hirsch;190671 Wrote: > If you've never heard of a genetic marker, it's fairly safe to say that > you're not currently in the biological sciences. > > I hope that you know that a biomarker says nothing about causality. It > simply allows prediction. Correlation as opposed to causality. If the > genetic marker is present in the study I mentioned, a placebo effect > will not occur in that person. In admittedly limited circumstances, > the placebo effect in pharmacology *does not exist* for some people. > Ponder the implications of that for a bit. > > It is rather naive to hold onto conclusions from old cognitive psych > studies in the face of new evidence. Do go back and look at the > variances in those studies. Just because placebo effects occur does > not mean that they occur in everyone.
So? Suppose this marker really turns out to work. Without knowing whether or not you have the marker, you don't know whether you're susceptible to the placebo. Thus, you still need to control for this, unless you test for the marker. So your argument proves nothing, really. Also, you would need to show that this marker is highly correlated with expectation effects in general, or perhaps with the ones we're directly talking about here. Or perhaps that another one exists. I'd suspect that you can do no such thing, so your argument, such as it is, gets even worse. To paraphrase your argument, so far as I can make any sense of it at all, "there might or might not be a genetic marker which we can test to show whether or not you are subject to expectation effects. Since this might or might not exist, you don't need to worry about them when testing audio tweaks which appear to fly in the face of basic science and engineering, since you might have it, and thus not have expectation effects. Therefore, you can assume that tweaks work, so sprinkle chicken blood with abandon". Sadly, no. -- totoro squeezebox 3 -> mccormack dna .5 -> audio physic tempo 4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ totoro's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5935 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33547 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
