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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.








  • America tried to modernise many British means of methods and standards. They used a metric currency long before Britain. That’s why they have a cent (1/100) rather than pennies and bobs and truppence.

    They got ride of many terms for multiples of measurements that made the imperial system more similar to metric. Americans use ounces, but they don’t use pounds.

    America also defines their us customary units using metric. There’s no longer an inch. There is a meter and from that an inch is defined as 24 millimeters. This is largely due to British, Canadian and American components for fighting wars not fitting together despite all using the same inch.

    Had America modernised a little later they probably would have converted to metric earlier than Britain.






  • 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.