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jimrandomh comments on Controlling your inner control circuits - Less Wrong
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The term "placebo effect" was coined to refer to phsychological effects intruding on non-psychological studies. In this case, since the desired effect is purely psychological, it's meaningless at best and misleading at worst. There is no self-help advice equivalent to a sugar pill. The closest thing to a sugar pill available is known-bad advice, and giving known-bad advice to a control group strikes me as decidedly unethical.
So, if you have an experimental procedure, go ahead and suggest it. Absent that, the only available data comes from self-experimentation and anecdotes.
It would seem ethically acceptable to give groups advice selected from common social norms. For example, give one group some "Getting Things Done", another group nothing at all, a third some instruction on calculus (irrelevant but still high status attention and education), a fifth a drill sergeant motivational yelling at and the fourth group gets PJEby's system.
What if you're wrong? What if the most effective anti-procrastination technique is tickling your left foot in exactly the right manner, and this works regardless of whether you believe in its efficacy, or even know about it? That (predicated on a correct theory of human motivation) is the kind of stuff we're looking for.
You're saying that there's no neutral (non-positive and non-negative) self-help advice? That's a pretty weird statement to make. Some advice is good, some is bad; why do you suspect a gap at zero? Failing all else, you could refrain from telling the subjects that the study is about self-control and anti-procrastination, just tell them to blindly follow some instructions and measure the effects covertly.
No, I have no experimental protocol ready yet, but have the impudence to insist that we as a community should create one or shut up.
You don't know what "we" are looking for. There is no one thing "we" are looking for. Some of us may be interested in plausible, attested-to self-help methods, even without experimental support.
Without experimental support is fine. But without extraordinary support isn't. Something must make the plausibility of a particular thing stand out, because you can't be interested in all the 1000 of equally plausible things unless you devote all your time to that.
I certainly agree with the 'create one' part of what you're saying. Not so much the 'shut up'. Talking about the topic (and in so doing dragging all sorts of relevant knowledge from the community) and also self experimenting has its use. Particularly in as much as it can tell us whether something is worth testing.
I do note that there are an awful lot of posts here (and on Overcoming Bias) which do not actually have controlled studies backing them. Is there a reason why Kaj's post requires a different standard to be acceptable? (And I ask that non-rhetorically, I can see reasons why you may reasonably do just that.)
One example of a control group in a psychological study (can't find reference): researchers compared freudian psychoanalysis to merely sitting there and listening.
sugar has physiological effects, so you can't really assume a sugar pill is neutral with no side-effects
And when you are testing the psychological effects of urea based salts you can't really assume lithium salts are neutral with no side-effects.
Is it how the real studies view the situation?