Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We know that America is a very litigious society: people sue for the most idiotic of reasons. And win! Remember that night club shooting in Florida recently? Guess who some of the victims are suing? Google, Twitter and Facebook. On what grounds, you wonder : “The lawsuit is the latest to target popular Internet services for making it too easy for the Islamic State to spread its message.” Wow! Who’s next by this logic: telephone line companies and mobile manufacturers? No wonder we find so many warnings and disclaimers on pretty much any product we buy: it’s all rooted in idiotic lawsuits like the one mentioned above. Ironically, those very warnings in products could then trigger the nocebo effect. What’s that? It’s the opposite of the famous placebo effect (a beneficial effect produced not by the medicine or treatment, but due to the patient's belief in that treatment!). From Shelley Adler’s book, Sleep Paralysis : “(Doctors) have found that pretending to expose peo...

Yesterday I read an article about something called the “nocebo”. A nocebo is the other side of the more well-known placebo. While the placebo refers to the dummy “medicine” that has a curative impact because the patient was told it was the real thing, the nocebo refers to the side-effects caused by the dummy “medicine” because the patient was told that the real thing sometimes caused those side-effects! Talking of such self-fulfilling prophecies, I didn’t know that the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” was coined by an economist in the 1940’s! The term was used to describe the scenario where people feel that the economic scenario is bad and hence cut down on non-essential spending which in turn leads to an actual economic slowdown. And talking of economists, I’ve always wondered why those guys never seem to be able predict an actual recession, let alone a depression. Robert Shiller feels the answer isn’t that economists are dumb. Nor is his answer that the world is too complicated to...