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The rise and fall of snake oil

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Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#41

Post by rkozik1989 »

janalsncm wrote: post #10

> Government analysis and enforcement of standards meant that snake oil had acquired a reputation for infamy that it retains to this day. Notably, they ended up being shut down due to a lack of actual snake oil in the product, not because of their claims that snake oil cured maladies. If we can draw a lesson for busting today’s multitude of scams, it might be easier to prove the scam is bogus on its own terms rather…

Like 90% of wellness products operate the same way as snake oil salesmen operated.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#42

Post by bluGill »

cogman10 wrote: post #7
ZunarJ5 wrote: post #6

The manosphere is rife with snake oil salesmen, it just changes form with time. Snake Oil as a concept is as old as money. Everyone wants a miracle, especially when hope can be commodified.

It goes far beyond the manosphere. You can find people selling all sorts of naturopathic, homeopathic, crystal, and Jesus endorsed medicines. Anywhere a group of people gathers to downplay pharmaceuticals or evidence based medicine, you'll find them pushing their own untested and unregulated junk.

I think you have the cause backwards. Anytime people can make money pushing their own thing they will downplay evidence based medicine.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#43

Post by bluGill »

cogman10 wrote: post #9

We need yet another "This has what it says it has" regulation around supplements and vitamins. There's basically no guarantee that any vitamin pill you pull off the shelf has any percentage of it's claimed ingredients. You could be getting 10% of what you wanted, you could be getting 1000% of what you wanted. Fortunately, the body can handle some pretty wide variation. But unfortunately if you are taking a vitamin be…

> But unfortunately if you are taking a vitamin because you lack a nutrient

Fortunately most people are not lacking a nutrient. Also fortunately most (but not all - the exceptions cause problems when they become the hype!) vitamins people take in large quantities are water soluble and you just pee out extra.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#44

Post by Theodores »

Even if you had some genuine snake oil with every step of the manufacturing process documented, with the product protected by the best anti-tamper technology and legal department, nobody today would buy snake oil. You could make it organic, fair trade and everything, but, due to the snake oil salesmen of times past, selling an adulterated product that contained no snake oil, the market for legitimate snake oil is not exactly massive.

Hence the problem with snake oil is not the product, it is how it has been sold.

There are many other products that are a whisker away from the same fate. For example, olive oil. Can anyone say they have had the pure and unadulterated stuff? There is no way of knowing unless you have pressed your own olives.

It is the same deal with honey. None of that honey in the supermarket could possibly be legitimate, at the price it is at.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#45

Post by cogman10 »

bluGill wrote: post #43
cogman10 wrote: post #9

We need yet another "This has what it says it has" regulation around supplements and vitamins. There's basically no guarantee that any vitamin pill you pull off the shelf has any percentage of it's claimed ingredients. You could be getting 10% of what you wanted, you could be getting 1000% of what you wanted. Fortunately, the body can handle some pretty wide variation. But unfortunately if you are taking a vitamin be…

> But unfortunately if you are taking a vitamin because you lack a nutrient Fortunately most people are not lacking a nutrient. Also fortunately most (but not all - the exceptions cause problems when they become the hype!) vitamins people take in large quantities are water soluble and you just pee out extra.

I tend to agree. But there are some like prenatal vitamins which people should be taking because dipping low on the nutrients can cause lifetime damage to the kid.

In that case, I worry less that the vitamin contains too much and more that it doesn't contain enough. Both could be a problem. There are also a few like iron which take longer for the body to purge where overdosing is a real problem.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#46

Post by senkora »

ccimmergreen wrote: post #28
Aerroon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My quality of life improved by a significant amount when I started supplementing magnesium. Better sleep and a bunch of other things. It's actually scary how much of a difference something so simple (and cheap) made.

Sounds like placebo effect. Which works too, but it doesn't have to be magnesium, zinc, or snake oil for that matter.

gwern once ran a rigorous N=1 self-experiment on magnesium with self-blinding and week-long blocks, and concluded that it was probably helpful to him: https://gwern.net/nootropic/magnesium#conclusion

You are welcome to review his methodology and see if it still seems like the placebo effect.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#47

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

pedalpete wrote: post #35
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you folks going to support non-iPhones?

Yeah, my co-founder and I were discussing this yesterday. It was always in the plans, we're all actually on Android, but we wanted to get the user experience right on one platform and not spread ourselves too thin, but we're thinking AI makes a big difference here, so... no announcement yet, but it was never going to be iPhone forever. I still can't say for sure we'll have android at launch, but we'd like to.

If you're all on Android, the inability to dogfood iOS will hinder that "get the user experience right", won't it? Not being an app developer, I'm curious why a cross-platform framework wasn't chosen. Aren't there several good ones to choose from these days?

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#48

Post by Noumenon72 »

senkora wrote: post #46
ccimmergreen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like placebo effect. Which works too, but it doesn't have to be magnesium, zinc, or snake oil for that matter.

gwern once ran a rigorous N=1 self-experiment on magnesium with self-blinding and week-long blocks, and concluded that it was probably helpful to him: https://gwern.net/nootropic/magnesium#conclusion You are welcome to review his methodology and see if it still seems like the placebo effect.

Based on his ranking of MP (mood/productivity), he concluded that it helped for the first three weeks and then got worse because he was overdosing on the magnesium. So not much there is going to apply to the general case.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#49

Post by trillic »

alexjplant wrote: post #24
pedalpete wrote: post #5

I think they will soon be re-writing this article with the addition of "and rise again". I work in neurotech/sleeptech and one of the biggest challenges I see in our industry is, if not pure snake-oil, the over-hype of "backed by research". People have accused us of being snake-oil as well, and I get why they might think that if you haven't read or don't understand the science. I've seen products that claim to be Vag…

> the current "It's got electrolytes" craze The modern emphasis on electrolytes is directionally correct but ultimately silly. Most electrolyte satchets and drinks are just overpriced salt water with artificial flavoring and sweeteners. The majority of the Western world actually fails to meet their recommended intake of potassium and magnesium. The former is rare in beverages because of its bitter taste and possible…

I do lite salt, maltodextrin, magnesium glycinate, and lemonlime powder.

Re: The rise and fall of snake oil

#50

Post by com2kid »

pedalpete wrote: post #34
com2kid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your subscription model but I honestly hope you don't have large backend costs. If the device came with a year free, or even a 6 month subscription, sure. But over $500 for a sleep aid is asking a lot.

The back-end costs aren't high. We decided to go with a low device cost and subscription to make it cost effective to purchase when finances allow us to get to a monthly instead of yearly subscription.

> We decided to go with a low device cost

When I worked on Microsoft Band, we wanted to have really nice side buttons. Great feel, not only the material, but the perfect spring tension, a great clicking sound, everything. We had someone who obsessed over them month after month, trying different polishes, colors, materials, spring types, everything.

$2 a button, 2 buttons, $4 total on the BOM. Absurd. Yes the buttons were great, but we couldn't justify $4 for them. But that was the best any of our suppliers were able to do for metal buttons. We had spun off the Xbox accessories team, so we really knew buttons, but we really knew plastic buttons of a certain type. Metal buttons were kicking our butts.

Then someone asked: "have we tried a watch supplier?"

So yeah, like 25 cents per button for the exact same buttons. It wasn't that our other suppliers were ripping us off, they just weren't setup to make the type of buttons we needed, in those quantities, at the price we needed.

So what I'm saying is, your base product is already expensive. It costs the same as an entire smart watch capable of running an operating system. You probably have lots of specialized components, lots of custom hardware, but your base price is already high and I hope you don't have any $4 buttons in the product, they are easy to overlook. I also get it is because you are doing small batch runs, and you are amortizing all the tooling and dev work over a small number of units, but you are not low cost. You are an unknown product selling adjacent to a bunch of snake oil people, if you were just $200 by itself I could maybe see it as an impulse buy to try out, but plus the subscription, ouch.

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