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EvelynM comments on The Anti-Placebo Effect - Less Wrong
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This effect isn't limited to people with anxiety and depression. People losing weight also experience it: http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/metabolic-research-center/146593-paper-towel-theory.html
It's hard to be objective about yourself. Using tools to gain objectivity is a good thing.
I agree anti-placebo isn't a a good name. It's more like a distorted or cloudy mirror (don't see yourself clearly). but that doesn't capture the difficulty of remembering precisely how you were a long time before, to capture changes that happen at a slow rate.
Having a good name for this, will help people to pass along the idea. Thanks Shannon.
The way that I came up with the name, was that someone was suggesting that my taking metrics might create a placebo effect, where people would believe that they were doing better than they actually were.
So, my response to this was that I was not trying to create a placebo effect, but rather, to avoid a placebo effect in the opposite direction.
So while I agree with you that this effect is not an opposite (why I referred to it as related instead of reverse), I do think that it is the opposite of what a lot of people fear - that they are experiencing a placebo effect.
In short, people being afraid of having a placebo effect is often how this effect comes to be - they don't want to create false hope and then have it dissipate, so instead they refuse to believe or acknowledge real positive results when they see them.
So, I would say that the title is reasonable regarding people's expectations, but not in the precise using of the term placebo sense. Personally, I think that expectations are more important for titling. Fewer people will pay attention to a precisely named definition that they know nothing about, whereas calling it the anti-placebo effect grabs attention - specifically the attention of people who have this bias.