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Rat Park

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Re: Rat Park

#21

Post by api »

bjourne wrote: post #16

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089 It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views? The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experimen…

Real life experiments with drug decriminalization and other factors such as varying rates of addiction tied to life circumstance provide circumstantial support that addiction is at least not entirely chemical.

"Liberal drug views" in general seem to have a lot of real world support, while hard-core punitive prohibitionism has been a failure in every way pretty much everywhere it's been tried... that is unless your goal is to imprison a large number of people, perpetuate cycles of poverty and crime, and route lots of money to the prison and police/security industries. In that case they're a big success. At this point I consider prohibitionism to be a crackpot view. I get the sense that with at least some people prohibitionism is supported as an indirect way to persecute minority groups. It was true back when the "war on drugs" was pursued, and I think it's still true today.

There are cases where certain liberal positions do not have real-world support and basically don't work, but this isn't one of them. None of our over-arching political bias frameworks (right, left, etc.) jive perfectly with reality.

Re: Rat Park

#22

Post by nemo1618 »

shutupalready wrote: post #19
bjourne wrote: post #16

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089 It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views? The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experimen…

> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out: "The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experime…

The issue is that there's a conflict of interest when the same person who proposed the hypothesis is the same person attempting to prove that hypothesis. This sort of bias is why meta-analysis exists.

Re: Rat Park

#23

Post by bjourne »

kbenson wrote: post #15
b_emery wrote: post #14

From near the bottom: "Some further studies failed to reproduce the original experiment's results, but in at least one of these studies[12] both caged and "park" rats showed a decreased preference for morphine, suggesting a genetic difference" Still, it's an intriguing result. The reviewer comments from science and nature would make interesting reading - too bad they are not public.

But also, from the immediately preceding paragraph: "Several later studies did appear to confirm its findings — for example, Bozarth, Murray and Wise in 1989, also published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior — but nothing came of those either." That paints a confusing picture, so without looking at the specifics of the later studies for possible differences, I think it's hard to come to a conclusion.

Wikipedia isn't so good when it comes to drug related topics. Or rather, it is atrocious since the linked study (http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/HOUSING.html) arrives at the completely opposite result Wikipedia claims. It's an interesting read because it also discusses why setting up a study to fairly measure voluntary drug intake among groups of mice is very hard.

Re: Rat Park

#24

Post by spb »

shutupalready wrote: post #19
bjourne wrote: post #16

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089 It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views? The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experimen…

> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out: "The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experime…

The problem is designing an experiment to confirm the hypothesis rather than to test it.

Re: Rat Park

#25

Post by cthalupa »

Diacetylmorphine is still used in several European countries as a front line analgesic. Other forms of morphine are widely used for pain relief on a prescribed basis all over. If it is as simple as using morphine addicts you to morphine, why are no much wider swathes of the population addicted to it?

I don't know that it's purely environment, but there's plenty of evidence out there that seems to suggest it's more than simply chemical dependency.

Re: Rat Park

#26

Post by tedks »

bjourne wrote: post #16

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089 It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views? The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experimen…

>the Milgram experiments should be discredited for the same reason

Actually, the original hypothesis Stanley Milgram had was that Germans were somehow predisposed to obedience as a culture or race. His studies in the United States were what's called a "pilot test" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment) conducted to verify if everything was working as expected. Once he had some control readings for Americans, Milgram planned to go to Germany and conduct the real experiment.

Milgram, and virtually all of his colleagues, believed that nobody would obey until the end of the study. He polled his colleagues, and the highest number ANYONE gave was 3%.

If you're not familiar with the Milgram experiments, take a minute to read up on them. Roughly 60% completed the experiment, obeying orders until the end.

For what it's worth I think you're wrong about conducting science, maybe right about the rat park, but don't bring the Milgram experiments into it. They are possibly the most valuable result science has ever given us.

Re: Rat Park

#27

Post by tedks »

spb wrote: post #24
shutupalready wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out: "The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experime…

The problem is designing an experiment to confirm the hypothesis rather than to test it.

This is not a problem. You can have any hypothesis and any test. If your test has validity it's a valid way to test the hypothesis. That's it.

The scientific process is a social one, and if you feel that an experiment is constructed unfairly, you can devise another experiment to falsify it.

Saying that an experiment "confirms" a hypothesis is just a rhetorical trick of the comment parent. Experiments can only ever falsify.

Re: Rat Park

#28

Post by spb »

mamer wrote: post #3

I lived in an apartment where 6 out of 8 apartments were occupied by alcoholics or drug addicts. Nearly every block on that street was the same. This was Glasgow, and the drug of choice was heroin, although everyone also smoked as much marijuana as they could afford. These people's lives weren't particularly shit on a day-by-day basis, but they had nothing but misery on the horizon. If they had kids they would lose t…

So, basically, you lived in Trainspotting?

Re: Rat Park

#29

Post by theon144 »

spb wrote: post #24
shutupalready wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out: "The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experime…

The problem is designing an experiment to confirm the hypothesis rather than to test it.

I don't see the problem with the design of the RP experiment; it might still falsify the hypothesis.

Re: Rat Park

#30

Post by tedks »

nemothekid wrote: post #5

Reminds me of reddit comment I once read of someone's experience with heroin - http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_o...

Make sure to also read the same user's comment later on in the thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_o...

My favorite quote:

>I used to torture some of the people I sold drugs to by asking them if they knew why they got out of bed in the morning. "Why do you get out of bed every morning?" I would ask. Most didn't have any idea. When they realized this, I would pounce: "I know why I get out of bed," I'd say, almost imperially "it's because I'm sick as shit and need to do a shot." So there.

And from the first comment:

>In spite of my immediate delight with heroin and vow to use it as much as possible, it took over 6 months, and really closer to a year, of consistent use before the body became physiologically addicted. That said, addiction is rarely only physiological in nature. More often than not, it is caused by social factors.

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