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Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

reuters.com

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Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#341

Post by jandrese »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #160
pjc50 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> psychosomatic and mental illness are no real illnesses This is what people are told by medical professionals who are refusing to help them.

I'm not sure I'm following, so I want to make sure I've got this right. You are claiming that there are medical professionals are telling their patients that psychosomatic and mental illnesses are not real illnesses?

No so much that they are not real issues, but that the doctors don't know of anything they can do to alleviate it. Drugs only work as far as the placebo effects work, and have the danger of being potentially addictive on the side. Counseling doesn't work if the person thinks you're bullshitting them just to deny them their pills.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#342

Post by ip26 »

sewercake wrote: post #181
ip26 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Is it worse in your mouse hand? Don't overlook the mouse. 2) Is the KA2 wide enough for your shoulders? A split keyboard was the ticket for me, due to the set of my shoulders.

what split keyboard are you using? Do you recommend it? Currently in the market for one.

It's a kinesis freestyle 2. It doesn't have slick trendy features aside from being split, and I am not madly in love with it. Instead I would say as it's mostly invisible to me, which is exactly what I want out of a keyboard. So, I would recommend it.

I also have a Microsoft 4000 at home for light/occasional usage and it's struck the point of being good enough for that purpose, and it was quite inexpensive.

(If your wrists are straight on a regular keyboard and your shoulders are not scrunched you probably don't need a split board)

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#343

Post by sorryforthethro »

spinach wrote: post #274

Calling these people 'activists' seems a bit disingenuous, since they just appear to be harassers. They aren't respectful and dig into the personal lives of the researchers. Later in the article it's even mentioned they harass patients who got better with the proposed treatment. At some point you are just an asshole pretending to be a saviour. Who would have thought that a by product the internet - social media - wou…

Maybe it's pessimistic, but I also see a profit motive here, the "psychological" CFS treatments have the potential to cut into modafinil/etc recurring profits.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#344

Post by btilly »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #290
btilly wrote: post #246

Here is a simple rule. Any condition that can be improved with a placebo, has a possible psychological component that can either be a cause or a contributing factor. This is not to say that it is all in your head, or that all people with it have it due to psychological reasons. But some of the people have at least some of their symptoms worsened by psychological factors. Anyone who finds this controversial has psycho…

It’s way more complicated than that. The diagnostic criteria changes over time, for many diseases with psychological components, in ways that make formerly pathological behaviors now healthy and vice versa. Placebo doesn’t actually help you, obviously, despite what the outcome you’re measuring suggests. It represents a slack (something not quite an error, but not quite a useful measurement) in the outcomes based meas…

You're right that changes in diagnostic criteria and statistical effects can cause a placebo group to look better or worse over time without the placebo having done anything. This is important, and thank you for the reminder.

However that is not to say that the placebo effect never helps you. As http://protomag.com/articles/the-placebo-problem shows, people who are receiving a placebo will experience medically significant effects, and which effects they experience depend on which placebo they got. Furthermore the reason why double blind studies became standard is that it turns out that the doctor's knowledge has an impact even when the doctor is trying to not communicate it. That is, if doctors are told that one group is receiving a placebo and another is not, the group that is not will do better EVEN THOUGH both groups are in fact receiving the same placebo! (I heard about this some time ago as a classic study, but I can't seem to track it down easily.)

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#345

Post by btilly »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #285
magduf wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone who finds this controversial has psychological issues with reality. Isn't that something you can say about much of the population though? It seems to me that humans, in general, have psychological issues with reality.

But who’s to say which group’s reality is real and which group’s reality is false? In the end it boils down to politics and public perception - or in today’s world, whichever group is more effective in leveraging the large online platforms to their advantage.

Whatever side is more populated with people who think that is an important question, is likely to be the side that I'm against.

Reality is. I am willing to accept that the best well-conducted research available is a better guide to that than my own knowledge unless it is in one of the very limited areas where I have personal expertise. And those are very, very limited areas indeed.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#346

Post by hu3 »

sandov wrote: post #248
kstenerud wrote: post #244

If you think it's bad now, wait until "activists" have easy access to AI that most people can't distinguish from real humans. It's simple: Just pick a target of your ire, be it someone with ideological, political, lifestyle differences, or just someone you don't like, point your AI bot to it, and watch it harass your victim and anyone associated with them, until they lose their job, reputation, friends, family, etc.…

That already happens, but instead of bots, it's dumb people with a political agenda doing the harassing, and they even do it with their own resources, you don't have to pay for bot servers.

So like Amazon Mechanical Turk but free?

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#347

Post by btilly »

new12345 wrote: post #294
btilly wrote: post #246

Here is a simple rule. Any condition that can be improved with a placebo, has a possible psychological component that can either be a cause or a contributing factor. This is not to say that it is all in your head, or that all people with it have it due to psychological reasons. But some of the people have at least some of their symptoms worsened by psychological factors. Anyone who finds this controversial has psycho…

I agree with possible psychological components is several health conditions. But saying that all acupuncture treatments are placebo is contradicting your first point, besides there are scientific studies that explains mechanisms behind acupunture.

What scientific studies would those be? And by what standards are they scientific?

Until a randomized controlled study can demonstrate real differences between acupuncture conducted with real needles and sham needles, I will happily call it a placebo. Ditto for acupuncture conducted per the way that acupuncturists think it should be conducted and acupuncture conducted per the way that they think it should not. Those studies have, in fact, been conducted. Acupuncture did not, in fact, do anything detectable. I am therefore on the side of calling it a placebo.

See http://www.dcscience.net/2013/05/30/acupuncture-is-a-theatri... for more.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#348

Post by monotone666 »

Copy of what I sent him:

"5 years ago I wanted to be a pro wrestler and had taught myself a couple advanced level gymnastic skills. I went to shovel snow one day after a blizzard and after 12 hours of work developed a case of mono that lasted for three months. i was never able to do my workout routine more than once every week or two after that. In 2016 I got a job that required me to walk 13 miles a day and lift 100 pounds. I got mono and switched to a job that just required 5 mins of work and 8 hours of staying awake. my case of mono lasted for a year until i quit my job. it was devastating, i became frequently confused and unable to understand language and lost over half of my physical strength. most foods would induce pain that lasted days. I got better after I quit my job with a treatment i found a doctor recommend online. since then ive sleep 16 hours a day and get sore throats if i spend too long on my feet. im frequently sore and tired and unable to exercise. i could still beat your ass tho pussy."

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#349

Post by btilly »

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #323
logifail wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Placebo doesn’t actually help you What? The first definition of the placebo effect I found was this: " a beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment" My highlight.

He means that most of the placebo is covered by a statistical effect, regression to the mean, etc. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-placebo-myth/

That may be most of the effect on the group taking the placebo. But it is not the placebo effect.

Were there no placebo effect, then we could test the effectiveness of drugs by simply observing one group and giving the other our proposed treatment.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#350

Post by [deleted] »

logifail wrote: post #308
doctorpangloss wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s way more complicated than that. The diagnostic criteria changes over time, for many diseases with psychological components, in ways that make formerly pathological behaviors now healthy and vice versa. Placebo doesn’t actually help you, obviously, despite what the outcome you’re measuring suggests. It represents a slack (something not quite an error, but not quite a useful measurement) in the outcomes based meas…

> Placebo doesn’t actually help you What? The first definition of the placebo effect I found was this: " a beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment" My highlight.

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