The key point is that in addition to being, perhaps, biased towards a positive or negative forecast, we are also at risk of being biased towards and over- or under-confident forecasts. By that I mean that, asked to give a range for our forecasts that will capture 80% of the probability, we can give ranges that are too narrow or too wide.

In practice we tend to be a bit positive and fairly consistently too narrow.

The long list of ‘optimism is good for your health’ studies are, typically, reliant on questionnaires that study only one dimension of bias, ignoring the open/closed mindedness dimension.

However, this is a crucial second dimension. I write about this in an article called “Optimism, pessimism, and open-minded optimism” available here http://www.managedluck.co.uk/objectivist/index.shtml

I argue for trying to reduce our biases.

(Incidentally, I don’t think the one-dimensional approach of the questionnaires is the only problem with them.)

I am interested because I am an agnostic minister of an agnostic church which preaches the Placebo effect. You can download details here

http://www.4shared.com/file/68219198/77015be8/Church.html

I have this to say. Get Thee to a Church. I believe in separation of Church and State. If the Church is destroyed, the State becomes the Church and all the dangerous, fanatic, true believers, espouse the State ideology as religion. See Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as examples.

In the US today, the 7 deadly sins of Catholicism are being replaced with new deadly sins of liberalism. Second hand smoke, not hugging your children enough, hugging your children too much, not recycling, etc. They are struggling to control education and suppress any non-state actors in the education field to be able to better indoctrinate our children in their religious values.

Society needs a wisdom authority separate from and independent of the State. Preferably more than one. So get thee to a Church. Find one that teaches values you agree with.

I found the normal hype here. People denying the existence of a placebo effect. Others pointing out that it is a significant problem in medical trials.

I find it amusing that Newberg’s “God” book is mostly concerned with the brain effects of meditations from Buddhism an agnostic religion which basically ignores the entire question of the existence of God.

I preach a sermon once a week on my blog at MySpace. Search for my name if you want to read past sermons.

Much of what I have read from the “skeptics” point of view, as I browse this website’s articles, appears to me as failed existentialism.

So far as I have read here, BELIEFS abound. Some people believe something and then others believe that they are wrong. The word “belief” necessitates some leap of faith, some jump from the world of incomplete experience and observation to accepting some piece of working knowledge as if it were real or true. What bothers me more than unqualified/unquantified beliefs, are peoples attachments to them. Why bother, when experience and observation may very well change one’s working knowledge of some thing? When belief does fail to change in the presence of new and conflicting experiences and observations it becomes dangerous.

I felt that views were well expressed Salerno until his final paragraph where he hangs himself on his own logic. His implicit view point in the final placebo scenario is loaded with unqualified/unquantified BELIEF and cultural hypnosis.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe Waldman and Newberg are “right”. They simply seem less attached to their belief.

Final note: It is not logically flawed to BELIEVE another’s BELIEFS are wrong?

I found a misspelling:
“They also found that highly optimistic people had greater activation in the same parts of the anterior cingulated, a part of the brain that plays a crucial role in controlling anxiety, depression, and rage, as well as fostering social awareness and compassion.”
The “anterior cingulated” should be “anterior cingulate (gyrus)”.

I love the article in the current skeptic issue about Benny Hinn. I watched his show on TV several times with my mother before she died. She went with her friend Dory to one of his massively attended shows. Dory had a rare crippling disease that left her little to no use of her left arm or fingers. Benny Hinn’s miraculous cure, where he casts out the demon and subsequently knocks his “patient” off her feet into the arms of caretakers afterward did nothing to cure her ailing arm. She died of other ailments a few years ago. My mom was an avid believer nonetheless, as was her friend Dory. Benny Hinn is energetic, full of optimism, hope, but, alas, totally ineffective as a healer. Too bad. He seems like such a nice old silver-haired genteleman, a bit French, Armenian, Greek, suave, kindly, and scary when it comes to faith healing, which, when taken with a dose of reality, is a complete crock.

In other words, you need to treat 10 people with active antidepressants to be reasonably sure that one person who responds is responding due to some unique action of the medication, rather than non-specific factors which could just as well be attributed to placebo.

The following very depressing review of available evidence suggests that if investigators use active placebos (placebos which induce side effects similar to antidepressants but not thought to have an impact on depression, e.g. atropine, or other anticholinergics) instead of inert placebos, the differences remain in favour of active drug, but only very slightly, on the order of 0.17 to 0.39 standard deviations:

http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab003012.html

And this, from a 1997 paper critical of Beecher:
“In 1955, Henry K. Beecher published the classic work entitled “The Powerful Placebo.” Since that time, 40 years ago, the placebo effect has been considered a scientific fact. Beecher was the first scientist to quantify the placebo effect. He claimed that in 15 trials with different diseases, 35% of 1082 patients were satisfactorily relieved by a placebo alone. This publication is still the most frequently cited placebo reference. Recently Beecher’s article was reanalyzed with surprising results: In contrast to his claim, no evidence was found of any placebo effect in any of the studies cited by him. There were many other factors that could account for the reported improvements in patients in these trials, but most likely there was no placebo effect whatsoever. False impressions of placebo effects can be produced in various ways. Spontaneous improvement, fluctuation of symptoms, regression to the mean, additional treatment, conditional switching of placebo treatment, scaling bias, irrelevant response variables, answers of politeness, experimental subordination, conditioned answers, neurotic or psychotic misjudgment, psychosomatic phenomena, misquotation, etc. These factors are still prevalent in modern placebo literature. The placebo topic seems to invite sloppy methodological thinking. Therefore awareness of Beecher’s mistakes and misinterpretations is essential for an appropriate interpretation of current placebo literature.”
http://tinyurl.com/m9sqvx

The 30% figure is often bandied about as if it were all due to some amazing placebo effect, but as we all know, most diseases go away completely on their own thanks to our natural immune system.

The placebo effect is real, but not nearly as powerful as the 30% makes it sound.

Mushy indeed.

Mushy indeed.

I have never heard this figure before and I was just wondering if anyone could post a reference to a study or something about it? Thanks