Ulysses S. Grant would like a WORD
Hogan Gidley: Trump is "the most masculine person to ever hold the White House as the president of the United States" https://t.co/fcoYWyaEhz
— Eliza Relman (@eliza_relman) January 11, 2021
But he didn't go down. He stood there and, while bleeding out, steadily took aim and killed the dude who shot him.
Stone cold.
Grover Cleveland hired a substitute to take his place in the Civil War.
And then he was the guy Polk chose to start a war with Mexico. He did so. And then he conquered Mexico.
One time he was on a hill in Cuba, and he got to watch it get taken by the innovative use of gatling guns supporting regiment of black cavalrymen!
The dude was DETERMINED TO POAST.
He is the third HEAVIEST president, of course, after Grover Cleveland (remember him from above?) and Taft, of stuck-in-the-tub fame.
More from Lyman Stone 石來民
So a few days back I was tweeting about SSRIs. The big question with these drugs is: why do controlled trials routinely show such small effects when practitioners and patients report life-changingly-large effects?
So first off, at this point the evidence is pretty clear that SSRIs and other anti-anxiety/anti-depression drugs truly don't do very much. Their average effects are beneath clinical significance, as I tweeted about here:
Basically, the problem these drugs face is that while they actually see relatively LARGE effects.... but that placebos in those trials ALSO see large effects (and most untreated depression improves within a year anyways).
So basically you have this problem where:
1. The condition tends to improve on its own in a majority of cases
2. Placebo effects for the condition are unusually large
Which means the large crude effects of SSRIs get swamped.
So that raises two new questions.
1. (Not my focus here) Are we treating these conditions appropriately given their untreated prognosis is usually (though certainly not always!!) "goes away in a few months"?
2. Why are placebo effects so unusually large?
So first off, at this point the evidence is pretty clear that SSRIs and other anti-anxiety/anti-depression drugs truly don't do very much. Their average effects are beneath clinical significance, as I tweeted about here:
What's the best recent empirical assessment of SSRI/SNRI effectiveness which deals with heterogeneity and long-term effects in a plausible way?
— Lyman Stone \u77f3\u4f86\u6c11 (@lymanstoneky) December 4, 2020
Basically, the problem these drugs face is that while they actually see relatively LARGE effects.... but that placebos in those trials ALSO see large effects (and most untreated depression improves within a year anyways).
So basically you have this problem where:
1. The condition tends to improve on its own in a majority of cases
2. Placebo effects for the condition are unusually large
Which means the large crude effects of SSRIs get swamped.
So that raises two new questions.
1. (Not my focus here) Are we treating these conditions appropriately given their untreated prognosis is usually (though certainly not always!!) "goes away in a few months"?
2. Why are placebo effects so unusually large?