[davelondon]

It's a nice story but it's actually a load of rubbish...

https://theoutline.com/post/2205/this-38-year-old-study-is-s...

"Despite his claims of a revolutionary breakthrough, Alexander had trouble finding a journal to publish his results. Both Science and Nature rejected the study for publication, likely due to significant problems with the methodology and results. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior published the results in 1981 with little response and the funding for Rat Park was canceled shortly thereafter."

"When scientists tried to replicate the Rat Park study, they got mixed results. In 1996, a study attempted to precisely replicate the conditions in Alexander’s Rat Park, down to the breed of rat. The researchers conducted two experiments to see if they could replicate the Rat Park study’s results. In the first experiment, the happy, social rats consumed slightly more of the morphine liquid, in the second experiment, the isolated rats drank slightly more. Neither experiment reflected the Rat Park’s results, which had the isolated rats drinking up to seven times the amount of the morphine liquid as the social rats."

[pas]

why is it a load of rubbish?

it's inconclusive. it seems there's no strong independent evidence either for or against the strong addiction model.

[aeternum]

Whenever a large group of people really want something to be true, your Bayesian evidence threshold should increase significantly.

IE cigarettes not causing cancer, glass of red wine a day, unleaded gasoline, caffeine has no negative effects, drugs are not addictive, you can eat as much as you want as long as no carbs.

[AnimalMuppet]

What about unleaded gasoline puts it on this list? What about it do people really want to be true?

[aeternum]

Sorry, meant leaded. The dangers were known very early-on but it was such a great way to increase octane rating that many including regulatory agencies allowed themselves to be led into wishful thinking.

It's interesting we're still using leaded when it comes to aviation. The FAA has been quite slow in approving alternatives.

[fuzzfactor]

The idea that it became harmless once the lead was removed?

[stillbourne]

Science operates on a system of checks and balances, not a free speech model. If your paper can't pass peer review then your paper is what is clinically referred to as bullshit. Now there are people who bypass the system of checks and balances by publishing on pay to play journals but scientist came up with a solution to that too, Impact Factor. They took all the journals and rated them by how much of the content that they publish has an high impact on science and how much of it is bullshit. If you can't get your paper to publish in a journal with an impact factor higher than say 3.5 then you're probably bullshit.

[nebulousthree]

Checks and balances are a perpetual game of cat and mouse. While yes, they do raise the barrier of entry, it doesn't account for nepotism or favouritism, which would be the equivalent of lifting the ribbon to let someone through. It can go so far as to make legitimate attempts at entry unreasonably difficult or downright impossible, making the paper publish only papers pushed through a rigged system that appears on the surface to be of value. It is only through time or by investigation that it is found that a paper reputation is increasingly fraudulent.

[stillbourne]

Yes, and we even have a system for that. Retraction. https://retractionwatch.com/

I'm not saying the system is perfect but it works over time.

[pyrophane]

I assume it is more the author's response to the headline of this article, which treats the conclusions of the experiment as robustly proven fact.

[MavisBacon]

Right. Not really the thinking of someone concerned with science, which is frustrating as a harm reductionist who has recognized that lack of serious logic and reason are the biggest enemy of the movement. It can begin to look like hedonism to the outsider otherwise

Also frustrating considering how bloated their staff seems to be and how much they seem to want to be viewed as scientific, and this is perhaps the most visible harm reduction org in the states.

https://dancesafe.org/dancesafe-national/

[krageon]

The situation described (cannot reproduce) is the standard in modern paper publishing, a significant fraction of even widely cited papers are just full of nonsense. The fact that it is not replicated in big publishers should therefore be sought in a different direction (I would say a political one).