the thing about doing a bunch of curious research into psychology and/or medicine is you learn how absolutely useless statistics really are in most clickbait casual use cases. "75% of people report their symptoms improving after they started eating this type of mushroom" okay. so. first of all correlation doesn't equal causation, you need to eliminate any other possible explanations for this. second of all, is it the mushroom? or is it because that mushroom isn't found in their local corner grocery shop - leading to the person spending more time outdoors and moving around, changing their blood pressure and balance of the 8575786845 different chemicals involved in all of these things? did they previously never speak to any other human beings but searching for this rare product forced them to leave the house and be around people and exchange words with cashiers? does the act of hunting for this product introduce them to any other products that are often kept on the same shelf and enough people would be tempted to buy that THIS product's effects skewed the data? are you sure they haven't increased or decreased their caffeine intake? what about the mental effects of the study itself on their wellbeing i.e. feeling useful, feeling listened to? are you absolutely positive they aren't spending their days ANY differently than they did before they began the study? did they start therapy in the same week? hey. look at me. how many participants made up this study. where were they from. what was their demographic. how long did this study run for. if you say 3 days i'll kill you. look are you absolutely sure it's the mushroom. are you fucking sure you should be writing this like it's gospel considering the mushroom has nasty side effects or isn't tested well. hey are we going to talk about the actual chemical compounds within this mushroom and whether they can be found in a safely refined drug that costs less and is safer and doesn't have the side effects and does the same thing. are we sure. can we just be sure. can we be absolutely fucking crystal clear and sure before we run a headline to the whole planet that eating this mushroom will fix them
it's not even just about the medicine, it's psychology too. you read some articles and they're like. 90% of participants self-reported they felt better 🤗*
*we tested 10 people from this one apartment block in Surrey and 8 of them were men and 7 of them had completely unrelated pre-existing health conditions we just couldn't be arsed to think about very hard. also our criteria for "felt better" was checking a box to say whether they felt better compared to last week but we left no allowance for them to explain if this was clearly just due to random shit that happened in their life this week so really it could have been anything
can we please account for the variables. can we PLEASE account for the fuckgn VARBIEALES
