The Physics of Ideas: Reality as a Coordination Problem

Antibabelic an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Whether such practices can produce effects beyond what placebo research documents—whether shared noetic certainty can, under certain conditions, become causally operative on physical outcomes in ways that exceed current medical understanding—remains genuinely open.

It doesn't, there are many studies on the "placebo effect" (see for example https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200105243442106 - "We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects. Although placebos had no significant effects on objective or binary outcomes, they had possible small benefits in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain. Outside the setting of clinical trials, there is no justification for the use of placebos.") that reliably show that the only thing it can do is reduce the feeling of pain.

This essay is verbose AI moralityslop that doesn't back up any of the points it makes, makes no single coherent argument, and apparently tries to subtly promote quackery. Truly awful.

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galaxyLogic an hour ago | parent | next [-]

But placebo works, right? But it only works if you don't know that it is placebo you are getting.

	▲	Nevermark 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Placebos often work, even when a placebo is known to be a placebo.

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canadiantim an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If placebo’s didn’t have clinical effects we wouldn’t be controlling for them in every scientific study

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Antibabelic 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

The entire premise of a placebo-controlled study is to see if a treatment works better than something that produces no effect.

	▲	Nevermark a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Both the placebo and treatment have placebo effects. By comparing the treatment to a placebo, the placebo effect is cancelled out. Whereas, comparing a treatment straight to non-treatment, leaves it unclear how much of any perceived benefit the treatment has was due to placebo, or the specific treatment. You may have been saying that, I wasn't sure what "no effect" was emphasizing. An alternate means of getting the same comparison is to have treatment and non-treatment applied without any patient knowledge of either, when that can be done. Which works, and is more straight forward, except for being ethically unacceptable.

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foo42 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm currently reading "The disappearance of rituals" by Byun-Chul Han which is highlights the roles of ritual to bring people together into those shared experiences which bind people into a shared narrative and world view.

There are parts of the book I agree with and some I disagree with, but an earlier version of me would have dismissed the whole topic as fluff and any notion of ritual or narrative as superstitious nonsense that needed to be swept away by the light of reason and science. Ultimately though the things that really matter in people's lives tend to be those things which are not coldly rational - love and a place in a wider narrative

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stone_fox 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Тhis is beautiful, I don't think I've ever seen someone crystallize the dynamics of nuclear war, cults, placebo effects, and the phenomenology of peace so clearly and viscerally. Thank you for sharing