{"id":79,"date":"2010-10-21T07:02:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T07:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2010\/10\/21\/what-does-it-works-mean\/"},"modified":"2010-10-21T07:02:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T07:02:00","slug":"what-does-it-works-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2010\/10\/what-does-it-works-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What does &#8220;it works&#8221; mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Response to my rants about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.golfusa.co.za\/index.php?page=shop.product_details&amp;category_id=11&amp;flypage=ilvm_fly_admirable.tpl&amp;product_id=353&amp;option=com_virtuemart&amp;Itemid=2&amp;vmcchk=1&amp;Itemid=2\">hologram bracelets<\/a> and articles like this one about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article.cfm?id=superstitions-can-make-you\">magical thinking<\/a> on SciAm  have forced me to re-evaluate my language.  I would like to say that the hologram bracelets &#8220;don&#8217;t work&#8221; because they have no physical effect on the phenomena that they claim to affect.  However, people who use the bracelet will probably have a measurable improvement in their performance as per the SciAm article.  So what to do?<\/p>\n<p>Ever since reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.badscience.net\/\">Ben Goldacre<\/a>&#8216;s Bad Science, I&#8217;ve been fascinated by the term &#8220;no better than placebo&#8221;.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Placebo\">placebo effect<\/a> is one of the reasons for using <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Blind_experiment\">blind testing<\/a> and shows what kind of rigour needs to be employed to avoid being fooled.  Now, the idea is that a medicine is only really effective if it works better than placebo.  Is there a corollary that says that if a medicine will not be particularly effective, it is better to attempt placebo treatment?  I suppose this makes a kind of sense if the medical solution has physical side effects but the placebo doesn&#8217;t.  I just can&#8217;t bring myself to think that I should start believing in crystals and holograms so that I can have cheap placebo improvements to my performance.  Is this why superstition persists?  I suppose it should be no surprise that it would have been selected away unless it conferred some advantage.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately this brings us to an uncomfortable point.  If the superstitions really do confer advantages (even if only mental) what is the sceptic&#8217;s method of achieving similar benefits for similar (low) cost?  It costs nothing to wear gold thongs to important interviews &#8211; what should you do if you honestly don&#8217;t believe the thong will work?  In fact, what does &#8220;work&#8221; even mean in this context?  I  hate semantics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Response to my rants about the hologram bracelets and articles like this one about magical thinking on SciAm have forced me to re-evaluate my language. I would like to say that the hologram bracelets &#8220;don&#8217;t work&#8221; because they have no physical effect on the phenomena that they claim to affect. However, people who use the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[117,167,190,191,193],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bias","tag-magic","tag-scepticism","tag-science","tag-semantics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}