There’s a great SSC post, Read History of Philosophy Backwards, which seems relevant to framing the first half of the series. That is, the point of talking about shamans isn’t that it’s better than what we’re doing today, or a direct response to the meaning crisis; the point of looking at shamans is in part to figure out how they worked (both what problems they were solving, and how they were solving them) and in part to figure out what life / society was like before there were any shamans.
I was a bit bugged by the ‘placebo effect’ discussion, mostly because I think he worded things wrong; ‘placebo effect is 30-40% as effective as full medicine’ is different from ‘you do 30-40% better with placebo than nothing’.
What is the difference of the placebo wordings? Are you not including the placebo half into the full medice and consider anythign not part of the chemical medice to not be medicine?
I think the denominators of them are different. The first wording is “(medicine—placebo) / (medicine—no treatment) = 0.65”, whereas the second wording is “(placebo—no treatment) / (no treatment) = 1.35″.
I am still a bit confused. I would read the first as “(treatment-chemical)/treatment = 0.35” and I guess the overall point was. I don’t think the case of secretly injecting peope with chemical was ever referred to or is it a typical experimental setting.
There’s a great SSC post, Read History of Philosophy Backwards, which seems relevant to framing the first half of the series. That is, the point of talking about shamans isn’t that it’s better than what we’re doing today, or a direct response to the meaning crisis; the point of looking at shamans is in part to figure out how they worked (both what problems they were solving, and how they were solving them) and in part to figure out what life / society was like before there were any shamans.
I was a bit bugged by the ‘placebo effect’ discussion, mostly because I think he worded things wrong; ‘placebo effect is 30-40% as effective as full medicine’ is different from ‘you do 30-40% better with placebo than nothing’.
What is the difference of the placebo wordings? Are you not including the placebo half into the full medice and consider anythign not part of the chemical medice to not be medicine?
I think the denominators of them are different. The first wording is “(medicine—placebo) / (medicine—no treatment) = 0.65”, whereas the second wording is “(placebo—no treatment) / (no treatment) = 1.35″.
I am still a bit confused. I would read the first as “(treatment-chemical)/treatment = 0.35” and I guess the overall point was. I don’t think the case of secretly injecting peope with chemical was ever referred to or is it a typical experimental setting.