thomblake comments on Controlling your inner control circuits - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 June 2009 05:57PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 29 June 2009 12:15:20PM *  6 points [-]

You say this stuff helps with akrasia? However hot your enthusiasm burns, you don't get to skip the "controlled study" part. Come back with citations. At this point you haven't even ruled out the placebo effect, for Bayes' sake!

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.

Comment author: thomblake 29 June 2009 01:08:00PM 1 point [-]

The closest thing to a sugar pill available is known-bad advice,

  1. One example of a control group in a psychological study (can't find reference): researchers compared freudian psychoanalysis to merely sitting there and listening.

  2. sugar has physiological effects, so you can't really assume a sugar pill is neutral with no side-effects

Comment author: wedrifid 04 July 2009 10:53:51PM 0 points [-]

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.