Another rather ignorant article

[aresian]

Several points are terribly presented in this article and I only place this hear to prove the point that there is no reliable studies done on pot use that establish cause and effect relationships between pot use and mental illness or something else they make up to sound scary.

news.yahoo.com/between-pot-psychosis-goes-both-ways-kids-215720943.html


I don't need to remind anyone here that a correlational study does not establish cause and effect only that the two points being made occur in near the same instant, though having no relation to each other whatsoever in only the fact they occur at the same time.

For example I ate a banana while sitting on a chair and I got an upset stomach. Should I say that chairs cause upset stomachs or that sitting should be a factor at all in my consumption of the banana causing my stomach ache. Well, sitting could possibly cause discomfort but to prove that I would have to test different sitting positions and consuming a banana in the same manner I did before... Point is I can say my stomach ache is likely to have been cause by eating the banana but I cannot say that sitting had anything to do with my resulting pain.

Point is the news is writing at an ever declining level of comprehension for a group of readers that they hope are at that target level or lower. One cannot present a full version of a scientific study with terminology in tact and every fact laid out for the kind of audiences news articles aim at. It doesn't garner audiences they want listening to their so called advice or "studies." They purposely only give what points are useful to drawing the conclusions they want. My second point is find research on your own.

If one is smart enough to identify the problem in news articles. Perhaps one can do research the good old fashioned way and actually look into real scientific studies that have been done on cannabis. They exist, true not many do but they are there waiting for some savvy sleuth to find them.

I wish they would stop slapping the tag of scientific onto things that aren't. I may have failed my Research Methods course the first time but when I got serious and tried again I got an A and so I should have at least the basic idea still.

This just annoys me (articles like this one) because it reminds me of the commercials that say "use this toothpaste because 3 out of 4 dentists say it works great." Well, how did they draw that conclusion? What was their population size which they drew their research from? Because interviewing only 4 dentists does not properly address the entire population the commercials are trying to appeal to (unless they mean to only talk to 8 people). Questions like these don't get asked by the average person because well admittedly they just don't have time. However, not having time to follow up on research leads to very large errors of judgment. I mean look at the politicians that try to summarize all this research when they aren't even close to experts on the topic... They fail but they learn to word it so at a glance it looks legit and they use only enough facts that they can't be called liars straight out because they can point to one extraneous fact that makes it true so it must be true then. Blech, I hate this crap learn to think for yourselves don't let complacency take the place of truth.


Blargh lol... Thank you my rant is done now.

[Alice]

We live in a world of sheep. The media no longer provides information, they tell the people what to believe. It has been that way for decades. Since WWII in fact.

Lazy science and fake statistics are the way of the world now.

In this case, their study shows that the occurrence of psychosis in teens is doubled among those who smoke pot. They claim that this means that pot doubles the likelihood of developing symptoms, when in fact all they have shown is that the speople who are predestined by their genetics to be prone to addiction are twice as likely to become psychotic.

The study provides absolutely no basis whatsoever for whether the act of smoking pot doubles the risk of psychosis, or the gene for addictive behaviour doubles the likelihood of the gene for the psychosis.

Any geneticist worth the paper their degree is printed on would point out that the genetic markers for mental defects (i.e. addiction and schizophrenia) often occur together in the same subject; and any worthwhile psychologist would likewise point out that they have few patients with only one problem.

The only study which would establish Marijuana as the actual cause of psychosis would be one in which a large pool of test subjects were gathered (based on appropriate demographic factors) including only individuals with no risk factors for mental illness, and only individuals who had never used a mind altering substance, and were administered Cannabis under controlled conditions.

Using subjects who voluntarily chose to smoke pot contaminates the results because they are studying only individuals predisposed to do so.

Unfortunately, telling teens who have lived a "clean" life to smoke would be illegal. The laws regulating Marijuana make any attempt to determine the validity of those very laws impossible. This is intentional. The lawmakers are well aware that a properly conducted test would prove Marijuana safe, because those studies were conducted in the 20's before it became illegal and were suppressed for political reasons.

May you find what you seek,
Alice

[aresian]

This sort of article provides support for my statement that the media constantly uses statistics in the wrong manner to propagate their own agenda. Unbiased news reporting is a thing of the past. There always is bias in anything any human being writes. People try pretty darn hard to insert their own opinions in what they do and write. It is the nature of a writer. There might be exceptions but they are few and far between. Most average writers are not in touch with their subconscious bias and/or their conscious biases for that matter. This means most write without realizing the bias they are perpetrating.
One of the positive lessons I pick up from the bible is how true it is about the bias of writers. Or worse yet the editing/censoring of what a writer puts on paper where some group or individuals in power take only what they want to see out of the writer's work. This constantly happens and I see it worsen with the perpetuation of the electronic type.

Electronic media has pros and cons to it. It allows writers, like myself, to write when otherwise would be a lot more difficult (I am unable to write by hand as effectively as I do typing). On the other hand it also allows a lot of information to be released without the kind of fact checking that should happen with normal edited/published works. In other words that saying about the monkeys and the thousand typewriters producing a passable work of literature has been proven false. There is a lot more inaccurate information out there, either purposely done or not, that is contually referenced as fact.

For example I constantly hear about the man that tried to bite off another mans face. It was first reported he was on drugs but there was no proof for the case and when they did test for drugs that might have caused such an event there were no levels of drugs high enough to have caused his behavior. People do horrible things and 90 percent of the cases are because people do horrible things not because of anything other than that's what they chose to do. The argument in psychology seems to be that there exists mental illness. There are a few illnesses that affect the mind but that isn't an excuse for the person to commit such horrible acts, it is merely an explanation of how one might get to the point of doing such an act.

Oh, and there is a big difference between correlational studies and cause and effect. It is a simply 101 lesson on statistics that most average (or below average) individuals seem to miss completely. The media knows these studies aren't saying what they are printing but they don't care. It matters what sells, entertains, and ultimately what makes the most profit.

Unfortunately I think we are becoming Ferrengi* see Star Trek if you wonder what those are.