I had one of those 3D-only cards on my first computer. I didn't know about the passthrough and got pretty annoyed that my games sucked and never worked with the hardware 3D stack. I don't know if they didn't document it correctly, or if I just missed it. But when some support person finally told me, I was so pumped. I spent a while manually moving the cable to the 3D card when playing a game, until I finally got a passthrough cable.
Hell, I'd say it's an 0<=N<1 because it involves subjective mood reporting, and there was no participant who was not contaminated by flaws in the methodology.
If the author felt good on a particular day for whatever reason, and then learned they had taken the active substance, their reports are contaminated forever. It works the other way, too. It works any way you slice it.
If he said unblinded at some point, it could have been because the study author looked into the cup to determine which substance had been taken too soon. The subject should have had no knowledge of what was taken until the entire 16-month trial was over.
We should avoid extreme polarization of our judgments in general. The study deserves some amount of praise for things it did somewhat well (like the method of blinding which is clever, but not applicable to everyone), and criticism for things it did not do well, such as designing your own study methodology for your own mood. That alone will affect the results. Simply RUNNING an experiment can affect your mood because it's interesting (or even maybe frustrating). The subject probably felt pride and satisfaction whenever they used their pill selection technique, which could improve mood on its own. Neither accolades nor complete derision are appropriate, although trying to claim too strong a result from this study is kinda deserving of derision if you claim to be science-minded.
The study was well-meaning and displayed cleverness.
And that is exactly the point made in the target post by the author. He explicitly raised that criticism himself. Double kudos for self-criticism. You will not find many conventional science publications pointing out: “Shucks, we could have done this a better”.
The ancestor post is neither a "Complete injustice" nor "derision" nor an "insult", and it doesn't warrant a hostile mocking reply. Its tone could have been gentler, but it wasn't that bad. And the study doesn't really deserve "accolades", it deserves to be recognized for whatever it does well. Such polarization of tone and vocabulary doesn't accomplish much, and I'll even propose that it actually prevents good things from happening. It is good that the author is aware of, and acknowledges, the problems in the study. What other studies and journals have done wrong doesn't make the author or study more deserving of praise.
Also, you asked why he said "unblinded", and I think you now have the answer to that.
Yes, perhaps. But please tell me you have read the original post. It is thoughtful, self-deprecatory, careful, well analyzed, and upfront about limitations and possible improvements.
Re-reading such a negative critique of a solid home-brew experiment is unwarranted. There are several word here worth red flags.
>This is an N=1 trial. Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better. In fact: putting this much effort into any medication trial makes it much more likely that you’re going to be incentivized to find effects that don’t exist. I think it’s nice that the author admits that they found nothing, but statistically, worthless drugs show effects in much better-designed trials than this one: it’s basically a coin toss.
Analog has been an all-around pain in the ass. I subscribed to the paper version and didn't receive an issue within the timeframe they advertise. It's bimonthly, so it was quite a while. When I wrote them, they said "Oh, we always skip the current issue in case you bought it in a store." I asked them to include that on the website, but guess whether they gave a crap.
When I let my subscription expire gracefully (because the overall quality of the writing and editing was bad), I got something like 6 - 10 letters warning me about it. They were the kind that scare elderly people with dementia into paying. They also included some dubious claims about renewing "now" and saving, but I couldn't work out how I would save anything if I did.
Do you think that the technique of using the last 4 bits to choose a further pseudorandom 31 bits from the rest of the hash MIGHT mitigate SOME future weakness as a PRNG? Or do you have confidence it is completely useless? Or neither, of course.
I think it's weird. Either you trust your output to be pseudorandom or you don't. These weird hacks may be fine, but they feel like adding "safety" duct tape onto the wings of a passenger jet.
Might be begging the question. Perhaps it's not really that random. We common people don't usually get pictures that convey depth and orientation, and probably wouldn't care even if we did. Might only be as random as a solar system with varying orbital inclinations and directions.
If not, the forces that turn some solar systems and galaxies into rotating disks might not act the same at the supergalactic scale in time and space?
Seems like the correct answer to me. Let's assume henceforth in this post that the code still does what the original vs code authors claim it was intended to do, and nothing more. If you launch the IDE from a shell, or launch ANY program from that same shell, it will automatically have access to the environment that you're concerned about.
Here's where they introduced wrapping the environment output in "random" numbers:
The associated issue explains that they needed to be able to ignore extraneous info returned by the shell itself, so they make the command return a token to delimit the actual environment info they want.
The very idea of spawning a shell to grab its environment has been there since the beginning of vs code:
There is no voluntary system which can't be sabotaged by your own feelings. Performance anxiety, overthinking, fear of success, etc. And if you let things pile up without processing them, that becomes another snowballing reason to avoid the system. One's thoughts and feelings ABOUT the system seem to have no way to be processed BY the system, so one just avoids all of it. There is also sometimes an expectation that a system will do the hard work for you, instead of just telling you what you should be putting hard work into in a certain time slice.
I am not betting my life that there is no one who is psychologically incapable of working with certain systems without intractable distress. But I doubt it.
