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[Reelya]

Yeah i was about to post about what harry said. The headline figure is more or less ... "80% of our members have been sober for at least a year", but the caveat is that only 5% of people who walk through the door last a year. So ... only something like 4% of people who walk through the door seeking help actually stay sober for a year.

But that doesn't stop them variously claiming the program is 80% successful, or even 100% successful. e.g. they hand-wave all people who aren't helped by labelling the failures as "unsavable". i.e. the program doesn't fail you, you fail the program, and they say "100% of people who stick with the program stay sober". So the program works 100% of the time for those people for whom the program worked. And if you didn't stick with the program, it's your fault, not the program which is "perfect wisdom from the holy founders of AA" and you're unsavable filth headed for hell, and other AA members are encouraged to sever all personal ties with you!

Also, any controlled trial to date has shown that sending people to AA has no more chance of leading to sober outcomes than a control group. e.g. (not the exact figures) 5% of both groups will quit drinking, but the ones who went to AA ascribe this purely-by-chance occurance as being due to AA. So the whole thing is about them tricking you with self-selection bias that they helped you.

Actually in a huge meta-study of 48 known alcohol addiction treatments, AA came 38th, just behind "attention placebo". i.e. give someone any fucking thing to do as a hobby, and it's about as effective as AA at preventing them relapsing into drinking. Actually more so, since a hobby picked completely at random gives them less time socializing with fellow drinkers, unlike AA. In AA all your time ends up being around fellow humans with drinking problems, and they actually encourage you to cut off your non-AA friends. So you end up in a huge circle of addicts. This is basically the opposite of helping.

[wierd]

There must be some kind of definition based control on the "attention placebo", since some actions will be statistically more likely to prevent drinking than others.

A rather morbid example would be suicide. Once done, the drinker is incapable of relapsing into alcoholism-- but other, less morbid ones, like using some other substance, could satisfy the same addiction center, without resorting to alcohol, and thus technically also be 100% effective at preventing future use of alcohol.

It thus cannot be "Any thing besides drinking". It must have a more narrow definition.

[Reelya]

There must be some kind of definition based control on the "attention placebo", since some actions will be statistically more likely to prevent drinking than others.

A rather morbid example would be suicide. Once done, the drinker is incapable of relapsing into alcoholism-- but other, less morbid ones, like using some other substance, could satisfy the same addiction center, without resorting to alcohol, and thus technically also be 100% effective at preventing future use of alcohol.

It thus cannot be "Any thing besides drinking". It must have a more narrow definition.

http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/attention+placebo+control+group

attention placebo control group

- a group of persons that serves as a baseline for comparison for assessment of the effects of a particular intervention. While persons in the treatment group receive the experimental treatment being studied, the attention placebo control group receives a treatment that mimics the amount of time and attention received by the treatment group but is thought not to have a specific effect upon the subjects.

Basically AA was below "do some random shit with no known benefit". The main reason for such a control group is to avoid the Hawthorne Effect or other similar effects where those under a study change their behaviour. AA does worse than pure control groups as well, however.

Here's a link to some of the study data. Attention Placebo came 34/48, to AA at 38/48

http://checkupandchoices.com/what-works.html

[wierd]

No, that is definition of the group-- specifically, that they are the group that receives the placebo.

The "no known benefit" part applies to placebos in general-- but even a sugar pill is not a placebo in certain circumstances-- such as treating low blood sugar.

In the case of alcoholism, you are dealing with "strong excitation bias" neural circuits that directly set off the reward system in the brain, that have been trained on alcohol consumption.  Some other activity that manages to fire those circuits, such as say-- aggressive excercise, or eating absurdly spicy foods (both for the endorphin rush) would have greater than expected efficacies when measured, because they stimulate the reward system.

It really needs to be a more tightly constrained definition, as the action taken must not have a pleasure reward associated with it in order to be a placebo for this condition.  Which then gets us back to the morbid case of suicide. 100% success rate in preventing recurrent alcoholism.

[Reelya]

Well whatever activities they're classing as attention placebo in the stated studies, if purely by accidental chance they exceed the positive results for AA that still doesn't paint AA in a good light, does it? Which is the main point, not what activities are chosen as the baseline.

[Yoink]

I frequently save videos that I see on Facebook, planning on coming back to them later when I have the time/inclination to watch them. 
Not once have I actually done so, as far as I can remember. This seems like the equivalent of my tab-hoarding habits.
If only I could train myself to bookmark things and close them, rather than just leaving the tabs open for weeks or months...    


Edit: Re: Alcohol discussion: Not actually related to the current topic, but still a WTF in its own right: I haven't had a drink of alcohol in three weeks tomorrow, let alone any other drugs. And the last time I drank it was barely anything, so it's closer to four weeks since I've been actually drunk. Whoa. My sleep schedule is still going quite well, too; there have been a couple of minor hiccups (once or twice I've been an hour or two late getting to bed, a few times I've been something smaller like 30 minutes late) but I still haven't abandoned it entirely and I am still feeling at least somewhat better than usual, anxiety and energy-wise.
Don't think I've given up alcohol or anything, just a bit of a detox that I've decided to see how long I can keep up, which has gone better than expected.     

Crazy, just crazy. Also crap, I need to finish eating and get to sleep, it is seven minutes past my bedtime.    

[pisskop]

A friend's older brother was alcoholic in AA when I was younger, I met him and he was like a maniac screaming bible verses, and prone to binge drinking.

This was a long time before I'd read the criticisms of AA however, but I put 2 and 2 together later on. The religious aspect is clear but a whole bunch of their "logic" leads to more binge drinking behavior:

- their metric for success: days since your last drink, instead of how many drinks you had. 1 drink is held to be as bad as 100
- they tell you that once you slip the Devil Drink will get you and you can't help but slide into a relapse/binge.
- they devalue personal responsibility and willpower, instead telling you to put all faith in a "higher power" to prevent you drinking, but only on a daily basis, through prayer. If you slip then you musn't have prayed hard enough that day, so the devil got you.

All of these add up to AA-treated people binge drinkng about 5 times more than people who never got treatment (control group in studies), and about 9 times more than those refered to professional drug and alcohol counselors.

aa is about crutching a in addiction.  its really a study in Freudianism.

it has the side benefit of making you reliant upon the group, which is what they need.  worse, they never 'overcome' their temptation, because they venerate it as one does a terrible god.

it helps the hardcore get clean long enough to detox, but keeps them in a situation where they deal with it every day.

[Putnam]

it has the side benefit of making you reliant upon the group, which is what they need.  worse, they never 'overcome' their temptation, because they venerate it as one does a terrible god.

And tells them they'll never get over it without the help of a higher power.

[Sergarr]

If only I could train myself to bookmark things and close them, rather than just leaving the tabs open for weeks or months...    

But why would you want to do that? Having hundreds of open tabs is fun!


I just found out that one of the newest Blizzard patches for Warcraft 3, which they decided to release because have broken the JNPG, a third-party program that I solely relied upon for mapmaking stuff, as well as breaking a lot of other stuff, as well.

Guess I'm never updating my version again, then!

[Akura]

I still don't understand how people can keep so many tabs open at once. Other than Bay12, I rarely have more than one other tab open, and usually close it when I'm done. I don't even bookmark, either I remember the URL or my browser history does.

[heydude6]

I used to keep several tabs open for Tvtropes, but after realising some of the flaws with the website (and my subsequent loss of interest), I eventually quit. Otherwise, I've kept my total open tabs to a maximum of 4.

[Parsely]

I still don't understand how people can keep so many tabs open at once. Other than Bay12, I rarely have more than one other tab open, and usually close it when I'm done. I don't even bookmark, either I remember the URL or my browser history does.

At home on Firefox I've got one window for:
- Fun (videos/forums/social media/quickpose/music)
- Documentation/research/references when I'm coding or drawing
- Homework

Usually I've got at least 4 tabs in each window but often more than a dozen.

When I'm at work I have one window for music and sometimes many for work since I split a lot if I need to reference documentation or whatever when I'm creating new content or referencing tutorials for Photoshop or whatever. If I'm testing browser compatibility I have Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox open all at once with all the tabs I'm testing duplicated.

E: If your computer is fine with it and it makes your browsing more efficient there's no reason not to load tons of tabs as long as you keep things organized. That's what windows, bookmarks, and tab managers are for.

[Neonivek]

I used to keep several tabs open for Tvtropes, but after realising some of the flaws with the website (and my subsequent loss of interest), I eventually quit. Otherwise, I've kept my total open tabs to a maximum of 4.

TVTropes kept getting worse and worse and now they are just flat out bad.

"Pirates who don't do anything" Ohh yay! A section on people who have a job... but don't really act or engage in said job.

"You never see Dede from Rugrats teaching": Ok TV Tropes... FIRST of all you do. Second of all that is because the characters are babies, not students in her school.

Boy do I wish that was just a bad example... but it is endemic.

[Yoink]

Yet another TV Tropes derail? Hrm, no thanks, let's move on.

I still don't understand how people can keep so many tabs open at once. Other than Bay12, I rarely have more than one other tab open, and usually close it when I'm done. I don't even bookmark, either I remember the URL or my browser history does.

I used to feel this way. Heck, for years I rejected the use of tabs at all, and looked down upon those who did use them, myself sticking to a window or two.
I don't know what happened to me.

[Grim Portent]

Not really a WTF, but I was rather surprised by this being true when I checked up on it. I always assumed tarantulas were too unintelligent to form mutualistic relationships.

Of course since orbweavers and jumping spiders can do it I suppose I should have expected it really, though they usually do it with other spiders.

Spoiler: Warning for arachnophobes (click to show/hide)