Double blind trials should be called "Trick or Treatment"
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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And that, children, is why you double blind
Triples makes it safe. Triples is best.
Twist: those are psych researchers, and he is in the experimental group.
Double twist: he's the actual psych researcher and they're the research subjects.
Triple twist: They're all just cartoon drawings, and we're the research subjects.
& we don't get to see the psych researchers.
This thread reminds me of an Asimov short story where someone discovers that humor is just a vehicle for psychological experimentation being done on humans by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Now that humans know where jokes come from, it's no longer a useful tool to the observers and is removed from the testing environment...
"The gift of humor is gone," said Trask drearily. "No man
will ever laugh again."
And they remained there, staring, feeling the world shrink
down to the dimensions of an experimental rat cage---with
the maze removed and something, something about to be put in its place.
http://blog.ac-versailles.fr/villaroylit/public/Jokester.pdf
Sometimes I think about the opposite where a patient is given placebo and then is cured. Imagine living the rest of your life knowing for certain that your body could cure whatever ailment it's going through but it's like naaah
Would legit drive people to deep spiritualism if not religion.
Well, not if they understand how double-blind studies work and can distinguish causality from correlation. People constantly get sick and get better without medication. The aim of such studies is to find out whether the medication performs better than no medication. In other words, the aim is to rule out the coincidence that illnesses often get better without treatment.
Of course, this does not mean that your body can cure “whatever ailment.” Self-healing, chance and coincidence do exist. There is no reason to become religious over it.
Yeah, I'm very well aware how double blind works and my point is exactly related to your 2nd paragraph. Be it coincidence or actual real placebo caused healing (which happens) it would be a major perspective trauma and it definitely happens!
Personally I do think that mental states absolutely impact biology through many invisible forces like hormone production and behavior. So getting a placebo and believing that it works can stimulate specific hormone production or healthy behaviors like going for a jog which ends up legit healing the person. It's easy to see how this could lead someone to a more spiritual or religious point of view because in this experience something like "faith" is legitimately healing them tho not in the way they think.
Mental states are biology. That there can be broader impact on the rest of our body is hardly surprising.
Yeah, reminds me a bit of bullshit titles like these:
No shit, your brain is also you
That's kinda like saying the movie on the cinema screen is the projector at the back.
More like saying a program running on a computer is digital, like the hardware.
I'm the patient in this picture, but it made me laugh hard.