taw comments on Quantified Health Prize results announced - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Zvi 19 February 2012 08:10AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (63)

Comments (63)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Yvain 18 February 2012 12:55:27AM *  20 points [-]

By "transmission mechanism", do you mean "mechanism of action"? If so, when you say "with no plausible transmission mechanism", do you mean "whose mechanism of action has not yet been discovered" or "I believe it is implausible that a mechanism of action for this could exist"?

'Cause if you mean the former, the fact that we don't understand it shouldn't be a barrier to using it (you might be surprised how many medications we have no idea how they work), and if you mean the latter, well, as the old saying goes, "If it happens, it's possible".

This is doubly true for lithium, where even if you want to reject every single one of the studies I cited, we already know it works in higher dose as a treatment for bipolar disorder.

(and I hate to follow up an interesting rationality point with a boring discussion of pharmacology, but many of the effects of lithium are known or plausibly speculated upon, including protecting neurons against glutamate excitotoxicity; I am no neuroscientist, but I know excitotoxicity has a role in dementia, probably some psychiatric disorders, and in a bunch of common neurological causes of death.)

Comment author: taw 19 February 2012 05:18:39PM -1 points [-]

By transmission mechanism I mean something more general. X has a non-negligible effect on Y, Y on Z etc.

An example of implausible transmission mechanism:

  • This or that food contains antioxidants, antioxidants protect from molecular damage, less molecular damage means you'll live longer - it has 2 totally broken links since entirely insignificant amount of antioxidants from food get anywhere in the body, and putting more antioxidants in the cells doesn't actually do much at all (even if reducing their amount increases damage considerably).

An example of plausible transmission mechanism:

  • Having dogs improve people's moods, people in better mood have lower blood pressure, lower blood pressure decreases risk of major cardiovascular disease - we don't have much hard data here (funnily enough they did a randomized study once, and found such effects), but every link in the chain is plausible and effect is within realistic order of magnitude.

With sufficiently overwhelming evidence it might be reasonable to ignore lack of any plausible transmission mechanism, but evidence is anything but, and I'm more inclined to think that it went from "I need to publish X papers a year" to "finshing for statistical correlations involving lithium" to "publishing a paper about that".

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit