I keep regressing.
It's been made abundantly clear to me that I am not Irish and that St. Patrick hates me.
This morning I woke up with seriously bloodshot eyes. It was so weird. That's not typically something that happens to me. I mean, I looked like I'd spent the whole night toking up, for real. It's gone now but daaaaaaamn.
Then I spent my whole morning on a work issue that was very annoying and very time consuming. Can I be done now, plzkthx?
Requests are still being taken on the photo meme. I posted the first batch of responses here.
Are you guys ready for another Fascinating Factoid from some book I'm reading? I've got a couple of them.
Remember my whole thing about regression to the mean? Turns out that this also explains why people are so easily convinced of the effectiveness of quack remedies, like Laetrile or what have you. There are other reasons, of course, such as just wanting it to work very badly and being persuaded by anecdotal evidence, but regression to the mean is a big part of it.
There are very few diseases that proceed in a linear fashion towards deterioration. Almost all chronic conditions have ebbs and flows, periods during which people feel better, for no reason other than the body's ability to heal itself and the uneven course of the disease. So when is a person most likely to seek out a fringe remedy? When they've had a flare-up, or are feeling particularly unwell. In other words, when they're at a statistical valley, an outlying point along the mean. This means that they're taking the snake oil at the period where it's most likely that they'd feel better soon ANYWAY. This slants the results in favor of the "remedy" being seen to having had some therapeutic effect. Even if the patient just stops getting worse, the remedy often gets the credit for "halting the progression" when that would have happened anyway.
But here's the one that got me today.
We've all grown up hearing that lifespan has increased sooooo much in the last hundred years, right? Better nutrition, preventative care, yadda yadda. We live longer now.
Turns out that's not even true.
What's happened is that average lifespan has increased, but not because people are living longer. It's increased because we've drastically reduced the number of people who die as children. We've increased our chances of living through childhood through medical science like vaccines, post-natal care and general sanitation, and the treatment of diseases which disproportionately strike children or are much more dangerous to them. The average lifespan in the nineteenth century of a 45 year old man was 70 years. Pretty much the same as now. So back then, if you lived past childhood, you weren't much more likely to die young as you are now. It's just that now you have a much higher chance of seeing your 21st birthday.
The author's also talking about various techniques that help convince people that things like faith healing works. Faith healers typically only proclaim to cure something when you can't tell if it's cured or not except by the testimony of the person being cured. Only diseases without visible signs, plzkthx. No faith healer's ever going to claim to be able to cure psoriasis, in other words. But arthritis? Migraines? Hearing loss? Bring 'em on.
The author mentions being at Lourdes with a French friend. At Lourdes there's a large collection of discarded eyeglasses, hearing aids, and canes. The French guy said "What, no prosthetic limbs?"
Heh.
This morning I woke up with seriously bloodshot eyes. It was so weird. That's not typically something that happens to me. I mean, I looked like I'd spent the whole night toking up, for real. It's gone now but daaaaaaamn.
Then I spent my whole morning on a work issue that was very annoying and very time consuming. Can I be done now, plzkthx?
Requests are still being taken on the photo meme. I posted the first batch of responses here.
Are you guys ready for another Fascinating Factoid from some book I'm reading? I've got a couple of them.
Remember my whole thing about regression to the mean? Turns out that this also explains why people are so easily convinced of the effectiveness of quack remedies, like Laetrile or what have you. There are other reasons, of course, such as just wanting it to work very badly and being persuaded by anecdotal evidence, but regression to the mean is a big part of it.
There are very few diseases that proceed in a linear fashion towards deterioration. Almost all chronic conditions have ebbs and flows, periods during which people feel better, for no reason other than the body's ability to heal itself and the uneven course of the disease. So when is a person most likely to seek out a fringe remedy? When they've had a flare-up, or are feeling particularly unwell. In other words, when they're at a statistical valley, an outlying point along the mean. This means that they're taking the snake oil at the period where it's most likely that they'd feel better soon ANYWAY. This slants the results in favor of the "remedy" being seen to having had some therapeutic effect. Even if the patient just stops getting worse, the remedy often gets the credit for "halting the progression" when that would have happened anyway.
But here's the one that got me today.
We've all grown up hearing that lifespan has increased sooooo much in the last hundred years, right? Better nutrition, preventative care, yadda yadda. We live longer now.
Turns out that's not even true.
What's happened is that average lifespan has increased, but not because people are living longer. It's increased because we've drastically reduced the number of people who die as children. We've increased our chances of living through childhood through medical science like vaccines, post-natal care and general sanitation, and the treatment of diseases which disproportionately strike children or are much more dangerous to them. The average lifespan in the nineteenth century of a 45 year old man was 70 years. Pretty much the same as now. So back then, if you lived past childhood, you weren't much more likely to die young as you are now. It's just that now you have a much higher chance of seeing your 21st birthday.
The author's also talking about various techniques that help convince people that things like faith healing works. Faith healers typically only proclaim to cure something when you can't tell if it's cured or not except by the testimony of the person being cured. Only diseases without visible signs, plzkthx. No faith healer's ever going to claim to be able to cure psoriasis, in other words. But arthritis? Migraines? Hearing loss? Bring 'em on.
The author mentions being at Lourdes with a French friend. At Lourdes there's a large collection of discarded eyeglasses, hearing aids, and canes. The French guy said "What, no prosthetic limbs?"
Heh.