Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/31/woman-will-share-results-of-he.html
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I wish I micro dosed 2016 away too.
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Yet another reason to visit Amsterdam.
So this conf talk was her goal? A trippy version of Toastmasters.We need to start a club.
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If they really wanted to know they could have simple asked me about my Junior year in high school
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I’m halfway between really excited that people are actually doing research on things like this and terrified that there exist compounds that can permanently alter how our brains work at the level of personality and social skills, even when administered at not-clearly-noticeable doses.
Then again, I already read how variations in (way sub-therapeutic) amounts of naturally occurring lithium in or water have big impacts on the suicide rate, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised
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well micro dosing is almost imperceptible. You’d want to macrodose 2016 away.
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The way this year has been you might want to go for that macro dose.
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It’s ridiculous that Psilocybin, LSD and cannabis are schedule 1 drugs but Meth and other dangerous drugs are schedule 2.
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I doubt that was _micro_dosing. 
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Can’t speak for anyone else, but I took a year’s worth of microdoses. I just did it more efficiently, got the whole lot done in one evening.
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Overachiever 
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I Um tried Um to watch Um this Um video Um, and Um, I couldn’t Um get past Um the 4 minute Um mark.
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Not able to watch the video at the moment, but this seems like iffy data. From the sound of it she’s experimenting on herself, and all the benefits are difficult to measure objectively. It’s one data point, with no placebo control, and the subject appears to have some preconceived ideas about what the results should be.
Is there clarifying information I’m missing here that helps? Because the idea is interesting, and I’d like the data to be good, but it looks like it’d be impossible to separate results from placebo effect and confirmation bias.
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Sadly, personal anecdotes and subjective reporting are not science.
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I feel like any benefits from micro-dosing could be written off as a placebo effect.
I just visited a friend in SF, and now I’m totally sold on this microdosing thing. Only on weekends, though. I don’t see why I’d want to waste a day that good working.
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As a general response to people who say this is not science:
Science has to start somewhere. Scientists throughout history and the present have been using anecdotal evidence as the basis for their investigation of truth. People with mental illnesses (including anxiety) have been systematically denied access to training and resources to become scientists. So we experiment on our own bodies, and we have our knowledge denied as “anecdotal” or worse.
As the basis for it, certainly, but anecdotal evidence still isn’t science. It’s how you generate a hypothesis. Then you test it and see if you can support the hypothesis with more than just anecdotes.
This is both true, and a travesty. But that means we need to fix the social systems in place that have caused this, at all levels. It doesn’t mean we can or should relax our standards for scientific evidence.
Because it is anecdotal. Your knowledge is absolutely true… for you. We have no way of knowing if it applies to anyone else, or why it’s true. Acupuncture is a good example. Many people report that it helps them. In a sense, they’ve experimented on themselves, trying several things and reporting the one that showed a result. Actual science has shown that acupuncture isn’t effective beyond a placebo. No one is doubting that acupuncture did help those people. It didn’t help them because sticking needles into people in specific places is helpful though. It helped them because they thought it would.
The same applies here. I have no issues with the hypothesis. I am completely open to the idea that microdosing is effective. This test isn’t, and shouldn’t, be considered scientific though. It fails all standards of rigor (again, unless I am misunderstanding an aspect of the test), results cannot be differentiated from a placebo, and it was done without blinding on a subject with a stake the results. The results of this project can’t be held to support the hypothesis. Nor would a null result of the study be grounds to reject the hypothesis. This project tells us nothing. Social issues are very real, very problematic, and we all need to work to solve them, inside the scientific community and outside, but they don’t transform bad data to good.
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Here you go, Dr. Hackenbush:
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