I completely agree that the line you've quoted is a spurious argument, I mentioned it as the major reason why a little research on animal placebo wasn't going to be productive for me.
People who specialize in terrible arguments and who quote results of badly defined trials are making a variety of posts about animal placebo and as such obscuring any actual science that might have gone into this. Therefore it would take actual research rather than a light googling to find anything scientifically valid on the subject.
I wasn't intending to make any statement about the validity of "if animals can't experience placebo then dog homeopathy seeming to work is proof that homeopathy isn't nonsense", as irrespective of the arguments clearly sugar pills that have "the memory of water with the memory of arsenic" aren't going to do anything that regular old forgetful sugar pills won't.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-07-16 05:54 pm (UTC)People who specialize in terrible arguments and who quote results of badly defined trials are making a variety of posts about animal placebo and as such obscuring any actual science that might have gone into this. Therefore it would take actual research rather than a light googling to find anything scientifically valid on the subject.
I wasn't intending to make any statement about the validity of "if animals can't experience placebo then dog homeopathy seeming to work is proof that homeopathy isn't nonsense", as irrespective of the arguments clearly sugar pills that have "the memory of water with the memory of arsenic" aren't going to do anything that regular old forgetful sugar pills won't.