You can't easily measure if something is beneficial. Which is precisely why a bunch of plants that people were taking before for different ailments were found to have absolutely no medical value when tried through a scientific method.

And in the age of social media, individual confirmation bias and a megaphone is the best way to promote non-science to hordes of people.

But you are quite right, individuals with strong confirmation bias and a large social media following are harmfull.

Still, that does not mean individuals should not perform harmless experiments. Individuals should experiment. But they should not claim their findings as universal truths.

It depends what you refer to when you talk about a placebo. What people call the "placebo effect" is in practice "regression to the mean" in most cases, which is the fact that you would get better over time even if you did absolutely nothing. You will notice that placebo 'effect' works best in contexts where the illness has a psychological component (mental illnesses and the like), but absolutely fail to show any effect at all in other contexts like viral infections.

> Individuals should experiment. But they should not claim their findings as universal truths.

I agree, but how can you prevent people from claiming that something worked for them if they are absolutely convinced of it. It's an unsolvable problem.

Do I understand correctly that you oppose people searching holistic remedies to their ills because they might accidentally get better, and a percentage of these might accidentally turn into snake oil salespeople?

Nope, I am for individual freedoms as long as it happens in their private sphere.

> a percentage of these might accidentally turn into snake oil salespeople

the problem is that bullshit takes a lot more time to debunk that it takes to spread. So you end up with hoaxes, false claims, rumors, confirmation bias spreading through other people's minds with extreme speed because of how we communicate right now. And my point is that as long as you can't make people understand that "anecdotal evidence" means absolutely nothing, you can't stop this from happening: it means you will end up with bullshit spreading everywhere and good Science being ignored or simply drowned in a torrent of unfounded claims.

So no, I believe that we must actively fight false information. Not "we" in an individual sense, but "we" as a society, and that means regulation.

Yes it's beneficial if something works, but I want to know why it works too and not just believe in random pseudoscience. Also, determining if something really works is hard.

I want to understand the mechanism. If there's something true there then you may be able to use that directly, you can also avoid untrue things that are harmful (history is full of these harmful 'treatments'). [0]

Without this people just end up wearing energy crystals, while dismissing real medicine for homeopathic nonsense that can lead to death [1][2].

Humanity has used the scientific method to barely rise above the collection of hocus pocus explanations. It's worth the effort not to fall back into that. [3]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23882029

[3]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RgkqLqkg8vLhsYpfh/fake-causa...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/one-b...

Pseudoscience is if you do not test it scientifically if it works.

Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean it’s pseudoscience. You just might not understand the mechanism.

There’s a greater risk that something you think works actually doesn’t though if you don’t test it.

There’s also a greater risk that claims people make about things in this untested space are more likely to be false.

Part of the reason it’s important to test and understand the mechanism is that people are good at deluding themselves with all sorts of biases and made up false explanations.

If one can't confirm changes in their own mental state, especially profound changes, I'd suggest that's a far bigger and more pressing problem than anything you've listed.

We can delude ourselves into believing anything. That's why we need to test things empirically in order to find out the truth.

Not sure about you, but if someone tells me "I've been exercising lately and mentally I feel much better" I don't say "but does homeopathy really work" and wink at them.

The point is if someone says they're getting a benefit from something that doesn't have a ton of evidence around it - my first instinct would be to be skeptical but curious.

When someone takes that skepticism and implies that the "far bigger and more pressing problem" is that I can't determine the obvious benefits it makes me more skeptical, not less.

How skeptical I am comes from how far it is from my priors. Breathing exercises being helpful seems likely, choosing energetic or restful based on which nostril you're breathing out of sounds like bullshit so I'm more skeptical by default.

If someone tells me they're breathing out of their right nostril to become more energized - I'd probably tell them that sounds made up.

The only reason I choose to exercise anyway is because of the people online and the scientific evidence saying that exercise is better for you in the long term. I certainly don't feel like it in the moment, and in fact sometimes worry if my heart is going to give out as I exercise. But if I am going to believe that exercise is beneficial overall, but that you can't experience the benefits it brings until it's too late to change things, I don't really know what else to do except listen to them and keep exercising, while getting over the unpleasantness and complete draining of energy and motivation to do things I'd rather do that it causes.

Maybe that's what some things in life come down to. It either comes down to eating diets like ones with plants prioritized and getting over the fact that they don't taste as pleasant as foods with refined sugars, or accepting the impact on your health by choosing the latter. Maybe some people just make their own peace with the taste of such foods, somehow.

It might be wiser to take a progressive approach - i.e. start with a five minute walk, the next day/week/month increase it to a ten minute walk or increase the pace.

There's actually a lot of research out there. Did you try to search for any? It's not scepticism to compare something you cannot believe because you haven't bothered to investigate, with well known falsities such as crystal healing.

Not only does the research support the existence of a nasal cycle where one nostril is dominant at different times, it also supports a different pathway to the brain and a different neurological response. On top of that, psychological research shows links between breathing patterns and emotional response, in both directions, and then there's the wealth of meditative research. This stuff isn't controversial.

From [Taste and Smell]:

> The FN model may also explain the observation by Sobel et al. [36] that, when performing an odor threshold test, humans sniff longer when using the nostril with the lower flow rate. (Subjects usually have different flow rates in their two nostrils because of cyclic changes in the size of their nasal cavities.)

From [Nature]:

> The flow of air is greater into one nostril than into the other because there is a slight turbinate swelling in one. The nostril that takes in more air switches from the left to the right one and back again every few hours

From [Stanford News]:

> Michael Leon, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California at Irvine said… [the] data suggest, that the olfactory system maximizes the ability of its distributed receptor neurons to encode differentially absorbing odors.

From [Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle]:

> Nasal airflow is greater in one nostril than in the other because of transient asymmetric nasal passage obstruction by erectile tissue. The extent of obstruction alternates across nostrils with periodicity referred to as the nasal cycle. The nasal cycle is related to autonomic arousal and is indicative of asymmetry in brain function. Moreover, alterations in nasal cycle periodicity have been linked to various diseases.

From [Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness versus odor names]:

> These findings are consistent with previously demonstrated neural laterality in the processing of olfaction, emotion and language, and suggest that a local and functional convergence may exist between olfaction and emotional processing.

From [Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion]:

> This article reports two studies investigating the relationship between emotional feelings and respiration. In the first study, participants were asked to produce an emotion of either joy, anger, fear or sadness and to describe the breathing pattern that fit best with the generated emotion. Results revealed that breathing patterns reported during voluntary production of emotion were (a) comparable to those objectively recorded in psychophysiological experiments on emotion arousal, (b) consistently similar across individuals, and (c) clearly differentiated among joy, anger, fear, and sadness. A second study used breathing instructions based on Study 1’s results to investigate the impact of the manipulation of respiration on emotional feeling state. A cover story was used so that participants could not guess the actual purpose of the study. This manipulation produced significant emotional feeling states that were differentiated according to the type of breathing pattern. The implications of these findings for emotion theories based on peripheral feedback and for emotion regulation are discussed.

I could go on.

As to meditative practices, there's been extensive research for nigh on 50 years now, and for the past 20 (at least, as far as I'm aware) they've been using fMRI scanners to provide objective results[Oser] on the link between meditation as a practice and mental state.

You just have to look.

[Taste and Smell] https://books.google.com/books?id=fuxS-p6bpuwC&pg=PA12

[Nature] https://www.nature.com/articles/46944

[Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5053491/

[Stanford News] https://news.stanford.edu/news/1999/november10/smell-1110.ht...

[Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness versus odor names] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12712833_Hemispheri...

[Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0269993014300039...

[Oser] https://www.lionsroar.com/the-lama-in-the-lab/ I include this as it's a personal favourite of mine and covered more extensively in Daniel Golman's book, Destructive Emotions.

I think this is actually a good example of the point I'm trying to make.

There appears to be an underlying mechanism here that's worth understanding that may have real effects. None of this suggests that left nostril 'relaxation' and right nostril 'energy' is a real thing. The closest may be that last link which I don't have access to.

The reason understanding the underlying mechanism is important is because it allows you to differentiate what could be real (potentially switching airflow in nostrils because "the olfactory system maximizes the ability of its distributed receptor neurons to encode differentially absorbing odors.") and what is pseudoscience "you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile.".

The latter sounds suspicious to me and these links don't seem to really support it. I'm extra suspicious when there's a strong interest in motivated reasoning (yoga-affiliated people being bought into it) to find it correct. It doesn't mean it isn't true, but it's less likely to be so.

The cycle can still be a real thing, there may still be real effects, and the left/right relax/energy thing can still be nonsense. That's why understanding what's going on is useful.

It's ugly, but it's how we usually lumber along. And yes, many mistakes and pseudoscience take place along the way.

I was recently reading how jet engines were developed even though no one really knew exactly how they worked (there were theories, of course).

This is the closest thing I could find on the topic online:

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/failure-leads-tech-advances-say...

Predictions have to start somewhere.

What bothers me about the comment I replied to was the hostility to trying to understanding the underlying mechanism. "As long as it does something beneficial who cares after all what the bias is?" is not a good position. That kind of thing leads to people doubling down when it turns out their pet hypothesis is actually shown to be wrong (not saying that's the case here).

It can also lead to people thinking they see benefits where none exist (or where the activity is even harmful), it can lead to people making up explanations (most of human history).

It's good to be willing to try new things, but also to have a healthy skepticism.

I'm bothered when something that is still uncertain is put forward as true, I think people are generally over confident where they should be less certain. Even this can be harmful in ways people don't expect [0].

It becomes really harmful though when stuff known to be false is pushed as true (conspiracy theories like not getting cancer treatment). This leads people to not pursue treatment they desperately need. In their case they won't have the opportunity to become more skeptical afterwards.

There's also the risk of political influence pushing certain things as true that aren't and real knowledge can be lost (though I think that's less likely to happen today).

In this specific breathing case, it's benefit being real or not is probably not that big of a deal - but the underlying value of wanting to understand why something is really true or not I think is important.

[0]: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#the-potential-harm-don...

In older times yes, but you can easily demonstrate that scientific progress was WAY faster once we developed actual methods to test things in a reliable way.

The dramatic advances you refer to happened after a time we developed reliable scientific methods.

I do. I hate being wrong about stuff.

If someone observes measurable benefits after (e.g.) breathing through one nostril for a while, I'd consider it important to know exactly why. Maybe there are important things about the mechanics of respiration that we haven't understood yet. Dismissing such phenomena with "If it feels good, who cares why?" seems counterproductive in the long run.

OTOH, if no one sees measurable benefits, then the various anecdotes from practitioners really are just bias in action, and (IMO) are not worth expending further thought on.

I strongly disagree with this line of thinking. If something is potent enough to deliver benefit, it can also be potent enough to deliver harm. You can't have it both ways.

Turns out breathing is rather psychoactive, and without proper educational context one can indeed induce or activate latent issues, anxiety or otherwise.

Just like with McMindfulness, I wish some of this kind of instruction required licensing.

See my reply to comment below which cites studies when these sort of practices backfire in a non-trivial fashion. Like I said, it is either too trivial as sit, breathe and relax which won't do much good, or it is potent enough to do some good in which case it also has the potential of doing some harm.

Second, breathing has multi-thousand year old legacy spanning multiple cultures and eras touting it's benefits. Why would you obtain your perspective from a click-driven Vice article referring to a study of 73 people instead of the infinitely more robust source of truth?

> If you suffer from PTSD and get an episode at the grocery store, do you want to regulate grocery store visits also?

I am not talking about triggering based on some external stimulus. I am talking about a nilly-willy prescription of a pscyhoactive exercise that has a non-trivial chance of interacting/activating pre-existing conditions.

> Why would you obtain your perspective from a click-driven Vice article referring to a study of 73 people instead of the infinitely more robust source of truth?

My perspective doesn't come from the article, I merely put it there as it gives a readable summary to the otherwise terse scientific papers.

Regarding the particular study, that study has tons of citations to other studies and meta studies, a good chunk of which complains about *adverse effects are not sufficiently mentioned", which I'm doing here. I'm not claiming that the score is settled on this matter, but the fact that there is no talk on adverse affects deserves attention.

> Second, breathing has multi-thousand year old legacy spanning multiple cultures and eras touting it's benefits

So does psychedelic mushrooms or circumcision. The good thing about science is we can systemically study traditional practices instead of taking their word for it. I don't think tradition is an infinitely robust source of truth, especially in comparison to scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, I value traditional knowledge too, but you can't claim traditional information and its context have propagated to our day sufficiently well (e.g. is circumcision a rite-of-passage anymore?), including the knowledge/caution on what to do with adverse reactions.

Contrasting merits of scientific processes with traditional knowledge is not scientism. If anything claiming tradition is an infinitely robust source of knowledge is some sort of dogmatism.

I don't agree with that statement, I think there are cases where the lab doesn't translate into real world and suggesting that scientific experiments are always the best representation of the real world is just naive, I-M-H-O.

Ergo, I don't see us agreeing on the topic and it is best left there.

Regarding the straw man spam - it would help if your claims were correct and not removed from context. I didn't suggest that all tradition is infinitely robust, I suggested tradition concerning breathing is more robust than the limited scope paper you referred to. Context matters.

No, that is not what I said. I said knowledge transmission through tradition is lossy and as such it is not systematic, it doesn't carry context and it doesn't cover the fine print. In that, the content of a memetic proposition that made it to our day might as well have truth value, but it doesn't mean it is readily applicable by anyone who reads about it on the internet. Or we might have memetic behavior that is divorced from context (e.g. circumcision) and is questionable as to why we should follow it. That's why rigorous scientific study is important.

> I think there are cases where the lab doesn't translate into real world and suggesting that scientific experiments are always the best representation of the real world is just naive, I-M-H-O.

I have not suggested any of these things (and this will be 3rd time in a row I'll be bringing up you strawmanning.)

Lab science is not the only science, experimentation is not the only component of scientific method. Yes science can't explain a lot of things yet but science has the best methodology in working for an objective truth. So ignoring evidence science can produce, especially if it's conflicting with tradition, is going to be naive at best.

> I didn't suggest that all tradition is infinitely robust, I suggested tradition concerning breathing is more robust than the limited scope paper you referred to. Context matters.

I didn't suggest you said all tradition. I still stand by my argument that you are defending dogmatism of tradition, even in the limited context of breathing exercises. Besides, that paper is not the only source I've cited, breathing is studied in a multitude of psychological domains as I mentioned, so indeed context matters.

> Regarding the straw man spam

Please refrain from inflammatory language. You made your point that you don't think you're committing straw man, and I still think you do and that disagreement is fine. No need to retort underhanded attacks, let's keep it civil and intellectually honest.

The problem with this line of thinking is to assume that inaction is not also a choice that affect you.

Inaction argument is a strawman, I'm not arguing for doing nothing at all, I am just against informal prescription of rather potent, psychoactive exercises without due respect, especially in the form of "just try it, can't do any harm". If you want to get serious with it, find people/sangha/teachers/therapists who know their stuff and train in that context. But assuming no harm can come while assuming benefits can come is a contradiction and wishful thinking.

And people often harm themselves immensely through inaction in the same areas.

People also change their breathing patterns all the time, or don't, without knowing what they're doing or not doing.

You're advocating a line of thinking that simply is not how most people live their lives, and never will be, because it would paralyse us.

You can also die from drinking too much water.

I'll list just the titles of select deep dive citations from the first study to give an idea, you can find detailed citations in the paper itself;

- "Meditation-induced psychosis" (several with this title)

- "Mania precipitated by meditation: a case report and literature review."

- "Adverse effects of meditation: a preliminary investigation of long-term meditators."

- "The unveling of traumatic memories and emotions through mindfulness and concentration meditation: clinical implications and three case reports."

- "Meditation in association with psychosis"

- "Precipitation of acute psychotic episodes by intensive meditation in individuals with a history of schizophrenia"

- "Psychiatric complications of meditation practice."

This is a citation tree from just one study on meditation.

To be clear, I know the term meditation is not strictly equivalent to breathing exercises but definitely a good chunk covers & includes them; e.g most frequently practiced meditation style (vipassana), breathing sensation is the most common object of focus.

If you're interested in non-meditation studies, the term "relaxation induced anxiety" will bring a wider selection of papers. If you are interested in studies about psychoactivity of breathing, search for "panic disorder breathing" which has again tons of studies that investigate the link (contents of which doesn't necessarily limit to panic disordered populations).

And to be clear, I am not saying meditation or breathing exercises are bad. But they are potent. They can create altered states. And as such I am against bold claims like "they can do no harm, just do on your own". As studies above demonstrate, even with a proper educational context they can backfire. Especially considering the fact that the population segment that would be most interested in trying these exercises would likely to be the people already suffering from stress, anxiety or mental health problems.

- "hiking is dangerous"

- "swimming is dangerous"

- "running is dangerous"

- "cycling complications"

- "running complications"

...all day long - just append certain keywords and you'll find many articles and studies to feed your subjective belief and win arguments.

I did and talked with a lot of people doing mindfulness meditation and none of them warned me against it. I don't doubt your claims but I think they are exceptions and just about any activity can be found to be dangerous when looking at the exceptions.

The difference is all of those are physical activities, and a reasonable person can easily infer the risks.

That's not the case with these prescriptions of rather potent, psychoactive exercises. A better comparison would be psychedelic mushrooms; it certainly wouldn't kill you but any reasonable prescription would have also cautioned about the importance of set & setting and to stay away from it if you have certain preconditions/proclivities.

The research I cited claims otherwise. If you have citations to back your claim, I'm happy to revise my position. And sure, it will be OK for a good majority of the population but it is not universally true to the extent of easily claiming "just try it, no harm can come" on a public forum. To give more context, 30% of US population will be clinically anxiety disordered at least once in their lifetime [1]. 17% to 53% of people will experience relaxation-induced anxiety [2].

[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241686673_OA1401_Re...

The paper is about the correlation between two separate manic episodes after meditation with two different methods. It further cites other papers - but in common for them is episodes occurring after meditation in patients with severe mental illnesses who in several cases are off their medication.

The paper goes on to give a case study of the patient, who had a manic episode the first time after a full weekend yoga retreat, and secondly again two months after entering a Zen retreat that she had been associated with for two years.

Notably there's no evidence of causation at all, of course, but more importantly there is also no reliable pattern of repetition despite her persistent involvement with meditation:

She was involved in meditation extensively over a long period before the second episode, she recovered without medication and re-entered the retreat. Of course we don't know if she further episodes, but that the case study only mentions two is a strong indication.

There's no discussion in the case study about other causes other than suggesting insomnia as a result of the practice as a possible cause. But the paper does not present any information to suggest any data on sleep deprivation was collected from the patient.

Maybe the other papers are more convincing, but this paper basically boils down to:

* Some reports of correlation have been made.

* Here's another example of correlation... Where the second incidents happened months into intensive practice, and with patient going back into intensive practice, yet no suggestion it happened more.

If anything, the low number of incidents the author uncovered has further convinced me of the safety of meditation. Maybe people with serious mental illnesses should be a bit careful.

[1] Mania precipitated by meditation: a case report and literature review, Graeme A. Yorston.

And since you can't really measure things well with n=1 you end up with confirmation bias at the end of the day.

I don’t see what is so controversial about this. Lots of people take up exercising as a lifestyle and say they are much better for it. I don’t see what saying ‘yes but there is only one you, maybe you would have felt better without the exercise in this span if time...’ - which means statistics 101 really is not blindly applicable to all venues life. Also why bayesian statistics are sometimes much better in real life situations...

And you would not be able to actually figure out which one it is.

+1

Please learn it from professionals or friends who are already well versed in the practice if you are new to it.

Anecdotal, but I tried anulum vilom ten years back as a remedy for general anxiety, went overboard with no proper guidance, and my BP shot up. It took me a while to understand that the key is to go slow and increase your practice slowly.