Brad DeLong

Views on Age of Planet Differ: No, Marco Rubio Would Not Be an Acceptable President Edition

Paul Krugman:

Views Differ on Age of Planet - NYTimes.com: Quite a few bloggers are having fun with Marco Rubio’s bobbing and weaving in response to a question from GQ: "How old do you think the Earth is?"… As I like to say, the GOP doesn’t just want to roll back the New Deal; it wants to roll back the Enlightenment. But here’s what you should realize: when Rubio says that the question of the Earth’s age “has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow”, he’s dead wrong. For one thing, science and technology education has a lot to do with our future productivity — and how are you going to have effective science education if schools have to give equal time to the views of fundamentalist Christians?More broadly, the attitude that discounts any amount of evidence — and boy, do we have lots of evidence on the age of the planet! — if it conflicts with prejudices is not an attitude consistent with effective policy. If you’re going to ignore what geologists say if you don’t like its implications, what are the chances that you’ll take sensible advice on monetary and fiscal policy? After all, we’ve just seen how Republicans deal with research reports that undermine their faith in the magic of tax cuts: they try to suppress the reports…. So don’t laugh over Rubio’s young-earth apologetics. If he, or anyone else from his party, wins in 2016, the joke will be on us.

Meanwhile, as Sandy Makes Landfall...

It just took 150% of the predicted time for a panful of shortbread to brown. It's like high-altitude baking. #sandy #brooklyn

— tnielsenhayden (@tnielsenhayden) October 29, 2012

Yes. The Future Is Here. Why Do You Ask?

Derek Lowe:

Chemistry in the Quantum Vacuum. No, Really… In the Pipeline:: If we end up being able to make [chemical] reactions go the way we want them to by coupling our starting materials to actual fabric of space, I will officially decide that I am, in fact, living in someone's science fiction novel, and I will be very happy about that…

Didn't Archimedes Have a Solution for This?

Felix Salmon:

Felix Salmon: The problem of fake gold bars: You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this worrying: a 1kg gold bar, certified as 99.98% pure by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) tests, turns out to have been drilled out and largely replaced with tungsten. This bar was discovered only because it was 2 grams lighter than it ought to have been: the forgers failed to add quite enough gold to the outside of the bar to make up for the weight lost when they replaced gold with tungsten. But if they’d gotten the weight right, it would probably still be circulating today.

Of course, there are means of testing gold bars beyond just weight and XRF. If you can weigh the bar accurately, then you can test for purity by essentially dropping it in a bucket of water and seeing how much the water level rises: a gold-covered tungsten bar will displace more water than a pure gold bar. Alternatively, for $3,000 or so you can buy a micro ohm meter, which is easily sensitive enough to tell the difference in conductivity between a pure gold bar and one which is largely tungsten.

But as far as I know, these tests are not particularly commonplace among gold dealers, and in any case only a minuscule fraction of the gold bars in the world are physically traded… the obvious point at which tests like these would be conducted…. [E]ven if you’re just a Ron Paul or Glenn Beck type with your own personal stash — then there’s no realistic chance at all that you’re going to go bar by bar through your own holdings, testing each one. In the case of gold, then, what JK Galbraith famously called “the bezzle” — the amount of wealth that people think they have, which in fact they don’t have — could be truly enormous….

On the other hand, it’s also possible that the number of salted 400 oz bars is zero, that the 1 kg bar recently discovered was an amateurish aberration, and that there’s nothing to worry about at all. But the economic incentives here are so enormous, for people looking to make a fortune in the fake-gold-bar industry, that I very much doubt no one has tried. And statistically speaking, if a bunch of people have tried, then some subset of those people will have succeeded.

So what to make of the fact that no salted 400 oz bars have yet been found? On the one hand, it can be viewed as very worrying — as being an indication that the gold markets are very bad at uncovering such things. On the other hand, you’d think they’d be good enough at it that they would have uncovered at least a small percentage of the salted bars outstanding — and if they’ve uncovered no such bars at all, then that can be taken as an indication there aren’t any salted bars outstanding.

In any case, there’s clearly now serious tail risk for anybody in the physical-gold market. And like most tail risks, measuring and/or insuring against it is extremely difficult…

Of course, Archimedes faces the problem that gold has a specific gravity of 19.32, tungsten has one of 19.25, and both osmium and iridium have ones of about 20.5. All you need to do is dope your tungsten with about 6% osmium/iridium and Archimedes is hapless and helpless.

How expensive are osmium and iridium anyway?

The Tomato, Once Again...

The sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath. And the entire point of horticulture is to grow people the food they would like to eat. And we like to eat tomatoes--even in winter, even though the tomatoes we eat in winter are far, far beneath the Idea of the tomato.

But Maggie Koerth-Baker and Barry Estabrook resent the fact that we like to eat lousy tomatoes in winter. They wish... well, it is not clear what they wish. But they both clearly think that the existence of the winter tomato--which people who want to eat one can eat and people who do not want to eat one cannot eat--somehow has "hurt us."

My brain explodes. Freedom is good. Freedom to do what you want--if you are a properly-informed adult--is good. Freedom to eat winter tomatoes is good. The banning of winter tomatoes by some Sinister Foodie Oligarchy would be bad.

What am I missing here?

Chemistry!

Now where did I find the link to this?

Mental Health Break: The Alkali Metals Show Their Personalities. In the Pipeline::

I suppose that the way to think about it is that the bare charge of the three protons of lithium is shielded from the valence electron by the two inner-orbital electrons, and that the bare charge of the fifty-five protons of cesium is shielded from the valence electron by the fifty-four inner-orbital electrons, and thus in each case you have (roughly) a valence electron attracted to a proton with the cesium electron being much further away, hence much more weakly attached, hence with much more energy to release when it drops into its place in a stable OH- ion...

Don't try this at home!

The Moon is a Not-So-Harsh Mistress

Matt Springer:

The Moon is a Not-So-Harsh Mistress : Built on Facts: Astronomers and space exploration enthusiasts around the web are expressing lots of enthusiasm for the discovery of water on the moon by the Indian Chandrayaan-1 orbiter. Long story short (Ethan has a good version of the long story), the probe discovered relatively large quantities of water frozen throughout the lunar soil just below the surface. It's not just at the bottom of craters in the polar regions, but instead seems to be quite widespread.

So is the beyond-the-Van-Allen Belt problem solved yet? Can we start our lunar colonies now?

My Day: Magister Ludi, or From Econ 115 to Tesla to Gernsback to "The Skylark of Space" to Oliver Wendell Holmes...

My day starts with the fall course: Econ 115, Twentieth Century Economic History. The question is how to teach the acceleration of global and North Atlantic economic growth around 1870. Before 1870 the capital- and resource-corrected efficiency of labor in the North Atlantic region looks to have grown by only some 0.4% per year--a pace at which it would take 180 years for the efficiency of labor to double. America supports real income growth of some 1.0% per year before 1870 only by conquering and expanding across the continent, greatly increasing the stock of natural resources the economy has at its disposal faster than its population grows.

Then around 1870 the frontier closes: natural resources per capita begin to fall. But real income growth does not fall: it doubles. Post-1870 real income growth is driven by (a) much faster increases in the efficiency of labor, and (b) capital deepening made possible by inventions that cheapen old and make possible the production of an entirely new range of capital goods. And both of these processes are in turn driven by (a) the application of science to technology, and (b) the scent of profit in the nostrils of financiers and entrepreneurs opened up by the possibility of applying science-based technologies to make both old goods (i.e., dyestuffs, steel, etc.) and new goods (electric lights, airplanes, etc.).

And I decide that the right way to teach this is to make them wake up by telling them about the life of autism-spectrum genius inventor Nikola Tesla, known for, according to Wikipedia: the Tesla turbine, teleforce, Tesla's oscillator, Tesla electric car, the Tesla principle, Tesla's egg of Columbus, Alternating current, Tesla's AC induction motor, the rotating magnetic field, wireless beamed-power technology, particle-beam weapons, death rays, terrestrial standing waves, the bifilar coil, telegeodynamics, and electrogravitics; recipient of the Elliott Cresson Medal (1893), the Edison Medal (1916), and the John Scott Medal (1934).[1]

Tesla then leads me to Tesla's autobiography, My Inventions, published in 1919 in Electrical Experimenter magazine, which was then edited by... science-fiction genre founder Hugo Gernsback, after whom science fiction's Hugo awards are named, who later edited Amazing Stories.

And so I found myself at the gym reading not David Wessel's In Fed We Trust nor Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter nor Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold nor Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy nor Rafael Yglesias's A Happy Marriage but instead a book I last read when I was twelve: E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Space, written in 1915-1921 and published in 1928 in Gernsback's Amazing Stories--and then compounding the offense with Spacehounds of IPC.

Seven things strike me about E.E. Smith and Skylark:

• The hero is a chemist--admittedly, a chemist who liberates "intra-atomic energy" through some bizarre catalytic process and then directs the energy via electromagnetic and other etheric disturbances (weak? strong? whatever extension to the standard model produces proton decay?), but a chemist.
• The villains are big business--"World" Steel--and the effete wealthy financial WASP establishment--"Brookings"[2] (plus the adversarial Nietzschean chemist-uebermensch).
• The adversarial Nietzschean chemist-uebermensch--Marc DuQuesne--will steal, will kill, will kidnap, but he will not lie: his word is good. Moreover, he will not engage in preemptive violence: he will not kill you on general principles simply because you might be an obstacle later, because he is always sure that he could deal with you if it were to become necessary.
• A "computer" is not a machine but rather a human job description.
• Smith doesn't understand special relativity at all.
• The casual genocide--alien women and children (or perhaps I should say "brooders" and "younglings") are exterminated by the billions without anyone batting an eyelash.
• The casual eugenics--evolution as directed toward greater scientific nerdity (but it is a very buff scientific nerdity)[3] and intelligence, this directed evolution as desired by the First Cause or as the point of it all, and the duty to assist in the improvement of the species (or perhaps specieses).

And this then led me to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v. Bell (1927):

Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony.... She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother... and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.... An Act of Virginia, approved March 20, 1924, recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives....

The attack is not upon the procedure [i.e., due process] but upon the substantive law.... We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson. v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Just as young men can be drafted and compelled to give their lives for the health of the state (or is it the volk?) in war, so feeble-minded women can be drafted and compelled to give their fertility for the improvement of the genome.

Let me say that this is a case where I suspect that a wise Latina justice might have been more able to consider the proper equities than Justice Holmes was.

And let me say that if we are going to play at genetics and eugenics it should be done not by a literary-intellectual judge but by a real live professional scientist, like Arianne Emory I:

[A]bsolutely essential... are adequately diverse [human] genepools.... We do not create Thetas because we want cheap labor. We create Thetas because they are an essential and important part of human alternatives. The ThR-23 hand-eye coordination, for instance, is exceptional. Their psychset lets them operate very well in environments in which... geniuses would assuredly fail. They are tough, ser, in ways I find thoroughly admirable, and I recommend you, if you ever find yourself in a difficult [wilderness] situation... hope your companion is a ThR... who will survive, ser, to perpetuate his type, even if you do not...[4]

Unfortunately, I only have half an hour of lecture--1/6 of one week--to talk about Tesla and company this fall--and I now easily have enough material outlined that I could now lecture for three weeks on science, invention, technology, popular culture, eugenics, and the idea of progress at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries. God knows if I will ever teach it or write it up--or if anybody would be interested if I did...

---

[1] When Tesla died in 1943, an old man living on charity in the New Yorker Hotel and talking to pigeons, Wikipedia claims that FBI head J. Edgar Hoover seized his property and turned it over to the government's Alien Property Custodian (despite the fact that Tesla had been a citizen for 51 yeara) while the FBI searched frantically for a working model of Tesla's death ray. Six months later Chief Justice Stone of the Supreme Court ruled that Tesla's beamed-power patent of 1897 incidently invalidated Marconi's later radio patents, and so the U.S. Navy did not have to pay for using Marconi-designed radio equipment. (Marconi's patent by then had a company, and lawyers. Tesla's patent did not.)

[2] To name your chief villain "Brookings" and have him reside in Washington DC in a book written over 1915-1921--when Robert S. Brookings is one of the U.S. economy's wartime central planners on the War Industries Board, is Chair of the Board of Directors of Washington University (St. Louis), and founding the three organizations that are going to become the Brookings Institution (the Institute for Government Research, the Institute of Economics and the Brookings graduate school) and is bankrolling Harold Moulton who is drafting legislation to create the Budget Bureau (now OMB)--is perilously close to libel before the Supreme Court changes the law in New York Times v. Sullivan.

[3] I.e., the Hero and the Ingenue in Spacehounds of IPC:

"Well, you've seen it, Miss Newton," Stevens said regretfully, as he led her toward the captain's office. "The lower half is full of heavy stuff—accumulators, machinery, driving projectors, and such junk, so that the center of gravity is below the center of action of the driving projectors. That makes stable flight possible. It's all more or less like what we've just seen, and I don't suppose you want to miss the dance—anyway, a lot of people want to dance with you."

"Wouldn't you just as soon show me through the lower half as dance?"

"Rather, lots!"

"So would I. I can dance any time, and I want to see everything. Let's go!"

Down they went, past battery after battery of accumulators; climbing over and around the ever-increasing number of huge steel girders and bracers; through mazes of heavily insulated wiring and conduits; past mass after mass of automatic machinery which Stevens explained to his eager listener. They inspected one of the great driving projectors, which, built rigidly parallel to the axis of the ship and held immovably in place by enormous trusses of steel, revealed neither to the eye nor to the ear any sign of the terrific force it was exerting. Still lower they went, until the girl had been shown everything, even down to the bottom ultra-lights and stern braces.

"Tired?" Stevens asked, as the inspection was completed.

"Not very. It's been quite a climb, but I've had a wonderful time."

[...]

"I think it's all perfectly wonderful!" she breathed. "Just think of traveling in comfort through empty space, and of actually seeing through seamless steel walls, without even a sign of a window! How can such things be possible?"

"I'll have to go pretty well back," he warned, "and any adequate explanation is bound to be fairly deep wading in spots. How technical can you stand it?"

"I can go down with you middling deep—I took a lot of general science, and physics through advanced mechanics. Of course, I didn't get into any such highly specialized stuff as sub-electronics or Roeser's Rays, but if you start drowning me, I'll yell."

"That's fine—you can get the idea all x, with that to go on. Let's sit down here on this girder. Roeser didn't do it all, by any means, even though he got credit for it—he merely helped the Martians do it. The whole thing started, of course, when Goddard shot his first rocket to the moon, and was intensified when Roeser so perfected his short waves that signals were exchanged with Mars—signals that neither side could make any sense out of. Goddard's pupils and followers made bigger and better rockets, and finally got one that could land safely upon Mars. Roeser, who was a mighty keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn't come back—he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn't overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. Now putting other peoples' ideas to work was Roeser's long suit—don't think that I'm belittling Roeser at all, either, for he was a brave and far-sighted man, was no mean scientist, and was certainly one of the best organizers and synchronizers the world has ever known—and since Martian and Tellurian science complemented each other, so that one filled in the gaps of the other, it wasn't long until fleets of space-freighters were bringing in air and water from Venus, which had more of both than she needed or wanted.

"Having done all he could for the Martians and having learned most of the stuff he wanted to know, Roeser came back to Tellus and organized Interplanetary, with scientists and engineers on all three planets, and set to work to improve the whole system, for the vessels they used then were dangerous—regular mankillers, in fact. At about this same time Roeser and the Interplanetary Corporation had a big part in the unification of the world into one nation, so that wars could no longer interfere with progress."

"WITH this introduction I can get down to fundamentals. Molecules are particles of the first order, and vibrations of the first order include sound, light, heat, electricity, radio, and so on. Second order, atoms—extremely short vibrations, such as hard X-rays. Third order, electrons and protons, with their accompanying Millikan, or cosmic, rays. Fourth order, sub-electrons and sub-protons. These, in the material aspect, are supposed to be the particles of the fourth order, and in the energy aspect they are known as Roeser's Rays. That is, these fourth-order rays and particles seem to partake of the nature of both energy and matter. Following me?"

"Right behind you," she assured him. She had been listening intently, her wide-spaced brown eyes fastened upon his face.

"Since these Roeser's Rays, or particles or rays of the fourth order, seem to be both matter and energy, and since the rays can be converted into what is supposed to be the particles, they have been thought to be the things from which both electrons and protons were built. Therefore, everybody except Norman Brandon has supposed them the ultimate units of creation, so that it would be useless to try to go any further...."

"Why, we were taught that they are the ultimate units!" she protested.

"I know you were—but we really don't know anything, except what we have learned empirically, even about our driving forces. What is called the fourth-order particle is absolutely unknown, since nobody has been able to detect it, to say nothing of determining its velocity or other properties. It has been assumed to have the velocity of light only because that hypothesis does not conflict with observational data. I'm going to give you the generally accepted idea, since we have nothing definite to offer in its place, but I warn you that that idea is very probably wrong. There's a lot of deep stuff down there hasn't been dug up yet. In fact, Brandon thinks that the product of conversion isn't what we think it is, at all—that the actual fundamental unit and the primary mechanism of the transformation lie somewhere below the fourth order, and possibly even below the level of the ether—but we haven't been able to find a point of attack yet that will let us get in anywhere. However, I'm getting 'way ahead of our subject. To get back to it, energy can be converted into something that acts like matter through Roeser's Rays, and that is the empirical fact underlying the drive of our space-ships, as well as that of almost all other vehicles on all three planets. Power is generated by the great waterfalls of Tellus and Venus—water's mighty scarce on Mars, of course, so most of our plants there use fuel—and is transmitted on light beams, by means of powerful fields of force to the receptors, wherever they may be. The individual transmitting fields and receptors are really simply matched-frequency units, each matching the electrical characteristics of some particular and unique beam of force. This beam is composed of Roeser's Rays, in their energy aspect. It took a long time to work out this tight-beam transmission of power, but it was fairly simple after they got it."

He took out a voluminous notebook, at the sight of which Nadia smiled.

"A computer might forget to dress, but you'd never catch one without a full magazine pencil and a lot of blank paper," he grinned in reply and went on, writing as he talked.

"For any given frequency, f, and phase angle, theta, you integrate, between limits zero and pi divided by two, sine theta d...."

[4]The implications of the fact that Arianne Emory I is probably lying to some degree when she says that Union "do[es] not create Thetas because we want cheap labor. We create Thetas because they are an essential and important part of human alternatives..." is left as an exercise for the reader.

P. Z. Myers Has a Quibble with the Excellent "Inner Life of a Cell" Video

It has aroused his ire. From P.Z. Myers:

Pharyngula: Buffeted by the winds of chance: why a cell is like a casino: This is what bugs me about the "Inner Life of a Cell" video. They're portraying the behavior of single molecules, and the movie has them dancing a slow waltz, steadily moving through fixed patterns. It should look more like a mosh pit filled with meth addicts; real chemistry doesn't direct single molecules, it shifts overall equilibria so that the random activity of single cells has certain probabilities of throwing them off a thermodynamic cliff into a new state. Those kinesin "feet" [on the motor transporter molecule] should have been pitter-pattering all over the place, occasionally falling into a more stable position that led them in a particular direction -- what was needed was a portrayal of a hyperkinetic ratchet. Anyone who uses a microscope or looks at the activity of small numbers of molecules or studies thermodynamics and reaction equilibria (like, say, a chemist or biochemist) ought to be familiar with the stochastic properties of the world on such a small scale.

The closest example on a macro scale that I can think of is a casino. People go in and out of a casino, and they engage in many small probabilistic events. Some people win big, some lose big, and all states in between are represented... but the house always has its small, advantageous odds in its favor. They don't shake down the crowd deterministically and demand a cut from each, instead what they have done is basically tipped the the reaction equilibrium gently to favor the transfer from one state -- your pocket -- to another state -- their bank. From the aggregate kinetics of a great many transactions with only a tiny edge in one way, they have constructed a powerful and reliable siphon hose to draw off your money. (I suspect that's also one, perhaps unconscious, reason why gambling establishments are fanatical about keeping out people with even a hint of a successful gambling system; it doesn't take much of a shift in the percentages to reverse the flow in their money siphon.)

If you watch single individuals in the casino, rather than the rising total profits for the whole institution, you wouldn't see a smooth and steady drain of money, though. Over long periods of time the trend would appear, but moment-by-moment? No. You'd see a herky-jerky random pattern of wins and losses.

And that's what I would want to see portrayed in my ideal version of an animation of the chemistry inside a cell: not a ballet, a jostling mob on an uneven floor. Show me more noise and chaos.

Robert Waldmann Has a Big Problem with the Anti-Prozac Meta-Analysis Study

Robert Waldmann has a big problem with and talks back to the anti-Prozac meta-analysis study of Hirsch et al.*.

Mark Liberman summarizes the meta-analysis data in a nice picture:

The x's are studies. The vertical axis shows the improvement in mood for people being given the placebo--the sugar pill. The horizontal axis shows the improvement in mood for people being given the antidepressant, both according to the Hamilton Scale of Depression.

People being given the placebo improved their mood a lot--by 7.8 points, which is a relatively big deal on the Hamilton Scale: feeling that you are taking control over your Depression by getting involved in a cutting-edge medical study, the fact that a group of research scientists are paying attention to you, and the passage of time together do a lot of good. But the people being given the actual anti-depressants improved their mood by even more. Let's turn the mike over to Hirsch et al.:

[W]eighted mean improvement was 9.60 points on the HRSD in the drug groups and 7.80 in the placebo groups, yielding a mean drug-placebo difference of 1.80 on [Hamilton] improvement scores.... [which] easily attained statistical significance [at the 0.001 level, in fact--much better than the 0.05 level]...

Subjects given Prozac improved their mood by an extra 1.8 points on the Hamilton scale. This difference is not due to chance sampling error--it is, statistically, very significant. The pills are really cheap to make. There is an upside. Better Living Through Chemistry.

So what's the problem with Prozac? The problem, according to Hirsch et al., is that the difference of 1.8 points on the Hamilton Scale:

does not meet the three-point drug–placebo criterion for clinical significance used by NICE [Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence]...

Where does this requirement that no therapy for Depression is worthwhile unless it improves the Hamilton Scale score by three points come from? The weblog "Pyjamas in Bananas" finds a quote:

Pyjamas in Bananas: No research evidence or consensus is available about what constitutes a clinically meaningful difference in Hamilton scores, but it seems unlikely that a difference of less than 2 points could be considered meaningful. NICE required a difference of at least 3 points as the criterion for clinical importance but gave no justification for this figure...

Who wrote this? Irving Kirsch, lead author on the anti-Prozac study.

And it is at this point that the economist in me wants to reach for his revolver. A declaration that a real-world solid statistically-significant improvement in people's quality of life is not "clinically significant" is inadmissable unless it is motivated by a proper analysis of opportunity costs: a conclusion that the resources devoted to this therapy would have a higher value and a better alternative use in some other therapy. It cannot rest on an arbitary number that some organization pulls out of its a--.

Even worse, Robert Waldmann points out, is that the Guardian's health editor Sarah Boseley doesn't understand the article she is reporting on:

Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists: Analysis of unseen trials and other data concludes it is no better than placebo: Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.... When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs...

Waldmann comments that Boseley is:

totally dishonest, totally innumerate or both. 1.8 > 0. Patients on Placebo did not improve just as much as patients on SSRI's... this isn't even a case of treating a statistically insignificant difference... as... proof that the true value is zero.... "Irving Kirsch, Brett J. Deacon, Tania B. Huedo-Medina, Alan Scoboria, Thomas J. Moore & Blair T. Johnson" find a significant additional benefit of taking a SSRI rejecting the null of no benefit with a p value of "<0.001"... overwhelmingly strong evidence that SSRI's cause improvement in depression.... Oddly big Pharma, which spends huge amounts of money on advertising, doesn't seem to have managed to hire anyone intelligent enough to point out that 1.8 > 0...