price almost anyone can afford. There are branded versions which are still reasonably priced. There are reasonable variations such as with caffeine or with decongestant, again priced perfectly fairly. If you want to pay $2 extra for awesome marketing you can. In some stores you might find a 'natural' remedy - essentially a placebo, again priced ok.

Everything on sale is basically safe. Nothing has a business model that relies on addiction. Nothing costs hundreds of dollars. Nothing is adulterated or counterfeit. It's easy to get information about everything available. The vast majority people would be able to choose something to match their own needs (for example, they might be allergic to aspirin, or need to avoid Tylenol because of a kidney condition).

If you bought the worst painkiller on sale in the store, it would be fairly effective and not too expensive. The experience in most stores in large parts of the world would be very similar.


Also, people feel differently about different treatments, for particular reasons. If your mom always took one brand of Tylenol when she had a cold, taking it might reassure you more than the theoretically optimal painkiller. Customers were quite happy to pay more for the exact same Ibuprofen labelled with 'Back Pain' or 'Period Pain', because they felt it worked.

If you think about it, the author's desire to choose 'the scientifically proven to be the most effective' is just another example of such a superstition. If you could convince him that a particular medication was the winner in the meta-analysis, he would probably objectively feel better, even if it wasn't actually true.


Then for you, a meta-analysis would be even more useless, as your own experience is much more valuable.


Isn't there a social benefit in letting the 10% (or whatever) of people that believe in them get a safe and effective placebo, for many conditions where that's all that's needed?


I see belief in the "placebo effect" as a mind virus. Because it is not just a justification for lying to patients, but entails medical people lying to themselves.

I get tired trying to explain, and if I'm not convincing anyone, maybe it's me who doesn't understand...but, I feel like the key is to ask yourself, if the placebo effect is something that you can scientifically demonstrate, how would you arrange a control group?

Failure to identify a reason for an apparent effect cannot be turned into proof that "nothing" has an effect. It's just a mental short circuit that people get trapped in.


> if the placebo effect is something that you can scientifically demonstrate, how would you arrange a control group?

Easy, just don't give the control group any medicine. Give the other group a placebo. If outcomes are better for the second group, it's evidence that placebos work, just as clearly as the usual trial provides evidence that medicines work.


Yes, for headaches no one wants to read a meta-analysis, they just want to buy something quickly and feel slightly better.

On the other hand, for depression medication, they don't want their doctor to look at an online tool and choose the most effective antidepressant. They want their doctor to look at THEM and say "hmm, we'll try you on X but if it doesn't help with the intrusive thoughts we'll maybe switch it out to Y and up the dosage of Z". Or they want to tell the doctor what they think they want to be prescribed. They are paying big bucks to see a psychiatrist. Most of them are not on a self-optimization trip, they just want to feel better, and also feel like someone takes an interest in how they are getting on. Using a snazzy tool would probably lead to the patient being less satisfied with the doctor's service, even if they have slightly better outcomes by whatever questionable metric is in the study.


But doesn't a large majority of 'social services' spending go to retirement incomes? Obviously that is important, but discretionary spending on, for example, taking care of children, is much smaller.


So maybe the problem is a broken political system which serves the interests of only one group of people, rather than high or low interest rates?


Well, there's always that, but I've always figured it's about taxes and government spending. There's a very large amount of over-valued houses in and around the larger cities in Denmark. If the property value goes down, so does the property taxes, which means less income for the local authorities.

There are cheap houses available outside those areas, but getting a loan for them can be tricky since their value is too low and there's no money to be had from lending the money.

Furthermore, most people have their homes as security (not sure if it's the right word in English) for their loans. If the property value drops then many will be forced out of their homes. Also a lot of landlords and real-estate agents, will be out of a job, but that's probably a smaller issue.


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