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Marlon
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Crazy Ideas Thread
Marlon9y10

Don't send heat underwater, it's a bad idea for everything that lives under there (and for us if we don't want these things going up).

I'm curious though, how would you "send" heat ?

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Skills training for dating anxiety
Marlon9y00

I would like to read that review but can't access it (either through my Uni or sci-hub). Can you provide the pdf of this review please ?

Thanks for this small litterature review.

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In defense of philosophy
Marlon10y00

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, what you should do if someone talks metaphysics is point out that they haven't given signification to some of their words. Although he says that philosophy should only care about reality (and if it's reality, it's physics, biology, etc and not philosophy), he also says that philosophy is here to clarify our thoughts, and I can't help but agree.

The "kind of crazy" of the postmodern though aren't the minority, they kinda all lack rigor and fail to give signification to their words (but use them nonetheless) - and moreover have what we'll call the "disease of the metaphor", doing many unnecessary or even obscuring metaphors.

I also agree that there is value in studying philosophy - but having the rationality to question it should come first. (Kinda obvious that I do side with the so called anti-philosophy huh)

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Nature publishes an article about alternative therapy
Marlon10y00

Only few people are interested in studying placebos. However, there are a few papers (Gotzsche is one of the few).

  • A review
  • An update to the review, for reproducibility

Pain (or nausea) isn't an objective outcome anyway.

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Nature publishes an article about alternative therapy
Marlon10y30

Placebo doesn't affect objective outcomes anyway.

See Orac for a bitter "discussion" about this article. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/10/15/in-the-pages-of-nature-a-full-throated-defense-of-integrating-quackery-into-medicine/

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Two Zendo-inspired games
Marlon10y20

Greatly interested, and once I am free of my current activities (in a few weeks) I'll be able to delve in it.

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Whole genome sequencing vs SNP genotyping
Marlon10y00

The main idea of WGS is having >all< the SNPs whereas you only get the most common SNPs with the SNP tests.

I'm not really sure how you would use the data from WGS (let's say the genome is assembled too - or maybe that would cost more ?). You would probably use BLAT on your local machine to search for genes with known SNPs. I don't think you could do anything more (finding novel SNPs is out of reach here).

I would guess the main idea would be to be able to check for new SNPs as more and more are found in the literature. However, the literature is not that easy to skim through except for the most common SNPs that are already included in the SNP tests.

Going back on the literature: for most multi-factorial diseases, you will see data coming from GWAS and linkage disequilibrium studies that will be really hard to interpret. A SNP popping up like that does not necessarily mean that you've got the trait associated with it.

My comment was probably not really well oriented, but I should still conclude. In my opinion, do a WGS only if you've got enough knowledge of bioinformatics (and I mean an engineer's level). SNP tests are cheap and will provide you with almost everything you could get from a WGS.

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Systemic review of antidepressants vs placebo commentary
Marlon10y00

Even Kirsch's paper from 2008 results in that, and it's probably one of the most (or the most) harsh paper on antidepressants.

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Systemic review of antidepressants vs placebo commentary
Marlon10y00

Science is not that simple, I'm not sure you can draw such conclusions.

There was/is indeed a problem in the reporting of the evidence, that diminished the effect of antidepressant in the literature. Reporting bias is an important and serious matter in science.

That does not mean however that the antidepressant effects got down to a placebo effect. It seems that Kirsch does a lot of hand-waving to put aside the treatment effect. He did the same thing in 2008.

AFAIK the literature still says antidepressants have an effect better than placebo.

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In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error
Marlon10y00

How would you test that the FAE leads to in average better judgments ? And better than what ? Eliminating the FAE does not mean only considering external factors either, or you'd have another bias.

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7LW should go into mainstream academia ?
10y
57