The placebo effect is measurable. If there is no measurable improvement, there's no placebo effect either.
Bear in mind that what most claims in favour of the polygraph measure is not truth but potentially-false confession. Extracting false confessions is relatively easy, it's also completely f-ing useless to wider society and massively harmful to the victim.
You're assuming truth is the goal, which isn't correct. The goal of police is to close cases, and in this goal, polygraphs are quite effective.
They don't care if you actually did the crime, they care that they can extract a confession, or provide damning evidence to a prosecutor that lets them throw you in prison, so they can put a nice big checkmark on that case. Did they actually jail who was responsible? Maybe not, but who cares about that, apart from you?
Same reason for Forensics to exist. Don't misunderstand, some Forensic science has validity in many cases, but a lot of it is just straight up nonsense that isn't proven or peer-reviewed in the slightest, in fact many Forensic sciences that appear in modern court cases are completely, 100% debunked.
And like, why should they care? Even if you hire a crack lawyer team that gets you out of the court case, it's not like anyone involved in the investigation that almost threw an innocent man in jail is going to suffer an ounce of consequences. Or hell, even if you're wrongly convicted, worst case scenario you get a financial judgement after years of litigation, that's paid for by the taxpayers.
I see no issues with using polygraphs for hiring at intelligence agencies (I defer back to the comment about people missing the point of it), but as an investigative tool it's definitely a net negative.
The problem is that the polygraph doesn't work on both levels. Obviously, it doesn't detect lies. But more to the point, it also doesn't extract useful information from most liars, and leads to fake confessions.
To stay in your metaphor:
- Not only do sugar pills not cure tumors, but imagine
- 60% of recipients don't report decreased pain levels (no placebo effect)
- 20% of recipients feel more pain
The placebo effect itself isn't real (at least in the vast majority of cases where it has been claimed to exist), when people measure a "placebo effect" what they are actually measuring is simply a regression toward the mean, not a causal effect.
I don't think this is right. Placebo effect definitely exists for conditions that are largely influenced by mental perception. The common example is pain. You can reduce people's perception of pain by deploying the placebo effect, e.g. giving them sugar pills that you convince them will reduce their pain. It extends to other similar conditions which are not generally (or possible to be) measured directly, but rather based on a patient's self-reported scoring. Like "on on a scale of 1-10 how would you rate your experience of this condition". Placebo effect can work for that. But not for other more tangible conditions.
Not only does a placebo reduce pain, naloxone will reverse the pain reduction just like it would if you'd given them morphone instead. Placebo effect isn't simple psychosomatic, rather something real and physical is going on inside the human body.
In my mid 20s I tried antidepressants for the first time. To me it was a big step because like many, I had a false perception of it having an unnatural effect on my personality, but I was finally ready to try them. The doctor said they will take at least 2 weeks to have any effect, and despite knowing that AND knowing about the placebo effect, I still "felt better" for several days after I started the regimen. To me, that was absolutely proof of the placebo effect, especially because after the 2 week window the effect was a backfire where I was in bed for a day and couldn't do anything. The pills backfired on me.
A single data point like that should never be considered anything close to "absolute proof" of anything - because you have absolutely no way of knowing that, for whatever reason (random chance, or the food you were eating at the time, or a compliment somebody paid you on the day you started taking them, or....), you might have felt better on those first days even if you hadn't started taking antidepressants at all.
Correlation is not causation, as they say.
(Hope your depression is gone or at least not too bad now days, regardless of what drugs or placebos may have played a part!)
> The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they’re wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they’re super-important for the past fifty years.
The words "clinically significant" and "benefit" are not the same thing as the effect being real. To me it reads as if they are testing the hypothesis that a patient comes into ER with a sprained ankle and the doctor gives them this "new powerful prescription pain pill that just came out" and instead tricks them with a sugar pill. If this worked, I'm sure it would be used as much as possible. And the study you linked is simply confirming that PE is not an effective treatment for anything.
That's not the topic at hand here, which is "is the PE real?". For me it absolutely is.
This is what you were replying to when you said "The placebo effect itself isn't real":
> while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management.
And now you go to this version:
> There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain
So is it real or not? We're just saying the same thing, what's the point of saying it doesn't exist and then revert back to exactly what was said originally?
In a small but measurable percent of cases, the sugar pill does actually make tumors
disappear though. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12509397/], and helps with almost every other factor of
care in much larger percentages of the time.
> Conclusion: In randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials, presumably with minimum sources of bias, placebos are sometimes associated with improved control of symptoms such as pain and appetite but rarely with positive tumor response. Substantial improvements in symptoms and quality of life are unlikely to be due to placebo effects.
A sugar pill does not make tumors disappear. That's not what the placebo effect does; it changes your perception of pain and well-being, but not much else. (Of course, that can have a value in itself, but it's nothing like the magical healing effects found in urban legends.)
In what sense? Pain is a complex emotion triggered by various simple sensations (very hot, very high pressure etc). But remember that people with certain kinds of brain damage can feel these same sensations, but not pain. To them these just don't register as painful. Other people feel pain in limbs that they no longer have, so not triggered by any sensation at all.
Also, even beyond medical issues, different people perceive pain very differently. Hot peppers are perhaps the clearest example of this, where people accustomed to them feel the same heat, but not the same pain as someone unaccustomed.
Pain is the mental reaction, not the whole process (of course, mental reactions are themselves physical processes, but that's a different discussion). When you take an opioid, the pain goes away, but the physical process that was previously causing it doesn't.
This is such a one sided dogmatic view of how the body works and heals that I honestly don't know where to start. I've seen enough evidence of bodies healing themselves just from changed minds. The truth is the synthesis of western scientific reasoning and eastern mysticism and holistic thinking. The problem was always blind faith, dogmatism, which is exactly what you're doing.
The point is not to extract truth, it's to extract behavior. It's the fact you can convince a judge or jury to take the evidence as evidence of truth that's a problem.
If the interviewee's behavior is not indicative of truth then the test serves no purpose other than allowing the interviewer or whoever commissioned the test (like a prosecutor or employer) to invalidly convince other people that the interviewee was lying
Not if you view the interview as a process to expose reasons to not eg hire someone rather than to establish a list of facts or earnest perspectives. Literally just putting the candidate under stress. For this to apply in court you'd have to be suing them for not hiring out of discrimination over a protected class (i think, I am not a lawyer).
I mean maybe there are other civil suits you could file, but I suspect a lot of that would be signed away before the polygraph.
What evidence do you have that there is no evidence?
For sure, you have:
- your opinion
- your knowledge (which is a subset of all that is known/"known", which is a subset of all that exists...though, it all typically seems other than this, such is culturally conditioned consciousness), have you something over and above this?
Saying "there is no evidence" is sloppy cable political TV tier rhetoric. There is absolutely evidence[1]. You and others may not find that evidence convincing, or otherwise think polygraphs shouldn't be used, but nevertheless it exists. A brief survey of the evidence suggests that the polygraph is probably slightly better than chance, but with high enough error bars that we should be very cautious about its use.
This comment is a perfect study of this almost uniquely American insane phenomenon.
But then I don’t question Koreans about fan death.