171–180 of 259 posts
For those who don't know- Lumosity is killing it. They can easily pay this fine with their enormous profits.
Based on the ads and no little fine print at the bottom citing any real science, I was a skeptic from the outset. Never did any real research to find out if their claims were inflated - or even viable in the first place. Apparently when challenged by the FTC they didn't have anything solid to show in their defense. Oh, and then there's this bit: >The complaint also charges the defendants with failing to disclose that…
Ah, consumer testimonials. I pay very close attention to those. If I learn they're fake, I blacklist the business. If someone is willing to lie to people like that on their page, I don't want to have anything to do with them.
I just wanted to share my thoughts, which are simply: "Thank God!" I've been working on a startup: http://synaptitude.me/ (demo is old) Essentially, we can do some of what Luminosity claims (and have independent studies to prove it). Every time someone goes: "Oh it's just like Lumosity" I have to go through and explain the difference. My wife has a degree in neuroscience and I minored in BioE, and we both just HATE L…
I have three small kids, my youngest, before she could even speak, was able to pic up an iPhone, unlock it and browse to various apps including camera, gallery and netflix and take pics, view them or select a movie to watch. Yet she couldn't yet formulate a word.
So given this, I assume that there is a great deal that an iPhone like device could be leveraged upon to accomplish greater learning...
How would you propose this be done with the ubiquity of such devices at this time?
I have some theories but I'd like to hear your position first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering the standard deviation for IQ is 15 points, I wouldn't drink an extra glass of water per day for another 3-4 IQ points, let alone play a training game for any extended amount of time. 3-4 points is statistically meaningless.
0.2 standard deviations is a very large effect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's like someone sold carrots claiming they improve vision, and got thrown in jail. No, it's not. It's like they were appropriately fined for profiting off unproven medical claims. > Testimonials being paid for shills? Like, say it ain't so. Every damed commercial you've ever seen in your life has fake people presenting fake testimonials. It's assumed. And they're labelled as an actor representation. Giving them a…
> Giving them a pass because it's "assumed" ...is the law of the land in USA It's called "puffery" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery > In law, puffery is a promotional statement or claim that expresses subjective rather than objective views, which no "reasonable person" would take literally. US Supreme Court has ruled that lying in ads is protected speech, up to some non-specified boundary: https://www.techdirt.c…
And as the FTC's actions have indicated, making unproven claims of direct medical benefit is not simple puffery.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering the standard deviation for IQ is 15 points, I wouldn't drink an extra glass of water per day for another 3-4 IQ points, let alone play a training game for any extended amount of time. 3-4 points is statistically meaningless.
One standard deviation is fairly significant, though. I think a lot of people would do mind training once per day for a possible 3-4 IQ increase, honestly. I would. It's also possible that it only results in a fairly small general IQ increase, but a larger increase in some specific facet of recall or cognition.
I just wanted to share my thoughts, which are simply: "Thank God!" I've been working on a startup: http://synaptitude.me/ (demo is old) Essentially, we can do some of what Luminosity claims (and have independent studies to prove it). Every time someone goes: "Oh it's just like Lumosity" I have to go through and explain the difference. My wife has a degree in neuroscience and I minored in BioE, and we both just HATE L…
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and opt for c). Sorry to pop your bubble, but your startup is not going to work out in the current form. All I see from your website, is a company founded by three students who read some papers about EEG and want to sell me a treatment for ADHD and depression using home made beta software and a consumer grade! EEG headset.
At least in my book, this is flat out quackery and one of the reason that Neurofeedback is still seen in many places as 'alternative medicine' and does not have a stellar reputation although it has been shown as effective in a couple clinical trials.
First of all don't even try to conduct a survey on treatment efficacies to make up for missing data on your own website. Please leave this to clinical trials.
Second, you compare your pricing model with allegedly professional Neurofeedback providers, by actually not offering any in-person session and non-medical EEG devices? Is this really not a joke?
Let's just ignore for now the fact that consumer grade EEG headsets don't even offer the precision you need for proper Neurofeedback training. e.g. Emotiv epoc offers 14 channels@128Hz, where real EEG hardware usually has at least twice the sampling rate, a greater bandwidth, and 19-21 channels (up to 256 in research).
Most importantly, how do you even think your treatment works? You can't just look for any occurrences of "slow-wave power" and then tell your patient that he should pay more attention now. That's not how any of this works.
You need to identify signal signatures in response to standardized stimuli. In patients and "healthy" controls. You need to account for the whole spectrum of any mental disorder. Even though they are usually defined as in the DSM as "one disorder" with couple of symptoms, on the individual level there is not much commonality left among all the people with the "same disorder". So you need to "reassemble" the disorder bottom-up, by clustering different sub-types based on biological markers (EEG profiles). Then you got to match them to their clinical diagnosis. If you have any meaningful data left by then, you might be able to identify a small set of markers that exhibit a high predictability, that a given patient belongs to a presumed subtype. Existing commercial databases are of the order of 1K-4K healthy controls and hundreds of patients. Then you can start a training using those markers. Now comes the fun part of assessing the clinical efficacy of your new marker set. You'll get a whole bunch of sub-types like high frontal delta/low dorsal alpha/low beta, high alpha/low beta, or low theta/high dorsal alpha/"higher" frontal beta, etc. ... each of which has to be trained accordingly.
I really don't see how you want to recreate all of this on consumer EEG hardware. And if you opt for the current medical hard&software/databases: then what's your value proposition? How do you want to beat current model, of a licensed practitioner guided by a supervisory psychologist? Because this setup gives you the efficacy of the literature and it costs a hell lot of money.
Please don't sell any "treatment" that you can't provide. I can understand that it is a very tempting and huge market: "According to the CDC one in five Americans have ADHD, anxiety, or depression.", if you really want to make money there, go to big pharma, if you actually want to "cure it", go to research. But I really don't think, that selling this quackery is going to benefit anyone.
disclaimer: this is neither my field, nor do I have any stakes in that particular game, just happen to know some people doing actual research on this matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering the standard deviation for IQ is 15 points, I wouldn't drink an extra glass of water per day for another 3-4 IQ points, let alone play a training game for any extended amount of time. 3-4 points is statistically meaningless.
"Considering the standard deviation for IQ is 15 points" The standard deviation for the distribution of IQ is 15 points. The standard deviation of the errors of measurement associated with measuring IQ is 3 points.( ie: the standard error of measurement aka SEM) I would be willing to have 3 fingers of my left hand ( not including my thumb ) amputated to improve my IQ by 1 standard deviation. For more on Standard Erro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
0.2 standard deviations is a very large effect.
In the metanalysis, Hedges' g is 0.24. Hedges' g is a less biased measure of Cohen's d, and Cohen d between 0.2 and 0.3 as a "small" effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#.22Small.22.2C_.22... ). Of course there are plenty of caveats to assigning importance to effects of different magnitudes without regard to what is being measured, but this isn't a very large effect.
- if the environment changes such that this effect becomes operative, what sort of change should I expect in terms of z-scores? ("how does the effectiveness of damping sound with crumpled paper compare to the effectiveness of mining with dynamite?")
- if I aim to change a quantity using this effect, what sort of change can I expect relative to the existing known ways of changing the quantity in question? ("How many laborers could I replace with one bundle of dynamite while ending up with the same size of hole?")
- if I see a change of so many standard deviations in some intangible variable, (a) what sort of effect will I see further down the pipeline in the variables that I really care about, or (b) is that amount subjectively worth the effort? ("If I have $600,000, can I make a bigger hole by hiring and outfitting diggers, or by buying and detonating dynamite?")
You're insisting on the first of those questions and only the first. The comment I responded to is explicitly phrased in terms of the third question, and 3-4 IQ points is quite significant in terms of tangible knock-on effects. It's also worth noting that an intervention yielding 3-4 IQ points is staggeringly large in terms of question #2, losing out to curing malnutrition but beating basically everything else. It is so large as to seriously damage the credibility of the result, given what we already know about efforts to raise IQ.