A claim counter to everyday experience, in which people take coffee to stay awake, rather than eat (red) strawberries.
At least one of us is confused. What conflict do you see between the following two propositions? (1) Eating an otherwise inert red thing can make you more alert. (2) Drinking coffee does more to make you alert than eating a red strawberry does.
(Even if there were a conflict between those, I’d have a problem with what you said, since it could be true that (2′) drinking coffee doesn’t really wake you up more than eating strawberries but (3) people drink coffee anyway, e.g. by habit or because it’s cheaper or because strawberries are more fattening or something. But my main objection is that I don’t see any conflict between 1 and 2.)
“it’s the placebo effect” isn’t an appropriate shorthand to criticize that particular study.
No, it isn’t, but what’s meant to follow from that? I don’t think anyone’s claiming that “it’s the placebo effect” is some kind of universally-insightful response to any observation that involves possible placebos. (Your example even seems to have the wrong sign, as it were; someone inclined to overuse “placebo effect” as an explanation is surely more likely to be defending the Blackwell study than attacking it, and indeed you go on to suggest that those people would fail to criticize the study, not that they would criticize it in an unhelpful way.)
Possibly me. I’m provisionally retracting that; my reasoning was that if eating red things, drinking from red cups etc. reliably increased alertness someone would have noticed and we would be exploiting this effect, not looking for it within the restricted context of eating a pill. However, I’m now remembering that there is just such a claim, called the “red room effect”, which I have no particular reason to disbelieve.
At least one of us is confused. What conflict do you see between the following two propositions? (1) Eating an otherwise inert red thing can make you more alert. (2) Drinking coffee does more to make you alert than eating a red strawberry does.
(Even if there were a conflict between those, I’d have a problem with what you said, since it could be true that (2′) drinking coffee doesn’t really wake you up more than eating strawberries but (3) people drink coffee anyway, e.g. by habit or because it’s cheaper or because strawberries are more fattening or something. But my main objection is that I don’t see any conflict between 1 and 2.)
No, it isn’t, but what’s meant to follow from that? I don’t think anyone’s claiming that “it’s the placebo effect” is some kind of universally-insightful response to any observation that involves possible placebos. (Your example even seems to have the wrong sign, as it were; someone inclined to overuse “placebo effect” as an explanation is surely more likely to be defending the Blackwell study than attacking it, and indeed you go on to suggest that those people would fail to criticize the study, not that they would criticize it in an unhelpful way.)
Possibly me. I’m provisionally retracting that; my reasoning was that if eating red things, drinking from red cups etc. reliably increased alertness someone would have noticed and we would be exploiting this effect, not looking for it within the restricted context of eating a pill. However, I’m now remembering that there is just such a claim, called the “red room effect”, which I have no particular reason to disbelieve.