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Monthly Archives: June 2015

From Facebook

Patient vs doctor ratings of drugs: Corr(X,Y) = -0.344, p < 0.01? :'(

23rd June 2015 FB-RSS Leave a comment

From one of my favourite Scott Alexander posts that I've read:

Doctor reviews [of antidepressant drugs] on RateRx correlated at -0.21 with patient reviews. The negative relationship is nonsignificant, but that just means that at best, doctor reviews are totally uncorrelated with patient consensus.

...

I correlated the average rating of each drug with the year it came on the market. The correlation was -0.71 (p < .001). That is, the newer a drug was, the less patients liked it.

...

The history of the past fifty years has been a history of moving from drugs with more side effects to drugs with fewer side effects, with what I consider somewhat less than due diligence in making sure the drugs were quite as effective in the applicable population.

...

I grabbed all the popular antipsychotics, antihypertensives, antidiabetics, and anticonvulsants from the three databases, for a total of 55,498 ratings of 74 different drugs. I ran the same analysis on the whole set.

The three databases still correlate with each other at respectable levels of +0.46, +0.54, and +0.53. All of these correlations are highly significant, p < 0.01.

The negative correlation between patient rating and doctor rating remains and is now a highly significant -0.344, p < 0.01. This is robust even if antidepressants are removed from the analysis, and is notable in both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric drugs.

Health careMedicineScott Alexander
From Facebook

I’ve bought anthropomorphizingcountries.com, but will I do anything with it?

16th June 2015 FB-RSS Leave a comment

I wonder if it might be pretty valuable if there were a blog-type website that does nothing other than point out recent instances of "#AnthropomorphisingCountries" in the mainstream media, with brief commentary on what the anthropomorphising metaphor obfuscates.
What do you think?

(Well, personally, I agree, but I don't want to be the one to read through mainstream media contents in search of samples. Oh well, we'll see.)

What are all my other not-yet-put-to-any-use web domains again? There's inefficiencykills.com and lowhangingfruitofecon.com, both of which I actually feel pretty motivated to write a "welcome" page explaining the site's intended theme for. And yet, not even that much has materialised to this day. It could still happen, though, I just need to hit upon one of those dopamine swirls that are know to roam certain regions of brainspace.

(Edit: lowhangingfruitofecon.com is not a thing (thank God). It's how I've been referring to a website idea I've had for a while, apparently to the point of hallucinating having bought that domain.)

AnthropoblahblahPolitical psych
From Facebook

CBT getting less effective :(

6th June 2015 FB-RSS Leave a comment

Tom J. Johnsen and Oddgeir Friborg say:

The metaregressions examining the temporal trends indicated that the effects of CBT have declined linearly and steadily since its introduction, as measured by patients’ self-reports (the BDI, p < .001), clinicians’ ratings (the HRSD, p < .01) and rates of remission (p < .01). Subgroup analyses confirmed that the declining trend was present in both within-group (pre/post) designs (p < .01) and controlled trial designs (p < .02). Thus, modern CBT clinical trials seemingly provided less relief from depressive symptoms as compared with the seminal trials.
Academic articlesMental healthPsychotherapy
From Facebook

What’s the deal with travelling?

4th June 2015 FB-RSS Leave a comment

I think it's often alleged that one reason people travel is to show off.
Why is travel an effective thing to show off with, though? As in, why are people impressed by it if you've been to lots of places?

[Good comments, some expressing skepticism toward this allegation by citing other plausible motivations for travelling.]

QuestionsSocial psychTravel

This is how I remind you…

This Wordpress blog is currently set up to fetch all my Facebook posts and save them as draft blog posts.
My hope is that this will prove a good way to have a searchable archive of my FB content, and to occasionally review interesting posts and craft them into something more substantial.
I use the FeedWordPress plugin to fetch an RSS feed of my Facebook posts. This RSS feed is generated by FBRSS.
As of this writing I'm only just starting to try this out. Suggestions welcome!

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  • Diversification vs competition :/
  • There are no green great dragons
  • Another science fail :(
  • Patient vs doctor ratings of drugs: Corr(X,Y) = -0.344, p < 0.01? :'(
  • I’ve bought anthropomorphizingcountries.com, but will I do anything with it?

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