Rat Park • Hacker News Board

Re: Rat Park

#31

Post by spb » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #23

kbenson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it is atrocious since the linked study arrives at the completely opposite result Wikipedia claims.

Wikipedia allows public editing. Did you amend the incorrect claim?

Re: Rat Park

#32

Post by nvader » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 8:54 PM UTC

api wrote: post #20

SapphireSun wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. I imagine nociceptors have a baseline firing rate but your brain tunes it out because it's just noise. If you switch that off, the current filter system would get whacked out of balance, you'd feel awesome, but when it switches on again, baseline firing would be a salient input for a bit and you might notice it? Of course, long term up/down regulation of various receptors occurs too, but I'…

I wondered a while back if (theoretically) taking some kind of non-harmful but pain stimulating compound might not make you feel awesome the rest of the time, and might even be good for you by recalibrating your inflammatory response and such.

See: spicy food.

Re: Rat Park

#33

Post by xanderstrike » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 8:59 PM UTC

SapphireSun wrote: post #18

chrisBob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife said something similar about morphine: "Did you know your hand hurts really bad while you are just standing there right now? You have no idea until you have morphine and it gets instantly better."

That's really interesting. I imagine nociceptors have a baseline firing rate but your brain tunes it out because it's just noise. If you switch that off, the current filter system would get whacked out of balance, you'd feel awesome, but when it switches on again, baseline firing would be a salient input for a bit and you might notice it? Of course, long term up/down regulation of various receptors occurs too, but I'…

If you've ever wondered why people on hard drugs like to take off their clothes when they're coming down, this is it. You can't handle the sensory overload of your t-shirt against your skin.

Re: Rat Park

#34

Post by derefr » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:07 PM UTC

tedks wrote: post #27

spb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

I think what the parent means is that a motivated experiment designer can (even accidentally) create an experiment that has a high false-positive rate, thus providing very little Bayesian evidence given a positive result. Ideally, you'd have the experiment designed by someone who actually wanted to falsify the hypothesis (or at least a neutral party), such that the non-null conclusion, if arrived at, would be really strong Bayesian evidence.

Re: Rat Park

#35

Post by MichaelGG » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:27 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #17

api wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew someone once who'd used heroin for a while and gave it up and he told a similar story. He said it "makes the pain go away," and I asked what he meant and he just said "all of it" and smiled. He said I'm in horrible, horrible pain and have no idea because I'd never tried heroin before. :O Immediately made me think of this great old sci-fi story: http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2009/05/17/desertion-by...

I remember talking to somebody in the medical industry once. I don't remember exactly what his job was, but he told me that he had done some work with opiate addicts. Supposedly, their brains themselves can get so powerfully addicted to the drugs that it actually generates phantom pain in order to force the user to get more opiates to make it go away. Every test they can run shows that the addict is actually feeling…

Forget physical pain. Opiates make the mental pain, the pain of existence go away. Stress, business problems, finances, it's all manageable with opiates. Most people don't know just how much better human existence can be with a bit of tweaking to our chemistry.

We accept we're no longer in our ancestral environment, why can't we accept that our default chemistry is suboptimal?

Re: Rat Park

#36

Post by te_platt » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:28 PM UTC

tedks wrote: post #27

spb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

This is subtle but important distinction. It is absolutely possible to do a confirming experiment that can give misleading results. There is a nice explanation in the wikipedia article under "Confirmation Bias".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

A striking example is the (2,4,6) test. From wikipedia:

"Wason's research on hypothesis-testing The term "confirmation bias" was coined by English psychologist Peter Wason.[66] For an experiment published in 1960, he challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of numbers. At the outset, they were told that (2,4,6) fits the rule. Participants could generate their own triples and the experimenter told them whether or not each triple conformed to the rule.[67][68] While the actual rule was simply "any ascending sequence", the participants had a great deal of difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such as "the middle number is the average of the first and last".[67] The participants seemed to test only positive examples—triples that obeyed their hypothesized rule. For example, if they thought the rule was, "Each number is two greater than its predecessor", they would offer a triple that fit this rule, such as (11,13,15) rather than a triple that violates it, such as (11,12,19).[69] Wason accepted falsificationism, according to which a scientific test of a hypothesis is a serious attempt to falsify it. He interpreted his results as showing a preference for confirmation over falsification, hence the term "confirmation bias".[Note 4][70] Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his selection task experiment.[71] In this task, participants are given partial information about a set of objects, and have to specify what further information they would need to tell whether or not a conditional rule ("If A, then B") applies. It has been found repeatedly that people perform badly on various forms of this test, in most cases ignoring information that could potentially refute the rule."

Re: Rat Park

#37

Post by Brakenshire » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:30 PM UTC

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…

> I don't have any great insight here - but I think there's more to it than environment as suggested by this study. There are people all around the world who live in far worse conditions and who aren't turning to substances, even when they are available. My feeling is that rats living in cages, who can see rats living in Rat Park would be more likely to seek addiction. And perhaps even more so if they see other rats being moved from cages to Rat Park, but not them.

To a certain degree it comes down to a semantic argument about how you define environment.

* Just the structural physical environment - nice benches, and trees, flats that are a decent size, and don't have mould on the walls, etc

* this plus the consequences of other people on the physical environment - needles left in parks, shouting in the corridors, people pissing in the lift

* this plus the immediate social environment - you are treated badly because you look like a drug addict

* this plus the cumulative internalized values that you have picked up from your social environment throughout your lifetime - other people living successful, prosperous lives around you, or in mass media, and you falling short of your expectations

Rats don't necessarily have the latter two, at least I don't think they have a social stigma for drug addiction!

For humans, the parallels are inevitably to some degree limited, because you can't just take someone out of their own mind, and put them somewhere where they feel good about themselves, although you can try, and will succeed with many.

Re: Rat Park

#38

Post by MichaelGG » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

xanderstrike wrote: post #33

SapphireSun wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. I imagine nociceptors have a baseline firing rate but your brain tunes it out because it's just noise. If you switch that off, the current filter system would get whacked out of balance, you'd feel awesome, but when it switches on again, baseline firing would be a salient input for a bit and you might notice it? Of course, long term up/down regulation of various receptors occurs too, but I'…

If you've ever wondered why people on hard drugs like to take off their clothes when they're coming down, this is it. You can't handle the sensory overload of your t-shirt against your skin.

Hard drugs isn't a category of drugs, but powerful opiates seem to be what's included anyways. I'm not aware of opiate users habitually taking off clothing. Other powerful drugs can make you feel cold, adding clothing. Some people really sweat on acid, which is probably a decent cause of taking off clothing.

Re: Rat Park

#39

Post by MichaelGG » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

tedks wrote: post #30

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 ou…

The /r/opiates subreddit seems more accurate on opiate usage. Don't get things wrong, it can be terribly addicting. But for many users, that's not really a bad thing by using, any more than needing to pee more is considered by coffee fans.

Extended release opiates are a huge lifesaver though, allowing you to wake up without feeling like torture incarnate.

Re: Rat Park

#40

Post by stefantalpalaru » Thu, Feb 12, 2015, 9:46 PM UTC

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.

Nobody invests time and money in a hypothesis they don't already have an educated guess it might be true.