One of nature s many attempts to evolve a crab.
Margaret Rule's magnum opus was a prank so outlandish that scholars would debate it for hundreds of years. This magic trick was so controversial that it would be immortalized as a symbol of the feud between Cotton Mather and Robert Calef: she levitated to the ceiling in front of witnesses.
The picture that emerges is that a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect, but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger than all existing treatments when administered by a researcher who really wants the placebo effect to be real. The most parsimonious explanation is that it is the research practices, rather than the…
This appendix to A Case Against the Placebo Effect reviews the studies in the Sauro and Greenberg (2005) meta-analysis on the effect of opioid antagonists on placebo analgesia, in alphabetical order. Next, the relevant sizes of the study arms for each study are provided. Finally, research into the placebo effect in depression is reviewed. Brief Continue reading "Appendix"
An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the emotional inception model of advertising, most cognitive biases, and any field with behavioral in its name are not real by a literal banana Nothing Works That Way Back in 2014, Kevin Simler published a provocative essay on the nature of advertising Continue reading "Against Automaticity"
Concerning placebos and the placebo effect, there is a distinction that I have struggled to articulate, a distinction I have also noticed highly intelligent humans failing to make. I recently found an excellent explanation of the distinction in a paper questioning the meaning of recent open-label placebo trials, and thought it was worth a short Continue reading "An Important Misconception About…
As a banana who lives among humans, the sacred beliefs of humans interest me a great deal. By sacred beliefs I mean beliefs that are widely shared and have a high level of emotional vehemence surrounding them, preventing them from being questioned, except by trolls. Usually the goal of trolling is to provoke a defensive Continue reading "The Limits of Help "
by a literal banana As a banana who lives among humans, I am naturally interested in humans, and in the social sciences they use to study themselves. This essay is my current response to the Thiel question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” And my answer is that surveys are Continue reading "Survey Chicken"
by a literal banana I have been trying to understand the “lexical hypothesis” of personality, and its modern descendant, the Five Factor Model of personality, for several months. In that time, I have said some provocative things about the Big Five, and even some unkind things that I admit were unbecoming to a banana. Continue reading "The Ongoing Accomplishment of the Big Five"
Notes on semantic deconversion It’s difficult to study words, because words are hard to see. Words are tools used in communication, and when communication is working, they disappear into invisibility. One way to see words is to make a word jail: a list of problematic words ripped out of their contexts, so that they may Continue reading "Words Fail"
A literal banana has published a method for volunteer investigators of suspicious science, this month in the Journal of Lexical Crime. From the abstract: Fact checking of scientific claims by lay volunteers, also known as recreational hostile fact checking or community-based science policing, is a growing hobby. A method for the evaluation of scientific claims Continue reading "The Extended Sniff…