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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • This is a common misconception of the placebo effect. The placebo effect is a measurement issue, not an actual benefit.

    Tests are corrupted by using the reposnes and judgement of humans. People will say they had some sort of benefit because of expectations, poor recollection and politeness. It doesn’t mean a benefit was gained. A placebo group allows researchers to quantify how much the placebo effect has on the data they gathered, they can then see if the experiment they did had any effect. Placebo is literally our definition of zero effect.

    Anyone telling you placebo is a good thing is wrong, misinformed or deliberately misleading you. In many countries it is illegal for doctors to prescribe ‘placebo treatments’. They will still recommend such things to their patients - not because they work but because they get the patient out the door and less likely to come bother them again.










  • They aren’t enemies of the state. Groups are classed as terrorists when they are using violence and terror to attack a nation state government, or its interests. The KKK don’t challenge the state in this way, they terrorise people and they support violence. But they don’t define themselves or act as enemies to the state.

    I think they should be classed as hate groups and possibly terrorists. They do use terror to try to enact social change. The social change they want is more of a regression than a revolution, so it can be easy for conservatives to sympathise with them. Conservatives make up half the political power in most countries so it’s hard to classify these types of groups as terrorists. These groups advocate for conservation of social norms, just the norms they want to preserve are oppression and lack of civil rights.



  • They could attempt to quantify how gamed the result is and reduce its ranking. Also punishing domains with lower ranking the more they return SEO optimised pages. They could also increase the ranking of older pages.

    This doesn’t really help google, it only really improves their search results. Google wants these hyper SEO optimised results with lots of advertising. Additionally, the less relevant the result is the more searches a person does. Each search is an additional set of ad impressions.

    Google search is better than ever. Because it generates more advertising opportunities for google. Google isn’t in the business of returning good search results, they are in the business of displaying ads.