Lots of late night computer screen time? That blue light is messing with sleep cycles. I used to think I’m a night owl myself but can adjust my sleep schedule at will if I just mind the lighting. These days I wake up at 2-4am.
Curiously all males in my family used to be late sleepers when young but effortlessly switched to rising early when their careers kicked off. They didn’t have computers back then so maybe it was their social lives keeping them up late.
the question under discussion here is what actually is the placebo effect and how much of it can you attribute to psychosomatic factors and how much to just regression to the mean (aka natural healing).
In that case your opener is slightly polemical :)
But that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t or shouldn’t ask questions about the placebo effect itself.
Agreed. The problem with nonintervention arms for studying the placebo effect is that there aren’t clear incentives for adding them and they cost statistical power.
The placebo group is called such because it receives the placebo treatment, not because medical researchers think all improvement in it is attributable to the placebo effect. Results are reported as improvement in the treatment arm vs. the placebo arm, and never have I seen these differences explicitly reported as treatment effect vs. placebo effect, and I’ve read hundreds of medical papers. The real magnitude of the placebo effect is almost never of interest in these papers. Some professionals in the medical community could have such a misconception because of the usual lack of scientific training, but I’d like to think they are a small minority.
If the placebo effect is of real importance, I think a more significant problem would be the lack of use of active placebos that mimick side effects since most drugs have them and this is a potential source of breaking the blinding of RCTs.
Whatever the terminology, they should make the connection between the process of decision making and the science of decision making, which they don’t seem to do. Medicine is like this isolated bubble where every insight must come from the medical community itself.
I found overcoming bias and became a rationalist during med school. Finding the blog was purely accidental, although I recognized the need for understanding my thinking, so I’m not sure what form this need would have taken given a slightly different circumstance.
We were taught bayes in the form of predictive values, but this was pretty cursory. Challenging the medical professors’ competence publicly isn’t a smart move careerwise, unless they happen to be exceptionally rational and principled, unfortunately. There’s a time to shut up and multiply, and a time to bend to the will of the elders :)
Huh. My experience is somewhat similar to yours in the sense that I never was a big fan of memorization, and I’m glad that I could outsource some parts of the process to Anki. I also seem to outperform my peers in complex situations where ready made decision algorithms are not available, and outperformed them in the few courses in medschool that were not heavy on memorization. The complex situations obviously don’t benefit from bayes too much, but they benefit from understanding the relevant cognitive biases.
The medical degree is a financial jackpot here in Finland, since I was actually paid for studying, and landed in one of the top 3 best paying professions in the country straight out of medschool. Money attracts every type, and the selection process doesn’t especially favor rationalists, who happen to be rare. It just baffles me how the need for rationality doesn’t become self evident for med students in the process of becoming a doctor, not to mention after that.
Welcome! I’m an MD and haven’t yet figured out why there are so few of us here, given the importance of rationality for medical decision making. It’s interesting that at least in my country there is zero training in cognitive biases in the curriculum.
You know what’s sad? It seems the support was discontinued a year ago. I never noticed because it still works just fine, syncs the annotated pdf files to dropbox and all that, and still seems to be the best pdf reader there is.
Found and apk that seems legit, I’ll pm the link to you, try at your own risk.
More apps for Android (5.0.2):
Alarm clock plus—probably the most feature rich alarm bell app. It allows for multiple alarms on different days with different tones, alarm labels, gently rising alarm, quick to set one time alarms and alarms that won’t stop unless you solve a math problem which is useful for deep sleepers.
Clockwork Tomato—a fully customizable pomodoro timer.
Darker—pretty much the same as Night Mode, except that it also allows for color adjustment. Unfortunately Android doesn’t seem to support dimming certain wavelengths and the color is just slapped over everything (the strength is adjustable), so the contrast isn’t that great.
I think what sets the above mentioned ES File Explorer above others is the integrated networking capability, you can use cloud storage, FTP and LAN sharing with the same app.
FBReader with TTS Plugin—listen to .epub and .mobi formatted ebooks.
Libra—weight tracking with charts, weight loss goal tracking, statistics on weight change and excess/shortage of calories.
Pocket—put articles you find during browsing to a safe place for later reading. It has a browser extension on PC for Firefox and Chrome and sync capability. Also, it has a page flipping mode that allows reading articles as if you were reading an ebook, and inverted color rendering for night time reading.
Repligo PDF Reader—I think I’ve tried every pdf reader there is on Android, and this is the only one that can both reliably reflow text for easier readability and has inverted rendering. Also has a text-to-speech option.
Rittr Labs Push Ups, Sit Ups, Pull Ups and Squats—All of the four apps are separate but I haven’t found a better app for automatically generated calisthenics workouts. These calculate the first workout sets based on your max repetitions and the next workout based on how people usually progress, which is further adjusted by telling the program whether the workout was too hard, just right or too easy. I’d recommend you give at least a day or two for recovery between workouts, for example have a different workout for each day with a four day rotation.
Did they work? Did you try any other solutions?
I wasn’t sure if we were metaphorically talking about the foetus brain in question or a hypothetical human that’s fully grown in an isolation tank. If we were talking about the former, we seem to have a fundamentally different set of ethics. With your clarification I assume we’re talking about the latter, in which case I agree with you.
Saying that an undeveloped foetus brain isn’t thinking because it hasn’t received sensory stimuli is a different argument than saying that a fully grown brain can’t think because it hasn’t received sensory stimuli.
How is it a bad argument?
Caynax hourly chime and Mindfulness bell on Android
Actually when I first responded to you I was thinking about biology, psychology and such as the higher level. In this case the claim seems to make sense. However, if I understood EHeller correctly, this doesn’t hold water inside the realm of modern physics. Besides, we can in principle never know if we’re at the lowest level.
I think I’m the one communicating poorly since it seems I understood your first explanation, thanks for making it sure anyways and thanks for the link!
When I was wondering about successful predictions in particle physics, I was in particular thinking about Higgs boson. We needed to build a massive “microscope” to detect it, yet could predict its existence four decades ago with much lower energy scale equipment, right?
Thanks, my reality got just a bit weirder. It’s almost as if someone set up a convenient playground for us, but that must be my apophenia speaking. If there are infinite possibilities of lower level theories, are successful predictions in particle physics just a matter of parsimony? Is there profuse survival bias when it comes to hyping successful predictions?
The whole point of the renormalization group is that lower level models aren’t more accurate, the lower level effects average out.
I tried to read about RG but it went way over my head. Is the universe in principle inexplicable by lower level theories alone according to modern physics? Doesn’t “averaging out” lose information? Are different levels of abstraction considered equally real by RG? Does this question even matter or is it in the realm of unobservables in the vein of Copenhagen vs MW interpretation?
EDIT: this is now pretty much retracted, see the following thread.
If the reductionist thesis is “we use multi-level models for computational reasons, but physical reality has only a single level”, then what kind of evidence could support it against the thesis “we use multi-level models for computational reasons AND physical reality has multiple levels?”
Lower level models are more accurate than abstract models, and you can observe the consequences of this on multiple levels of abstraction. Therefore if physical reality has multiple levels then they must be incompatible and parallel in a very peculiar way. This makes the idea more complex and therefore less probable than the reductionist thesis.
Tabooing reality might make things a bit clearer.
True. Since people are so irrational, not to mention inconsistent and slow, it might be one of the most difficult problems of FAI. The whole concept of consent in the presence of a much more powerful mind seems pretty shaky.
Not recognizing what the rules are or not understanding why they exist could be more easily confused with non-conformity, while recognizing the rules but failing to apply them is more apparently incompetent. Volitional non-conformity requires understanding of the rules and the ability to apply them, and it’s not entirely obvious what constitutes understanding in this highly subjective matter. The aspect of opting in/out of acquiring the skills needed for conformity complicates things further.