I would like to read that review but can’t access it (either through my Uni or sci-hub). Can you provide the pdf of this review please ?
Thanks for this small litterature review.
Marlon
Karma: 42
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, what you should do if someone talks metaphysics is point out that they haven’t given signification to some of their words. Although he says that philosophy should only care about reality (and if it’s reality, it’s physics, biology, etc and not philosophy), he also says that philosophy is here to clarify our thoughts, and I can’t help but agree.
The “kind of crazy” of the postmodern though aren’t the minority, they kinda all lack rigor and fail to give signification to their words (but use them nonetheless) - and moreover have what we’ll call the “disease of the metaphor”, doing many unnecessary or even obscuring metaphors.
I also agree that there is value in studying philosophy—but having the rationality to question it should come first. (Kinda obvious that I do side with the so called anti-philosophy huh)
Only few people are interested in studying placebos. However, there are a few papers (Gotzsche is one of the few).
Pain (or nausea) isn’t an objective outcome anyway.
Placebo doesn’t affect objective outcomes anyway.
See Orac for a bitter “discussion” about this article. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/10/15/in-the-pages-of-nature-a-full-throated-defense-of-integrating-quackery-into-medicine/
Greatly interested, and once I am free of my current activities (in a few weeks) I’ll be able to delve in it.
The main idea of WGS is having >all< the SNPs whereas you only get the most common SNPs with the SNP tests.
I’m not really sure how you would use the data from WGS (let’s say the genome is assembled too—or maybe that would cost more ?). You would probably use BLAT on your local machine to search for genes with known SNPs. I don’t think you could do anything more (finding novel SNPs is out of reach here).
I would guess the main idea would be to be able to check for new SNPs as more and more are found in the literature. However, the literature is not that easy to skim through except for the most common SNPs that are already included in the SNP tests.
Going back on the literature: for most multi-factorial diseases, you will see data coming from GWAS and linkage disequilibrium studies that will be really hard to interpret. A SNP popping up like that does not necessarily mean that you’ve got the trait associated with it.
My comment was probably not really well oriented, but I should still conclude. In my opinion, do a WGS only if you’ve got enough knowledge of bioinformatics (and I mean an engineer’s level). SNP tests are cheap and will provide you with almost everything you could get from a WGS.
Even Kirsch’s paper from 2008 results in that, and it’s probably one of the most (or the most) harsh paper on antidepressants.
Science is not that simple, I’m not sure you can draw such conclusions.
There was/is indeed a problem in the reporting of the evidence, that diminished the effect of antidepressant in the literature. Reporting bias is an important and serious matter in science.
That does not mean however that the antidepressant effects got down to a placebo effect. It seems that Kirsch does a lot of hand-waving to put aside the treatment effect. He did the same thing in 2008.
AFAIK the literature still says antidepressants have an effect better than placebo.
How would you test that the FAE leads to in average better judgments ? And better than what ? Eliminating the FAE does not mean only considering external factors either, or you’d have another bias.
Does your increase in social skills made you better at discussing (without boring others) subjects you have an interest in then ?
I wasn’t very clear, and probably misleading. Although I’m not an expert, I have “read” Pearl’s book a few years ago (Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, it’s available as a pdf) and it really seemed to me that some independence was hard to test, and sometimes was an assumption given the system. It’s also true that I haven’t read it deeper now that I have a bit more knowledge, and I lack time to do so.
If you have more hindsight about that, I would love to read it.
So … Should I understand that you’re now talking about subjects you have no interest in ?
Or your final point is that you’re working on talking about subjects you do have an interest in with more “sociality” (and I don’t get why people would take it differently if the subjects are, as I perceive, not common) ?
I agree with gurugeorge response and see Popper the same way.
That said, I do think that although Pearl’s work is great, the key word is “in principle”—the methods rely on a number of assumptions that you can’t test (like independance) and he also says that the experiment is the only guaranteed way to establish causation (in his talk the art and science of cause and effect). I also may be wrong, as this talk was given in 1996, he might have changed his mind.
Moreover, your “trust your intuitions sometimes” is misleading: it is still not simply trusting your intuitions, it is trusting them only in the cases where there is data suggesting that intuition gives better results in similar cases. It has data behind it—the intuition is not taken for granted.
As Popper wrote, sensory data comes through organs that aren’t ‘perfect’ sensers. Our brain is also not a ‘perfect’ thinker. We know all that thanks to our knowledge of evolution—and that’s the starting point of Popper. Popper didn’t have Kahnemans’ or Pearl works, but he still encouraged critical thinking of hypotheses while not treating intuitions as given (only as hypotheses, and only if they were falsifiable), and falsification is still the basis of science at this moment.
Updating priors with evidence. Standing by your beliefs seems to be praised—at least where I live.
I consider Popper as an important thinker, falsification is quite important right now for example. Why do you seem to think he’s unimportant ?
More knowledge about bias, which would particularly undermine the unfortunately common and well regarded stance “I only believe what I see”. People rely too much on their direct feelings/intuitions without assessing them.
The idea that in order to have an accurate representation of reality, one must have background knowledge in science. Add in a little philosophy (recent philosophy, like Popper).
Also praising the ones who admit their mistakes—that happens too little.
The final idea would be like yours, more Bayesian thinking.
I’m probably too optimistic.
I don’t know if that has been pointed out, but it has been done only recently and with moderately bad results …
It could become a thing if every human on the planet wouldn’t go crazy at every mention of “gene editing” (or simply “gene” for that matter, as 80% of americans support the labeling of DNA containing foods …).
This kind of development would be … strange. The generations of semi-enhanced humans would indeed feel rather strange.
But I have to point out one thing: genes don’t work like that. You don’t have one (or few) gene for height, genes for psychopathy, genes for intelligence, compassion, benevolence, reflectiveness … Each of those groups has more than one single effect. Modifying such genes (or corresponding regulatory regions) have way more than one single effect and the result would be much harder to guess than what our imagination enables us to when we hear “gene-editing”.
For this problem, you could make the distribution of the time it takes to get to the train station—you could easily compute the average time it takes for going there, and seeing that by planning to take exactly this amount of time to get there will make you 20 minutes late 50% of the time.
The prep time will only make the “late amount of time” discontinuous, it won’t change the probability of being late.
One problem I see is trying to see the signals that would raise the crush probability … While you would also need to see the signals that would make that probability drop.
The sensible route seems in my opinion to be what signals would they give me if they didn’t have a crush on me ?, as you seem to be going the confirmation bias route otherwise.
I’m also one of those for whom the whole “You’re overthinking this, don’t think, stay natural” simply does not work. I appreciate the idea of such a survey to get a prior though, it seems like a great idea.
The way I see it, causal decision theory simply ignores a part of the problem: that the Predictor is able to “predict”.
Evidence should get inside the equation, but not the same way as evidential decision theory: the evidence is what should fuel the hypothesis “The Predictor predicts our choices”.
It does not matter if we “think” that our “choice” shouldn’t change what’s inside the boxes—as the main thing about a prediction is that we aren’t actually making any “choice”, that “choice” is already predicted. It’s the whole “free will” illusion all over again, that we think our choices are ours, when the presence of such a Predictor would simply invalidate that hypothesis.
Causal decision theory should still work, but not with a reasoning that forgets about the Predictor. Since the Predictor is gone, our choice shouldn’t (and won’t) affect what’s in the boxes—but as our choice was predicted, accurately, and as we have supposedly enough evidence to infer this prediction, we should one box—and this won’t be a “choice”, it will simply have been predicted, and we’ll get the money.
I’m probably not being clear, and will try to say it another way. “Choosing” to one box will simply mean that the Predictor had predicted that choice. “Choosing” to two box will also mean the same. It’s not a “choice” at all—our behavior will simply be deterministic. Therefore we should one box, even though that is not a real “choice”.
The features of the Predictor should appear in causal decision theory.
Don’t send heat underwater, it’s a bad idea for everything that lives under there (and for us if we don’t want these things going up).
I’m curious though, how would you “send” heat ?