Placebos generally aren't given for serious diseases. New treatments are compared with accepted treatment, but not with a placebo. Deliberately withholding treatment from a potentially fatal disease like cancer would be considered serious misconduct, and possibly murder, if there is any treatment available that gives a better survival rate than placebo.
Placebos generally aren't given for serious diseases. New treatments are compared with accepted treatment, but not with a placebo. Deliberately withholding treatment from a potentially fatal disease like cancer would be considered serious misconduct, and possibly murder, if there is any treatment available that gives a better survival rate than placebo.
jsk - I understand your concern. I have no intent to scam JREF; I simply want to limit their decision capacity to the minimum necessary to ensure an acceptable protocol. This means being specific about the reasons they can reject a suggestion of mine.
I'm afraid I don't understand your second example either. How does that introduce a false positive? All it would say is "above average" or "below average"; statistically that should be 50-50. No recipients are transferred from round to round...
Thank you for your clarification re 1 vs 2 tailed analysis. I'll have to take that into consideration and answer later.
gr8wight - To the contrary, I believe that the challenge *is* a vehicle for scientific inquiry. JREF in this case is taking its usual stance as a skeptic; I am taking the place of a challenger who does not know if what he is claiming is real or not. This is hardly unusual. There is nothing in the challenge rules that says that I have to have a fervent belief in what I claim; I can do so purely for experimental reasons. I "claim" that the null hypothesis is false, for the purposes of this discussion. That is not different in principle from any other claim.
Not to mention, it is explicit in the challenge rules that JREF is not interested in my beliefs, theories, or anything of the sort - only in whether it works or not. I likewise am not interested in discussing my beliefs or theories.
yoink - Could you please explain what about my setup (namely, remote prayer) that intrinsically makes it impossible to have rigorous double blinding without the need to lie to anyone?
I'm afraid I don't understand your second example either. How does that introduce a false positive? All it would say is "above average" or "below average"; statistically that should be 50-50. No recipients are transferred from round to round...
Thank you for your clarification re 1 vs 2 tailed analysis. I'll have to take that into consideration and answer later.
gr8wight - To the contrary, I believe that the challenge *is* a vehicle for scientific inquiry. JREF in this case is taking its usual stance as a skeptic; I am taking the place of a challenger who does not know if what he is claiming is real or not. This is hardly unusual. There is nothing in the challenge rules that says that I have to have a fervent belief in what I claim; I can do so purely for experimental reasons. I "claim" that the null hypothesis is false, for the purposes of this discussion. That is not different in principle from any other claim.
Not to mention, it is explicit in the challenge rules that JREF is not interested in my beliefs, theories, or anything of the sort - only in whether it works or not. I likewise am not interested in discussing my beliefs or theories.
yoink - Could you please explain what about my setup (namely, remote prayer) that intrinsically makes it impossible to have rigorous double blinding without the need to lie to anyone?
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Sorry saizai, that came out all wrong on my part.
So far, your appearance seems indeed "forthright, rational, comprehensible and sane". What I had in mind were the "here today and gone tomorrow" approaches of the Mental Professor, supernaturalbeing and Neutralize in particular.
If I choose to enter a discussion with a potential Applicant, it mostly means I will take an all-out/full-on/whole-nine-yards approach and also become involved on an emotional level.
I spend a good part of my day with reflections on how to improve the protocol or solve the problems at hand. By choice, of course.
Should you apply, saizai, your claim together with your approach so far seem worth devoting time and energy to. The discussion in this thread shows others think alike.
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GK - I see. All I can do is point to my existing commitment (namely, the website which I am programming and is up, and the associated costs) and say that I have no intention of vanishing without completing at least one round. If that one round shows absolutely no discernable effect, then I'll either need to repeat with a larger sample, change what info I'm tracking (hopefully I'll have been comprehensive), or admit defeat. In any case, the protocol would need to be figured out first, so your input would not be wasted.
To be perfectly honest, I am in no particular hurry to submit the official application, since JREF's involvement doesn't occur until after the first round, and it is likely to take some time to recruit enough participants to begin. That is the only reason.
To be perfectly honest, I am in no particular hurry to submit the official application, since JREF's involvement doesn't occur until after the first round, and it is likely to take some time to recruit enough participants to begin. That is the only reason.
Nobody is given a placebo unless they agree to enroll in a study. They are informed in advance that they will be given treatment that will be either the experimental medicine or the placebo and that neither they nor the doctor treating them will know which they are receiving.
No ethics board would ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, agree to giving patients a placebo while telling them that it is actually an effective medicine.
saizai, you misread my post. As far as I can see, with a large enough sample your protocol works fine (I think it is set up in such a way that it needs a very large sample, and you may find it difficult recruiting enough participants). My point was a propos the fact that when you get a negative result, believers in prayer will simply dismiss this on the basis that the link between prayers and prayees was too tenuous. I was suggesting that the only way to set up a test that might actually shake the faith of believers would be to engage in active deceit--deceit of the kind that no ethics board would approve.
This, of course, is a common problem in any scientific question devoted to human behaviour: there are all sorts of social questions that could be answered by raising humans in isolated cages or Truman Show like virtual worlds and performing "clean" experiments on them--but, of course, these are not acceptable in the real world. I wasn't knocking your design, just making a general observation about the limitations of studies of this kind on human subjects.
Yoink - You're wrong. Patients are told that they may be given a placebo, and that the treatment is experimental. Your argument that they should not be given a medicine that hasn't been proven effective is circular. The only exception is that medicines that act biologically must be proven in more "disposable" oragnisms (eg rats) to not be harmful - not necessarily to have a positive effect (since humans are more complex).
Yoink - I see. Yes, believers could do so; I try to mitigate that as much as I can think of (by providing photo, first name, gender, age, state, country, primary cancer location, and cancer type) but of course it is inevitable. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people who claim that remote, intercessionary prayer of this sort works. It's acceptable to require a retreat to claiming that only in-person prayer, or prayer for a person one has contact with, works. I have no particular interest in "shaking the faith of believers"; I am not and will not be a proselytizer of any faith or lack thereof.
Nevertheless I still don't think I understand what sort of "faith-shaking" deceit-inclusive study you are thinking of. Could you detail a couple specific examples?
I don't think your analogy is really accurate - the comparisons are rather extreme.
Nevertheless I still don't think I understand what sort of "faith-shaking" deceit-inclusive study you are thinking of. Could you detail a couple specific examples?
I don't think your analogy is really accurate - the comparisons are rather extreme.
digithead
Thinker
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- Feb 4, 2005
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You need to go back to Stats 101. When you're using t-tests, you're testing the null hypothesis, that is there is no difference in the the means of two groups. The alternative hypothesis only comes into play if you reject the null. Your alpha level, 0.05, sets the acceptable Type I error level and rejection region at which you will accept for a particular test. If the observed t-score is in the rejection region, you conclude there is a statistically significant difference, otherwise you conclude that you "failed" to reject the null hypothesis. You are not "statistically saying" that there is a difference when you specify the null hypothesis, you are merely constructing a logical framework in which to test whether or not you have enough evidence to conclude that there is an effect and place the error bounds on that evidence...
And the t-distribution is not a Gaussian distribution, it's limiting distribution is Gaussian when your sample size is large, but it is definitely not Gaussian...
You either misread my post or are answering someone else's post. I never made anything like the claim you are attributing to me here.
ETA: here was what I said, just to remind you:
saizai, that's twice now that you've completely misread posts of mine that were, as far as I can see, pretty straightforwardly phrased. I'd appreciate it if you would take just a second or two longer in reading my comments before firing off utterly irrelevant "rebuttals."
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Yoink:
Please explain how that is analagous to any prayer study setup, in which the subjects are in no way being encouraged to discontinue standard treatment.
Or explain how it is not analagous to a standard clinical trial of a medicine that has not yet been proven effective.
Please explain how that is analagous to any prayer study setup, in which the subjects are in no way being encouraged to discontinue standard treatment.
Or explain how it is not analagous to a standard clinical trial of a medicine that has not yet been proven effective.
O.K. saizai--let's make that three times that you have failed simple reading comprehension. I was quite impressed with your experiment when I first joined this thread, but now I have grave doubts about the experimenter.
I was answering ladewig, post #80. Go look at it. You will see that he quotes the post of mine that s/he was responding to. You might then, just possibly, realize that I was talking about a different hypothetical experiment that was NOT THE ONE YOU ARE PROPOSING.
Once you have got that through your extraordinarily dense skull you might see that my comment about what an ethics board would not approve does not refer to the experiment that you propose, which I believe would pass muster with an ethics board.
And then, finally, you might go back to my last post, or the post before that, and realize that I was accurately describing what an ethics board would approve: i.e. enrolling patients openly in a study and telling them that they will receive either a placebo or the experimental medicine. You might also realize that I never once intimated that your experiment would fail to meet this test.
I will not hold my breath, however, as I wait to see if you manage to figure any of this out. Sheesh.
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Yoink - There is no need to shout, be rude, or insult me. Please refrain from doing so, as I at least am attempting to engage in a more civil discourse.
ladewig was responding to your post on the first page:
Indeed, you are discussing not only the experiment I am proposing, but *all* experiments about prayer. (Mine being a test of prayer that is intended to be rigorously double-blind...) Your statement is that "prayer is one of those things that is probably impossible to test in a rigorous double-blind experiment " without the use of deception that harms the subjects. I am asking you to defend that statement, because I believe it to be false.
I am sorry that you feel the need to resort to ad hominem attacks instead of responding to my request.
I also suggest that you be somewhat more circumspect about judging my intelligence or character, as you may be unpleasantly surprised when you are wrong.
ladewig was responding to your post on the first page:
Indeed, you are discussing not only the experiment I am proposing, but *all* experiments about prayer. (Mine being a test of prayer that is intended to be rigorously double-blind...) Your statement is that "prayer is one of those things that is probably impossible to test in a rigorous double-blind experiment " without the use of deception that harms the subjects. I am asking you to defend that statement, because I believe it to be false.
I am sorry that you feel the need to resort to ad hominem attacks instead of responding to my request.
I also suggest that you be somewhat more circumspect about judging my intelligence or character, as you may be unpleasantly surprised when you are wrong.
saizai, you have demonstrated both an inability to understand my fairly straightforward posts, and now an inability to apologize for consistently misrepresenting them (I notice you've just ignored the post I originally objected to: the one where you referred to "[my] argument that [patients] should not be given a medicine that hasn't been proven effective" and pointed out that this claim that I had never made "is circular.")
As for the post you do reference: surely even you can see that I am saying "your test is fine, but it will return a negative, and that negative will be immediately dismissed--on perfectly reasonable grounds--by those who claim that prayer is in fact effective." I then go on to say that to do a test that might persuade believers you would need to do an unethical study that involves active duplicity. Since you seem hell bent on not understanding my point, I will try to spell it out for you further:
The problem with your experiment is that in order to maintain double-blindedness, it has to actually interfere with the normal mechanisms of "prayer treatment." That is, prayer that is claimed to be effective is prayer that involves people praying for people they know, and the people who are being prayed for being fully aware that they are being prayed for by those people.
To do a rigorous test of this "normal" prayer would require deceiving people: you would have to have some people believing that they were being prayed for by their families, where in fact you've, say, deliberately kept the family misinformed about that person's illness (you say that they're on an extended work assignment overseas, say).
So, I was not making a point that in any way criticized your experimental design, except to say that it was, of necessity, designed in such a way that what was being tested was not really "prayer healing" as any normal practitioner of "prayer healing" would normally conceive it.
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digithead
Thinker
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- Feb 4, 2005
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- 147
Saizai,
It is you that is being rude and discourteous.
I, Yoink, and others have given you valid, empirically, and scientifically based criticisms of your study design and you shrug them off as inconsequentional.
How many clinical trials have you performed? If the answer is 0 then you should be consulting with biostatistician to help you set up your experiment so that you avoid all of the pitfalls. If the answer is greater than 0 then you would know that you should be consulting with biostatistician to help you set up your experiment so that you avoid all of the pitfalls.
Please seek assistance if you really want your study to have any scientific validity. Otherwise, you're just posturing and preening for your own amusement and it's pointless for anyone to continue to answer your questions or engage you any discourse.
-digithead
It is you that is being rude and discourteous.
I, Yoink, and others have given you valid, empirically, and scientifically based criticisms of your study design and you shrug them off as inconsequentional.
How many clinical trials have you performed? If the answer is 0 then you should be consulting with biostatistician to help you set up your experiment so that you avoid all of the pitfalls. If the answer is greater than 0 then you would know that you should be consulting with biostatistician to help you set up your experiment so that you avoid all of the pitfalls.
Please seek assistance if you really want your study to have any scientific validity. Otherwise, you're just posturing and preening for your own amusement and it's pointless for anyone to continue to answer your questions or engage you any discourse.
-digithead
Yoink: I agree with your rephrasing. I believe that your previous post, as quoted, did not say that, but we can chalk it up as immaterial and based on a mutual misunderstanding.
I think the sort of more limited version prayer you suggest would be more difficult to test mainly not because you'd have to lie, but because you'd have to drastically constrain the contact between the parties involved for long enough to notice erstwhile results (months most likely).
Also disagree that your limited view of how people conceptualize prayer - i.e. that it only works for people one knows and is in contact with - is accurate of most theological conceptions of the mechanism of prayer, which would more likely claim that those constraints are unnecessary.
digithead: Please explain how my prior clinical experience or lack thereof negates the rudeness of Yoink's comments, e.g. "your extraordinarily dense skull".
I think the sort of more limited version prayer you suggest would be more difficult to test mainly not because you'd have to lie, but because you'd have to drastically constrain the contact between the parties involved for long enough to notice erstwhile results (months most likely).
Also disagree that your limited view of how people conceptualize prayer - i.e. that it only works for people one knows and is in contact with - is accurate of most theological conceptions of the mechanism of prayer, which would more likely claim that those constraints are unnecessary.
digithead: Please explain how my prior clinical experience or lack thereof negates the rudeness of Yoink's comments, e.g. "your extraordinarily dense skull".
jskowron
Really Bad at Karaoke
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- Jun 30, 2005
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digithead said:
Whoa- take it easy- I assumed I was explaining to someone who has not taken stats 101, so I took some liberties with my explananation. That said, there is no excuse for me saying that the t distribution is normal. It would have sufficed for me to say it was bell shaped, with higher peak and more of its distribution in the tails than a standardized normal distribution. Certainly, with a low sample size (eg <40), the sampling distribution is unlikely to be normally distributed.
My error is, I think, minor far as the OP is concerned, but major as far as an accurate representation of sampling distributions and an understanding of the central limit theorem is concerne. Thanks for pointing it out.
As far as my use of the phrase "statistically saying......", I simply found it more clear than saying "you are hypothesizing that, if the null hypothesis were true, you would only expect the results you obtained only 5 times out of 100." It is, in fact, a peave of mine when people equate the p-value with the percentage chance that the alternate hypothesis is true. I was trying to explain my point, as requested by Saizai, in as simple a manner as possible. I don't think my short-cut explanation negates the fact that if he has a theoretical reason to use a 1-tailed test, he should do so.
digithead
Thinker
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- Feb 4, 2005
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He is venting his frustration at your willful ignorance to the problems that have been pointed out to you, but that's irrelevant...
And can you explain how your lack of prior clinical experience might lead you to design a poor study?
And how you blithely dismiss the concerns that have raised as inconsequentional when you've be given ample evidence that they're not?
You can't be helped if you're not willing to listen and take heed of some sound scientific advice...