A friend asked me to investigate whether someone getting into astrology makes them more likely to get into more harmful pseudosciences such as alternative medicine.
This market will resolve whenever I've gotten around to doing that research. This'll probably be within a few months, but I'm not sure when I'll have the time.
Resolves to YES if I think there's likely an effect there, even a small one. (Needs to be large enough to have some meaningful impact on the world though.) Resolves to NO if it looks like there's no effect, or if I'm unable to find any significant evidence that points one way or the other.
A correlation of "people who believe in astrology are more likely to believe in alternative medicine" is not enough; it needs to be causal. The discussion that prompted this was about whether attempting to get people to stop believing in astrology is an effective way to prevent the growth of alternative medicine.
I'll read through any studies posted in the comments here, so feel free to try to influence the results by posting relevant links.
Related questions
The discussion that prompted this was about whether attempting to get people to stop believing in astrology is an effective way to prevent the growth of alternative medicine.
note that managing to convince people to stop believe astrology may have additional effects, including (maybe) treating pseudomedicine like homeopathy less seriously
So this can be a good idea even without astrology being "gateway pseudoscience"
@MartinRandall Wrong. Homeopaths are sly people, so they put ingredients like acacia gum as "inactive" to make them work. Acacia gum has interesting effects.
@MartinRandall Directly harmless, maybe. But it leads to people choosing not to seek real medical care, which is plenty harmful.
There's also a lot of crossover with naturopathy, and some "homeopathic" remedies include nice natural substances like Belladonna, poison ivy, zinc, and arsenic.
@IsaacKing Sure, so maybe for some people it's a gateway to another activity, that of declining necessary medical care, and that other activity is harmful. I'm not aware of any causal research on that. I'd expect it to be correlated some.
Also, on the margin, in rich countries, healthcare spending doesn't appear to be correlated with outcomes. So any causal effect where homeopathy causes fewer medical interventions would have to be quite large to show net harm. For a small effect you might end up with some people being hurt by reduced healthcare and some people benefiting from reduced healthcare, and no overall effect.
I have no idea why zinc lozenges are labeled as homeopathic. They're evidence-based medicine, there are studies on efficacy and safety, and I'd be surprised if they were net harmful at recommended doses.
@IsaacKing Not harmful at all. Real medical care has far greater risks than homeopathy. Compare the risk profile of acacia gum to antipsychotics.
@Endovior Don't need to "prove" causation, I just need to think it's likely. I imagine an RCT that pushes people to practice astrology would not get past an ethics board, so I have to work with what I have. :)
@IsaacKing I'd bet on this but I don't understand the methodology of your experiment. You're planning an experiment to determine causation, right?
@CiprianEnache No, I plan to review whatever research I can find that has already been done. If I can think of a simple experiment I can easily perform myself that would help me find out the answer then I might do so, but I don't plan to do anything that would take more than a few days of effort.
@Gurkenglas Interesting. I think I shouldn't count that for the purposes of this market, since it would imply that we should actually be pushing people into astrology.
@IsaacKing It doesn't work that way because of basic math. Quitting smoking decreases the probability of lung cancer. "To decrease the probability of lung cancer in the general population we should ask everybody to start smoking and then quit" is a logical fallacy.
Since the rate of cancer in smokers is higher than the rate of cancer in the general population, asking someone to start smoking and then quit will only increase the rate of cancer - and never decrease it.
@CiprianEnache Quitting smoking decreases the probability of lung cancer because smoking causes lung cancer. Gurkenglas was specifically asking about the situation where that's not the case; where (in your analogy) smoking doesn't increase the risk of lung cancer, but quitting smoking reduces the risk of lung cancer.
@MattP When was science invented? 1940s. When did scientific progress slow down? Same time. Pretty much all technological progress comes from the big companies.