Reminds me of a brain hack I employ. Intentionally worshipping Placebo as a god makes me laugh, thus activating his miraculous healing powers: http://zencephalon.com/placebo
On the other hand there's http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200105243442106, a meta-analysis which shows that while placebos might make people feel better, you don't actually get better – which is about what you'd expect and probably not shocking to most of you... but you'd be surprised at the mystical powers that are sometimes ascribed to placebos.
I didn't bother to look up the primary literature, but check Scientific American, March 2015, article by Kevin Tracey, pp. 30-35. As always, don't blame the named author for all the fluff added for the general reader.
I agree. I will just to copy one sentence of the first comment of tokenadult:
> [...] In actual practice, placebos only look effective when the statistical tests in a study are poor, and most especially when the symptoms are self-reported by patients. Placebos are NOT effective in treating actual disease states or improving "hard endpoints" such as reduction of all-cause mortality or major morbidity from specific diseases with verifiable physiological signs. [links with support information]
But also not 100% the case. Where I live (Calgary, AB) most cross walk signals are only activated by pressing the button. If you don't press the button, you just get the orange hand the whole time.
Brilliant idea and I feel like I've already got what I pressed - "focus".
The first thing, of course, is to write a comment on HN and then I'll focus :)).
But the concept might just work.
People believe in crazy, irrational things and it actually seems to help them, so why not a button which does this ?
Here's a story. Last month I've travelled to Romania, which is a beautiful country and one of the main attractions there is the multitude of churches and beautiful monasteries on top of mountains. So I arrived at this monastery where a famous priest was buried and people from all over the country and the world come and visit his grave.
They wait for hours in line and eventually they get maybe 30 seconds in front of his grave and they kneel and kiss the cross and make all kinds of wishes.
From a rational perspective, what those people are doing is totally absurd - even if the dead priest could manipulate this world from 'the other world', why would people think that in order to be helped they have to kiss his grave ?
But I've heard countless stories of miracle cures - cancers, paralysis, etc, after people visited his grave so maybe there is a force at work which helps them, which I think is the force of placebo.
Stories like this are abundant all over the world so if you're in the Church of the Digital, a digital button might just be a trigger for some force inside our minds.
and Nocebo (the opposite) works, too. so i think it's possible that both works, it's just because it happens with our unconscious mind so it's hard to justify or falsify.
I was under the impression that each reset was in some way due to network issues, either reddit being down briefly or a valid press not resetting the timer. Either way, it's gone long enough. I am both surprised and not surprised there is a necro sub to keep it going.
I think that's what the admins claimed, but there was some disbelief, and external monitoring websites were showing the button as being at 0 for a few seconds each time. If it were an actual problem, I think it would remain at 0 until it got noticed, not just for a few seconds.
Noticed that the post never says anything like "it finally reached zero", it just mentions who the last presser was.
For what it was worth I saw one of the times it went down. The monitor started beeping so I went to the tab and watched it count down to zero. Hitting refresh presented me with the "reddit is down" logo and nothing on reddit worked so I believe them when they say everything simply went down. Just think about it, it was an april 1st gag, it wasn't suppose to have this type of uptime.
That's not entirely correct. What actually happened was that the button itself had a buffer which accounted for the possibility of people pressing the button, but the press registering 'late'. The buffer was 2 seconds I believe, and because of that even when the button hit zero, you could still press it for two seconds until it actually ends. So, it did hit zero more then once, but the click-buffer never expired until the time it actually ended - All the times before that, an account clicked the button before the click-buffer expired.
Looks like it just puts HTML onto the page, you can do JavaScript as well at a glance (so long as you add <script></script> and an event to trigger, since pageload already happened)
> That means, if I give you a placebo, and tell you it's a placebo, there's a 1 in 3 chance it will help alleviate symptoms of whatever I say it's for.
I've seen this avert bad trips.
"This is a coin. It's just a regular coin from my pocket, but I want you to carry, and know that as long as you carry this coin - for the rest of the night - you'll be safe."
I've heard of this idea before and it sounds great. But I can think of a hack for it that could make the trip even worse.
"This is a coin. It's just a regular coin from my pocket, but I want you to carry, and know that as long as you carry this coin - for the rest of the night - you'll be safe."
(lean in close to whisper into the recipient's ear)
"But if you lose the coin...if you lose the coin, you're doomed, mate. Completely f*cking doomed."
in pro audio equipment, there is often a flashy colored button on the panel, unmarked, that the documentation call the "client button". it does absolutely nothing, and the manufacturer suggest you press it when the client is annoying you for "more weight" or "more color" or some other nonsense.
This fake button digital nonsense does nothing for me; I need that fake knob analog placebo effect!
It sounds crazy but most sound engineers have accidentally done this to themselves. You tweak a knob, hear the difference, and then noticing the whole channel was muted and wonder what it was that you just heard change.
Not to dismiss what you're saying, but in this case the 'client button' is for tricking the annoying client into thinking you're making a change when you've really done nothing.
This is kind of the same idea as throwing in a duck[1] or hairy arms[2]:
I was once debugging some issue with my laptop's multimedia buttons driver. I found some tweak which helped: enable the tweak, reboot - works fine, disable tweak, reboot - no go. Tested repeatedly several times.
I filed a bug report and received an answer that my tweak absolutely cannot work. The tweak was disabled at the time and the button didn't work. I pressed it again after reading this email and boom - it works.
I swear.
I figure my mind must have been believing so much in futility of pressing this button that it didn't even bother pushing it all the way down. Scary stuff.
This is brilliant, reminds me of the story I heard of how Michelangelo was working on a statue, might have been the David, and the patron walked in and said something along the lines of, "Looks good, but the nose is a little big, can you make it a little smaller?".
Michelangelo knew the nose was just right, so he grabbed a handful of marble dust, went up to the face and pretended to chisel it while slowly letting out his handful of dust.
When he was done, the patron said, "There! It's perfect."
Really wish I had had a button like that back when I was doing audio production.
Interesting article. In my experience, the converse is often true: Engineers want to solve the difficult issues, while the more trivial get relatively little attention and end up causing most of the issues.
I heard a minor variation of that, in which the button just kicked the playback volume up, exploiting the effect that louder music often feels "better".
Do you have any examples of this? My dad owns a recording studio and I've joked with him about turning up the "silver knob" which doesn't exist. Kind of an inside joke, but never seen anything like you're talking about. Certainly haven't seen it "often".
A different approach I've seen is often referred to as "hairy arms".
It's not the same as a placebo or client button but it addresses the issue of people who would otherwise diminish a project through nitpicking and wanting to put their own touch on everything.
The idea came from animation (Disney, I believe) where the art directors were always asking the artists to make changes just to feel like they had some input and control. The animators started adding hair on the arms of the characters as an obvious thing the directors could latch onto and demand the artists modify. The artists didn't want the hairy arms to begin with but it was a way to keep the directors from screwing up something "important" just so they could feel special.
The placebo effect is not a superstitious belief, however, if that's what you're trying to imply. This isn't a tarot card or horoscope button or something. Placebos are legitimate science.
That flashing background effect is a little off-putting. At first I thought something was wrong with the fluorescent lights in my office, then I realized I don't have any fluorescent lights in my office...
201 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadThese days I'm mostly busy with a graphic novel: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/
But then I tried "cure RSI" and hundreds of clicks later it only seemed to have gotten worse...
http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
https://www.google.be/search?q=1000000000+vietnamese+dong+in...
[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150601122445.ht...
> [...] In actual practice, placebos only look effective when the statistical tests in a study are poor, and most especially when the symptoms are self-reported by patients. Placebos are NOT effective in treating actual disease states or improving "hard endpoints" such as reduction of all-cause mortality or major morbidity from specific diseases with verifiable physiological signs. [links with support information]
But the concept might just work.
People believe in crazy, irrational things and it actually seems to help them, so why not a button which does this ?
Here's a story. Last month I've travelled to Romania, which is a beautiful country and one of the main attractions there is the multitude of churches and beautiful monasteries on top of mountains. So I arrived at this monastery where a famous priest was buried and people from all over the country and the world come and visit his grave. They wait for hours in line and eventually they get maybe 30 seconds in front of his grave and they kneel and kiss the cross and make all kinds of wishes. From a rational perspective, what those people are doing is totally absurd - even if the dead priest could manipulate this world from 'the other world', why would people think that in order to be helped they have to kiss his grave ?
But I've heard countless stories of miracle cures - cancers, paralysis, etc, after people visited his grave so maybe there is a force at work which helps them, which I think is the force of placebo.
Stories like this are abundant all over the world so if you're in the Church of the Digital, a digital button might just be a trigger for some force inside our minds.
Yup. Proof of that right here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/
Oh, wait, the experiment ended? The button finally hit 0!
http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/the-button-has-ended.html
The game is over? Everyone will go back to their lives? Not quite.....
https://www.reddit.com/r/buttonaftermath
Noticed that the post never says anything like "it finally reached zero", it just mentions who the last presser was.
click
click
...
I've seen this avert bad trips.
"This is a coin. It's just a regular coin from my pocket, but I want you to carry, and know that as long as you carry this coin - for the rest of the night - you'll be safe."
"This is a coin. It's just a regular coin from my pocket, but I want you to carry, and know that as long as you carry this coin - for the rest of the night - you'll be safe."
(lean in close to whisper into the recipient's ear)
"But if you lose the coin...if you lose the coin, you're doomed, mate. Completely f*cking doomed."
It sounds crazy but most sound engineers have accidentally done this to themselves. You tweak a knob, hear the difference, and then noticing the whole channel was muted and wonder what it was that you just heard change.
This is kind of the same idea as throwing in a duck[1] or hairy arms[2]:
1: http://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ 2: http://www.oliverburkeman.com/blog/posts/the-theory-of-the-h...
I was once debugging some issue with my laptop's multimedia buttons driver. I found some tweak which helped: enable the tweak, reboot - works fine, disable tweak, reboot - no go. Tested repeatedly several times.
I filed a bug report and received an answer that my tweak absolutely cannot work. The tweak was disabled at the time and the button didn't work. I pressed it again after reading this email and boom - it works.
I swear.
I figure my mind must have been believing so much in futility of pressing this button that it didn't even bother pushing it all the way down. Scary stuff.
Michelangelo knew the nose was just right, so he grabbed a handful of marble dust, went up to the face and pretended to chisel it while slowly letting out his handful of dust.
When he was done, the patron said, "There! It's perfect."
Really wish I had had a button like that back when I was doing audio production.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
https://github.com/airblade/acts_as_enterprisey
See bikeshedding. People just want to feel like they contributed something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_trivialit...
It's not the same as a placebo or client button but it addresses the issue of people who would otherwise diminish a project through nitpicking and wanting to put their own touch on everything.
The idea came from animation (Disney, I believe) where the art directors were always asking the artists to make changes just to feel like they had some input and control. The animators started adding hair on the arms of the characters as an obvious thing the directors could latch onto and demand the artists modify. The artists didn't want the hairy arms to begin with but it was a way to keep the directors from screwing up something "important" just so they could feel special.
Ha!
The brain is a strange, strange organ.
Placebos are another face on the basic processes underlying what we call "magic", with all of the "mystical" "woo" removed.