This comment is a perfect study of this almost uniquely American insane phenomenon.
But then I don’t question Koreans about fan death.
Here's a good example: https://www.salon.com/2013/11/03/lies_i_told_to_become_a_spy...
The polygraph obviously has no basis for working, but while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management.
I still wouldn't use it in the context of the justice system, though.
Where do you draw the line?
Also, even beyond medical issues, different people perceive pain very differently. Hot peppers are perhaps the clearest example of this, where people accustomed to them feel the same heat, but not the same pain as someone unaccustomed.
To stay in your metaphor:
- Not only do sugar pills not cure tumors, but imagine - 60% of recipients don't report decreased pain levels (no placebo effect) - 20% of recipients feel more pain
The placebo effect is measurable. If there is no measurable improvement, there's no placebo effect either.
Bear in mind that what most claims in favour of the polygraph measure is not truth but potentially-false confession. Extracting false confessions is relatively easy, it's also completely f-ing useless to wider society and massively harmful to the victim.
They don't care if you actually did the crime, they care that they can extract a confession, or provide damning evidence to a prosecutor that lets them throw you in prison, so they can put a nice big checkmark on that case. Did they actually jail who was responsible? Maybe not, but who cares about that, apart from you?
Same reason for Forensics to exist. Don't misunderstand, some Forensic science has validity in many cases, but a lot of it is just straight up nonsense that isn't proven or peer-reviewed in the slightest, in fact many Forensic sciences that appear in modern court cases are completely, 100% debunked.
And like, why should they care? Even if you hire a crack lawyer team that gets you out of the court case, it's not like anyone involved in the investigation that almost threw an innocent man in jail is going to suffer an ounce of consequences. Or hell, even if you're wrongly convicted, worst case scenario you get a financial judgement after years of litigation, that's paid for by the taxpayers.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/
https://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-wea...
> The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they’re wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they’re super-important for the past fifty years.
That's not the topic at hand here, which is "is the PE real?". For me it absolutely is.
> while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management.
And now you go to this version:
> There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain
So is it real or not? We're just saying the same thing, what's the point of saying it doesn't exist and then revert back to exactly what was said originally?
Correlation is not causation, as they say.
(Hope your depression is gone or at least not too bad now days, regardless of what drugs or placebos may have played a part!)
> Conclusion: In randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials, presumably with minimum sources of bias, placebos are sometimes associated with improved control of symptoms such as pain and appetite but rarely with positive tumor response. Substantial improvements in symptoms and quality of life are unlikely to be due to placebo effects.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/is-a-polygraph-test-admiss...
I mean maybe there are other civil suits you could file, but I suspect a lot of that would be signed away before the polygraph.
For sure, you have:
- your opinion
- your knowledge (which is a subset of all that is known/"known", which is a subset of all that exists...though, it all typically seems other than this, such is culturally conditioned consciousness), have you something over and above this?
Just in case, please do not do this:
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Shiftin...
Saying "there is no evidence" is sloppy cable political TV tier rhetoric. There is absolutely evidence[1]. You and others may not find that evidence convincing, or otherwise think polygraphs shouldn't be used, but nevertheless it exists. A brief survey of the evidence suggests that the polygraph is probably slightly better than chance, but with high enough error bars that we should be very cautious about its use.