2 ms·
>"Perhaps when you say in the first post "give people placebo", you mean "give the placebo to some subset of the individuals leaving the remainder untreated"?"
by nonbel 11y ago
>"Perhaps when you say in the first post "give people placebo", you mean "give the placebo to some subset of the individuals leaving the remainder untreated"?"
I meant just placebo. I am using predictive skill of the theory behind the explanations to distinguish between them, this is common in physics/astronomy/etc. As noted by asherer, placebo effect has been studied for a long time in the manner of seeing how two groups differ. There is nothing wrong with RCTs, but does near sole reliance on them (and their observational analogue) appear to have lead to cumulative knowledge and growth of understanding?
- ashearer 11y agoBoth hypotheses in this case are plausible. Beyond that, it would be great to have the tools to numerically calculate a psychological phenomenon such as the placebo effect the way a physicist calculates the energy of a particle. But we're very far from having them, and in the meantime, I don't know of a practical alternative to RCTs that would expand our knowledge at least as much. (I think we can both agree that over-reliance on significance testing is a problem, though not one limited to RCTs.)