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It wouldn't be just placebo though. Clearly separating time when you want to be productive vs playing around is an old and effective trick. Placebo apps that m
by comboy 6y ago
It wouldn't be just placebo though. Clearly separating time when you want to be productive vs playing around is an old and effective trick.
Placebo apps that make your Internet faster are as old as the Internet itself though. I am guilty. In my defense, that was 20 years ago.
- mekkkkkk 6y agoGuilty as in you developed one of those apps? I'd be really curious to hear about the product timeline in that case. Did it get any traction? Was it monetized somehow? I've always been curious.
- mercer 6y agoI'm not 100% certain of how the medical/psychological community would define 'placebo', but I'd argue it's not as simple as this not being a placebo because it's an effective trick. The fact that placebos are effective is precisely /because/ they're effectively tricking whatever badly-understood connection there is between our thinking and our body. I imagine that there are degrees to this: 'tricking' ourselves to be productive by deciding to clean our house instead would generally not be called a placebo, whereas taking a sugar pill that lifts us out of depression probably would. But fundamentally they're just the same thing on a spectrum: an improvement as a result of something that we /know/ should not be effective by understood, biological pathways.