Of course, https://xkcd.com/808/ belongs in every such post. getting to concrete claims of most forms of woo is the hard part—they are almost always motte-and-bailey between some fairly subtle personal impact and some implausible larger or wierdly-causally-described ones.
I find it very easy to believe that placebo-like effects are real and sometimes quite powerful, both from autonomous effects (you can actually change blood pressure and perhaps some regulation cycles), and from pyschological effects (makes you exercise just a bit more effectively or whatnot). And a lot of such beliefs can have positive social effects as well—having friends has lots of positive effects.
And since people are weird, it’s very plausible that deconstructing the causality makes it less effective. So the very act of studying and quantifying it makes it go away. Fun psychological Heisenberg effect.
Unfortunately, the ability to believe things that I don’t examine closely has always been difficult for me, so I’m denied some of these tools. I have a fair number of Mormon friends, and they have better support networks and are generally happier than my average acquaintance, and perhaps than myself. I expect I’d be healthier and happier as a Mormon. But I just can’t.
If we would have a medical system that would run on prediction-based medicine where the ability of a practitioner to solve health issues would be what they are paid for, the argument for the health interventions would work.
In our world however, in most medical cases people are paid for providing “standard of care” instead of being paid for results. If a hospital would hire an energy healer they would open themselves up to lawsuits about not providing standard of care.
The way the for profit healthcare system works is not to focus on “health care cost reduction” but making profits by performing costly treatments.
Outside of hospitals we do find a sector where people do make profits by providing alternative health treatments. This doesn’t mean that those treatments automatically work, but we don’t see a lack of people who make their living with them.
Full agreement—human health is extremely noisy, and people are irrational and inconsistent in their measurement of outcomes. Under-discussed is the variability across persons as well—there could be orders of magnitude difference in effect for the same treatment in different individuals.
I think that only reinforces my speculation that placebo effect (or similar belief->experience causality) is sometimes powerful, but almost always hard to measure.
And some of these things make more money or get more research in versions that are rebranded to sound more respectable. de Bono taught and sold his ideas to various clients; when I asked Claude if there’s any research on the effectiveness of Tarot, it said that there’s some research on OH cards, that are basically like Tarot cards without the woo stigma, making them more palatable to academic researchers.
Of course, https://xkcd.com/808/ belongs in every such post. getting to concrete claims of most forms of woo is the hard part—they are almost always motte-and-bailey between some fairly subtle personal impact and some implausible larger or wierdly-causally-described ones.
I find it very easy to believe that placebo-like effects are real and sometimes quite powerful, both from autonomous effects (you can actually change blood pressure and perhaps some regulation cycles), and from pyschological effects (makes you exercise just a bit more effectively or whatnot). And a lot of such beliefs can have positive social effects as well—having friends has lots of positive effects.
And since people are weird, it’s very plausible that deconstructing the causality makes it less effective. So the very act of studying and quantifying it makes it go away. Fun psychological Heisenberg effect.
Unfortunately, the ability to believe things that I don’t examine closely has always been difficult for me, so I’m denied some of these tools. I have a fair number of Mormon friends, and they have better support networks and are generally happier than my average acquaintance, and perhaps than myself. I expect I’d be healthier and happier as a Mormon. But I just can’t.
If we would have a medical system that would run on prediction-based medicine where the ability of a practitioner to solve health issues would be what they are paid for, the argument for the health interventions would work.
In our world however, in most medical cases people are paid for providing “standard of care” instead of being paid for results. If a hospital would hire an energy healer they would open themselves up to lawsuits about not providing standard of care.
The way the for profit healthcare system works is not to focus on “health care cost reduction” but making profits by performing costly treatments.
Outside of hospitals we do find a sector where people do make profits by providing alternative health treatments. This doesn’t mean that those treatments automatically work, but we don’t see a lack of people who make their living with them.
Full agreement—human health is extremely noisy, and people are irrational and inconsistent in their measurement of outcomes. Under-discussed is the variability across persons as well—there could be orders of magnitude difference in effect for the same treatment in different individuals.
I think that only reinforces my speculation that placebo effect (or similar belief->experience causality) is sometimes powerful, but almost always hard to measure.
And some of these things make more money or get more research in versions that are rebranded to sound more respectable. de Bono taught and sold his ideas to various clients; when I asked Claude if there’s any research on the effectiveness of Tarot, it said that there’s some research on OH cards, that are basically like Tarot cards without the woo stigma, making them more palatable to academic researchers.