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Assorted links
1. What's the chance you'll die in the next year? Here is a new calculator.
2. Markets in everything: revenge flyers.
3. One good way to think about why placebo effects are getting stronger.
4. The conference bike: will it make meetings longer or shorter?
5. The P vs. NP problem and its importance.
6. Incompetence as a signaling device.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 27, 2009 at 10:46 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
What? Rocks getting cleaner with water is *not* the "placebo effect," but rather "effects of the placebo." This might seem like a minor difference, but it is hugely important. The author basically accuses Wired of making a mistake that only he himself is making.
Posted by: Ryan at Aug 27, 2009 10:56:42 AM
The death risk site is crashed for inexplicable reasons. The Carnegie Mellon people said they are looking into it.
Posted by: David at Aug 27, 2009 11:34:28 AM
Incompetence as signalling: One of the ways Peter proposed to defeat the Peter Principle is a display of incompetence of a kind that prevents promotion.
Scientists use it all the time to avoid becoming managers.
Posted by: rhhardin at Aug 27, 2009 11:44:15 AM
And husbands have long used it to avoid housework.
Posted by: John B. Chilton at Aug 27, 2009 11:59:22 AM
The comments at the placebo article do a fairly good job of demystifying this a bit. The Wired article was a bit misleading, and many people read it as though a) it was evidence that drug companies and their products are bad/silly/pointless and/or b) there was some mystical process going on whereby people were being found to heal themselves better and better.
Posted by: PM at Aug 27, 2009 12:10:16 PM
1 @ David : It died ?
Too many sites (YahooNews etc.) were mentioning it . Must have generated a lot of hits.
Posted by: Rama at Aug 27, 2009 12:23:52 PM
We're not sure what happened. It certainly did get a lot of hits, but that doesn't appear to be it. The IT guys are having at it right now.
Posted by: David at Aug 27, 2009 12:33:19 PM
Hmmm, calculator crashed.
Meets the definition of irony.
Posted by: Allan at Aug 27, 2009 1:11:01 PM
I would have thought the placebo effect was measured against a no treatment control, not the drug. That's pretty dumb.
I wonder if there's a systematic difference in the placebo effect between effects that are reported by the patient (like for anti-depressants) vs. something measured (like cholesterol levels).
Posted by: efp at Aug 27, 2009 1:36:15 PM
@efp
Placebos aren't tested against drugs. Rather drugs are tested against placebos. The reasoning is, the placebo effect is real enough that its not sufficient for a the effect of the drug to be stronger than the effect of no treatment. Rather, the effect of the drug has to be distinguishable from the effect of a placebo.
As far as whether placebo effects are stronger for "subjective" (e.g. pain, depression) vs. "objective" (cholesterol levels, diabetes) ailments, I have heard that the effect is stronger for the subjective category. I don't have a link to the literature handy, though.
Posted by: quanticle at Aug 27, 2009 4:17:02 PM
If you are healthy and without diabetes, the Reynolds Risk Score is designed to predict your risk of having a future heart attack, stroke, or other major heart disease in the next 10 years.
http://www.reynoldsriskscore.org
Posted by: anon at Aug 27, 2009 9:33:46 PM
Note that if P = NP, then government can in fact allocate resources to each individual in a way that maximizes their happiness. Anybody think that's possible? I don't hold out much hope for P and NP being in the same set. And fundamentally, that's why I'm a libertarian.
Posted by: Russell Nelson at Aug 28, 2009 2:04:10 AM
conference bike? Thank goodness high speed rail captured the technocrat imagination first.
Posted by: Andrew at Aug 28, 2009 6:44:37 AM
At the university where I taught in the 1960s
senior professors avoided socializing with the
untenured, whose futures they would eventually
decide. But this is harder to do at small
colleges.
One way to avoid corruption is to insist on
quality of publication and teaching significantly
independent of the judgment of one's immediate
colleagues. Another check is that if one keeps
promoting one's cronies, the off-campus reputation
of the institutuion will suffer.
A further consderation is that it requires fine
judgment to distinguish between those whose realized
work is competent but no better than mediocre and
those who in ten years will do something truly
original.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai at Aug 29, 2009 10:23:51 AM
Maybe someone with more math than I have can give examples of how to use the conference bike to demonstrate NP-complete problems.
Posted by: arbitraryaardvark at Aug 30, 2009 12:30:37 PM
