Safe Speed Forums

The placebo effect is important. Who knows? In an uninformed society, the sight of a soldier waving a high-tech-looking wand around may be enough to dissuade some perpetrators, and perhaps save some people from being mutilated by a bomb. As for using these things to clear mines: I think word of their true efficacy would get around quite quickly, once one or two mine-clearers had been blown to smithereens.

Whom does the placebo effect affect?

Word getting around without the knowledge of the authorities results with huge potential for damage, possibly reversing any benefits resulting from the positive placebo effect.
Once word had got around, the bombers could have a field day smuggling the materials/devices until such time when proper detectors are installed, assuming the dowsing rods didn't eat up all the budget.

Surely folks who can make bombs are smart enough to be able to correctly guess the efficacy of these rods ?

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

I'm sure they did. But the people who would have been blown up before word got around were saved, instead. If it only failed to save those who were blown up after word got around, it was partially succesful, wasn't it?

I'd be glad if I'd been saved by one.

Why “instead”? Would they have been saved if genuinely effective measures were used instead?
It is very unreasonable to assume that no other treatment would have been applied if the placebo wasn’t used.

Also, it could be argued that bombers frequently test the detection systems for weaknesses, or just chance it. So the people who would have been saved by genuinely effective measures were in reality killed because of the ineffective placebo.

Any deterrence from the placebo effect would occur only when the bomb is being transported. It does absolutely nothing if it is instead immobile (e.g. being built) and being searched for by mobile detection systems, simply because the bomb builder/transporter cannot act upon that deterrence. Once a sweep is done and has inevitably found nothing, the bomber will invarably conclude the detection system is totally ineffective – any effect of deterrence is immediately and totally lost.


Again, I would say no.

Remember, budgets aren’t unlimited (especially in those countries).
Unlike real placebos, this one costs money, and its use is at the expense of genuinely effective measures.

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Bearing in mind that quite some number of these believe that a fictional character has told them to go and blow up people who do not believe in their fairy-tale, do you really think so?

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

To get high performance involves high cost. If it costs the same to get more effective measures, then that would be right.

But if it costs much more to get more effective measures, then you can afford less. If cheap measures work partially, then that could be right too.



Only if the benefit of more effective measures is not lessened because you can't afford enough of them. If you can only afford very few more effective measures, it's obvious that it could be more effective to use more less effective measures. That way, you keep the proper, effective measures for rich people, while using cheap, less effective measures for the poor people.

Yes - George Bush and Tony Blair, for two. Barak Obama and David Cameron for two more.

The system in question isn't "less effective"; it is actually non-effective.

You have a valid point about benefit vs. cost. However, it is clear the system in this case provides no benefit whatsoever, apart from a temporary and ignored placebo effect, but even that doesn't apply at all when out-and-about searching for bombs.

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

That doesn't mean they don't understand physics (and from their POV, the character isn’t fictional).

Many scientists believe in abiding by the demands of what others would deem to be "a fictional character".
I work with many physicists and engineers; a significant portion of these believe in these "fictional characters". Indeed their own “fictional character” had the added benefit of having magical powers too !!

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Perhaps you're right - perhaps no-one was deterred by these things. On the other hand, perhaps some bombers were. And if they were, the effect is not temporary, because the people saved still live. These bombers typically take 20 or 60 lives. If one was deterred, then that is worth hundreds of these wands.

But people in Daventry don't understand physics. Christ, even I don't know the difference between a lepton and a muon. Hardly anybody knows how a telly works, let alone a geiger counter or a bomb detector. The bluff could work on Britons, so it could work on Arabs.



Newtons laws are fiction. The laws of science have no mass or energy, and therefore they don't exist either. Methinks it best to stick in the practical domain; anything else is BS. There is a strong case for placebos in human experience - my kids still hold thier teddy bears at night.

And the SCP and the CSW still go out with cameras with the deluded impression that speed is the be all of road safety .Same thing .
So when I avoid walking under a ladder I'm doing it from superstitious grounds ,rather than from the fact that I have spent a lot of time working aloft and lost count of times I've dropped something .(Contrary to your esteemed opinion, items dropped from a height fall DOWN ,not up. Or perhaps you live in an alternative universe where things dropped fall up .)

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

And those that weren't soon realised the true efficacy, as well as understanding there is actually no valid detection mechanism for detection in place at checkpoints (aided by the results from out-and-about searches).

I bet someone would have realised that within the 3 years they have been in use!

I believe there have been a lot of deadly explosions in Iraq ...


The placebo effect itself is temporary, regardless of how permanent the consequences are.

You are taking things in isolation. You have not accounted for those that did get through, and those who realised the minimal possibility of being caught (none beyond random chance).

Such phrases, like "if it saves one life" are totally fallacious, possibly even wantonly disingenuous, if the causal factor that saved that one individual life had also resulted with the deaths of many others.


There indeed is, if they're not at the expense of genuine treatments, such as "often replacing physical inspections of vehicles"

At $60k a pop, that's a lot of sniffer dogs not bought.
$85m in Iraq alone is onehellof an expensive placebo!

Ammar Tuma, a member of the Iraqi Parliament’s Security and Defense Committee:
“This company not only caused grave and massive losses of funds, but it has caused grave and massive losses of the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians, by the hundreds and thousands, from attacks that we thought we were immune to because we have this device,”

Since being deployed in 2008: "Despite the controversy, the device is still being used at checkpoints across Iraq." [Wiki]
Do you reckon the placebo effect is still going or long, long gone?

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

In some circumstances!

I'm referring to the explosions in Iraq that didn't occur.



Yes - I'm taking no notice of those that did get through. I'm talking about the ones that didn't.



Why was Ammar Tumawe stupid enough to believe the wands worked, but the bombers were clever enough to know they don't work? Are you saying that the bombers are more astute than the Iraqi Government, who bought these things. No wonder the country is buggered.

I'm sorry to rake this up again, but it's mind boggling that Ammar Tuma, a member of the Iraqi Parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, didn't know that wands don't work. Who is this guy, and is he still working there? Why on earth have Iraqis got cretins running the place?

That's enough. We allowed 'play on', but this is getting silly, again!

It has come to attention that the user bilyfat is a previously banned poster.
This user's account has been deactivated.

Pity - was waiting for his answer when I asked for a non assisted example.

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Yeah, now we'll never know under what circumstances things fall upwards.

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

I suppose technically speaking, thinking outside the box, any reference to up, down, clockwise or anticlockwise is all relative to where you and it are. Something in New Zealand ‘falling down’ is falling up in relation to me here in the UK isn't it?

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.