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Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

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Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#111

Post by gwern »

keenerd wrote: post #93
ultramundane8 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't completely follow this line of reasoning. Something like "a minor enhancement like this would have been selected for by now, so it not being selected means it has a drawback?" I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems like the increased intelligence (or more accurately, cognitive performance) may not have had all that practical a benefit until just recently in our history anyway. I accept that the verdict i…

It is a rephrasing of "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". It is safe to assume that everything has side effects and the side effects are going to be roughly proportionate to the primary effects. If you think there are no side effects, then you have not looked hard enough. This is a fairly cynical point of view. But safe. We are not talking about medicine, we are talking about messing with otherwise perfectly…

> Off the top of my head, vitamins and vaccines are the only side-effect free wonder drugs for healthy people.

Vaccines have well-characterized death rates and is why things like the smallpox vaccine stopped being administered as soon as possible even though it'd be comforting to have built-in immunity against that nasty biowarfare possibility; and some vitamins have been shown to increase mortality in RCTs.

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#112

Post by gwern »

ultramundane8 wrote: post #37
gwern wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there literally no potential for artificial selection to outpace natural selection? Of course there's potential and loopholes but the basic observation (dubbed 'Algernon's law' by some; I've written an entire essay on the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics ) seems sound for tDCS: it's such a trivial intervention that it shouldn't work, which suggests there must be some catch. The catch may well be tri…

I don't completely follow this line of reasoning. Something like "a minor enhancement like this would have been selected for by now, so it not being selected means it has a drawback?" I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems like the increased intelligence (or more accurately, cognitive performance) may not have had all that practical a benefit until just recently in our history anyway. I accept that the verdict i…

> I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems like the increased intelligence (or more accurately, cognitive performance) may not have had all that practical a benefit until just recently in our history anyway.

That's obviously wrong, because the brain is so metabolically expensive that if it was not pulling its weight, it would long ago have shrunk considerably. More intelligence is always better - if the intelligence is not too expensive. (I cover this in the link.)

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#113

Post by gwern »

pkroll wrote: post #14
juskrey wrote: post #6

If something can make your body better without adverse effects, it is already there. You are not smarter than 3.5 billions of life evolution, period.

I get what you're saying, and basically agree. But... A) how much of an adverse effect? And B) Plenty of medical procedures can "make your body better without adverse effects" (at least not as adverse as the medical condition continuing on unchecked).

Plenty of them are outright harmful too, of course, and this is even after a century of randomized experiments and 'evidence-based medicine' weeding out the worst of the crap. But the medicine that works falls handily under one of the loopholes laid out (exercise for the reader: vaccines work amazingly well. Why hasn't evolution already done the work of a vaccine in humans and what loophole does this argument fall under?)

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#115

Post by glenra »

gwern wrote: post #109
glenra wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPDATE: I'm getting downvoted, most likely from people who don't know what I'm referring to. So let me clarify: The platonic ideal of a traditional drug or medical treatment is something that works the same way on EVERYBODY. When you do a controlled double-blind study, you specify one specific treatment regimen - use dose X as a function of unit mass or of condition severity - and test whether that (a) has a statisti…

> A double-blind study of THAT sort of intervention will find a low AVERAGE effect because the AVERAGE includes the nonresponders and the negative responders. It'd also find a higher standard deviation in the experimental group, which, especially if the data had been graphically plotted, would trigger an f-test to check for increased variance. Finding the increase would then become the main result and one could start…

A bit more regarding "sufficiently strong and consistent" effects: We all do little experiments all the time and generally reach valid conclusions based on them. Some examples. Imagine your friend says one of these things:

"Spicy pepperoni pizza late at night gives me heartburn; I feel better when I stick to milder foods."

"My stomach hurts when I eat cheese."

"I feel great when I get around 8 hours of sleep, I get grumpy when I only have 4 hours and I feel groggy if I stay in bed for more than 10 hours."

"If I drink caffeine after 7pm, I have trouble getting to sleep."

"Gin makes me sick, but vodka is fine."

Somehow, all of those seem like PERFECTLY REASONABLE statements, even though they are anecdotal and based on a sample population of one. Nobody says this is invalid information because it wasn't double-blind and there was no control group. Nobody ever says, to paraphrase the upstream comment I responded to:

> I wish they wouldn't report such anecdota so strongly. Joe is unlikely to have conducted controlled double-blind studies on himself, so he can't know it's the {pizza, cheese, caffeine, sleep...} doing anything or not.

Right?

But if Joe says: "When I zap myself with tCDS it helps relieve my depression", he DOES get that sort of complaint!

Why is that? Why is it okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I exercise" or "I feel less depressed when I get to bed earlier" but NOT okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I use the tCDS"? Why is he allowed to KNOW those first two things based just on personal knowledge of how he feels, but not that last one?

There is a weird and (I think) inappropriate double standard at work here.

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#116

Post by s_baby »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #114
s_baby wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.wireheading.com/delgado/index.html

hadn't seen this. Thank you!

There was a particular case study I can't find that documented intense euphoria. To the point the subjects were borderline dysfunctional, like the rats with the cocaine dispensing lever experiment.

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#117

Post by beagle3 »

kunai wrote: post #45

The scientific method has advanced so far in the past century that any new "breakthrough" without proper empirical evidence and due process of science makes me feel like it's just quack science. Forget about the journals, forget about peer review, just have evidence. Anecdota have proven to be very unreliable in critical testing scenarios.

So has so called "evidence". Can't google right now, but recently someone tried and failed to reproduce ~60% of celebrated cancer results published in Science & Nature from the last 20 years. Also, ionaddis has shown most published research in medicine and nutrition to be wrong.

"Publish or perish" has replaced the gold of gold standard with tungsten, with everyone related aware of it, but no one doing anything about it.

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#118

Post by DanBC »

glenra wrote: post #115
gwern wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A double-blind study of THAT sort of intervention will find a low AVERAGE effect because the AVERAGE includes the nonresponders and the negative responders. It'd also find a higher standard deviation in the experimental group, which, especially if the data had been graphically plotted, would trigger an f-test to check for increased variance. Finding the increase would then become the main result and one could start…

A bit more regarding "sufficiently strong and consistent" effects: We all do little experiments all the time and generally reach valid conclusions based on them. Some examples. Imagine your friend says one of these things: "Spicy pepperoni pizza late at night gives me heartburn; I feel better when I stick to milder foods." "My stomach hurts when I eat cheese." "I feel great when I get around 8 hours of sleep, I get g…

Many people used to have knee arthroscopy. Doctors felt it was useful. Patients thought it was useful. It had a credible mechanism of action.

When we do double blind placebo controlled studies we find that knee arthroscopy for some conditions is no better than placebo.

> Why is it okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I exercise" or "I feel less depressed when I get to bed earlier" but NOT okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I use the tCDS"?

It isn't okay to tell people to do exercise to treat their depression unless you have some kind of evidence to back that up. The evidence is weak, and the effect is small, but more research needs to be done. (http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004366/exercise-for-depressi...)

It is not okay to tell people to go to bed earlier to treat their depression unless you have evidence to back that up. I can think of a bunch of pros and cons for going to be earlier. I wouldn't voice my uninformed opinion in a national newspaper, and I wouldn't want that national newspaper to trumpet my uninformed opinion as a facty truthy comment.

> Why is he allowed to KNOW those first two things based just on personal knowledge of how he feels, but not that last one?

My position is that he doesn't know any of those things, not that he can know two of them but not the last one. Especially things like your gin / vodka example: I'd want evidence. Get a bunch of people in a room. Dip the rim of some drinking glasses in gin, and fill the glasses with cold tonic water. Observe. They're not drinking any alcohol, but they do have loosened inhibitions.

So far I've just spoken about the need for a trial. Good quality trials are always needed. Cognitive biases are very strong, and very hard to protect against, and can cause people to undergo lengthy, risky, poor quality "treatment" that just doesn't work. (There are many good books about this. "Bad Science" is a good quick read.)

Let's look at some other flags that might cause us to want better data, rather than just accept his word.

He sells the device for $600. Right there is a big flag.

Either he knows it doesn't work (I don't think this is the case) and he's a scumbag, cynically exploiting people. Or he really does think it works, and he wants to help people. Either way, better data is a good thing. Better data helps us stop the scumbags, and better data helps people like him sell the device and treat ill people.

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#119

Post by Shorel »

glenra wrote: post #89
eurleif wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree, but the comment I was responding to was claiming that drugs only cause harm because they're illegal.

When drugs are illegal, the economics of an illegal market tends to push them towards more concentrated highs. When heroin was legal people took it in pill form, which is much safer than "shooting up" but is a relatively inefficient delivery mechanism so you don't use it when the chemical gets to be really expensive per unit volume. When alcohol was legal SOME people went for the harder stuff but beer was a lot cheap…

> whiskey was cheaper than beer

To be honest, whiskey is expensive only because it is a branding and social experiment that was successful, not because of the cost of manufacturing it.

Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried

#120

Post by zxcdw »

beagle3 wrote: post #117
kunai wrote: post #45

The scientific method has advanced so far in the past century that any new "breakthrough" without proper empirical evidence and due process of science makes me feel like it's just quack science. Forget about the journals, forget about peer review, just have evidence. Anecdota have proven to be very unreliable in critical testing scenarios.

So has so called "evidence". Can't google right now, but recently someone tried and failed to reproduce ~60% of celebrated cancer results published in Science & Nature from the last 20 years. Also, ionaddis has shown most published research in medicine and nutrition to be wrong. "Publish or perish" has replaced the gold of gold standard with tungsten, with everyone related aware of it, but no one doing anything about…

I remember the amount of non-reproducible research was as high as 90 %? Google returns some hits from May 7th(and I remember the HN post from around a month ago, we talk about the same thing I think) or so with that title, but perhaps the actual number is somewhere between 60 and 90 %?
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