That is less about AA and other treatment programs and more a look at bad statistics and why the studies were bad. It is absolutely bloody fascinating and y'all should read it even if AA itself doesn't interest you.

I find this stuff fascinating as well. There's a BBC radio program where they pick apart whichever statistics are making the news that week, and it's great fun to guess the fallacy. This is as far as my interest in statistics goes though - I'm dreadful with numbers.

I don't know if these BBC radio podcasts are available outside the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd/broadcasts/2014/09

Yep. I can play it on the website, and it's also available of iTunes here in New Zealand.

Good one. Works in US.

I love stuff like this! What I hate is when people who are only half-literate in statistics start criticizing stuff. I heard this the other day: "This survey oversampled black males! These results aren't representative of the country! It's flawed!" Take a class on survey design, learn some about weighting, then you can talk about oversampling.

There's a great website on AA (it's against it) called Orange Papers, it's ridiculously enormous, with enough writing to take weeks to get through. Goes through the statistics, fall-off rates, sexual harassment from sponsors, the amount of people who quit, relapse, suicides, the cult-like atmosphere, all sorts of people who aren't success stories that get treated as such. There's also a very good, also ridiculously in-depth chapter on critical thinking and propaganda, Propaganda and Debating Techniques.

Not related to the AA topic (or is it?), but is there an SE minecraft server?

Yes. But it's currently running Agrarian Skies mod, not vanilla.

I am still somewhat of a minecraft noob. What is different with that mod? Could I just putt around and do my own thing anyway?

Agrarian Skies is a mod pack (you have to use a special launcher called "Feed The Beast" to run it) where you start on a small floating island with limited resources and you have quests to make stuff and build up your resources. It's not that easy to putt around on it.

Thanks for the info. My little minecraft community shut down a few weeks ago, and I was just looking for a replacement. I only ever get on a couple times a week for small amounts of time, so I guess I will have to keep looking.

So this confirms that it must've been through here that I found Slate Star Codex. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how I stumbled upon it.

The article mentions that voluntary AA members are already biased among alcoholics because they want to quit and are being compared to alcoholics who possibly have less desire to quit. How do you control for that?

It won't do to use the involuntary AA members; we don't know whether they do or do not want to quit nor how much. As for non-AA members, our only gauge for how much they want to quit is whether they enter a program (like AA), which seems tautological.

Perhaps it is less important to see how often it works, and instead to look for common factors between successes and failures. We should find out who it does and doesn't work for, and why. It could be that for certain types of people (based on personality, income, lifestyle, and other variables) AA is almost always effective, while for other types, maybe it is almost never effective.

I doubt there is any one definitive working treatment, and over time we will get better at selecting treatment types best suited to the individual.

There's some evidence that AA works, but only if you are already religious. If you aren't strongly religious, if you're atheist, or there on court order? No benefit.

Back when the Soviet Union still existed, after Glasnost, AA was invited into the country. Seems the Soviet Union had a bad alcohol abuse problem, and they were at the point they would try anything. So some AA members (there is no professional or counciling class in aa) went over to help the locals that might be interested set up some groups. When one of them returned, he was asked by someone," If the Soviet Union is an athiest country, how do they deal with the God thing?" Astute guy, he just said that it is God as you under stand him. If you believe there is no God, you start from there. For it to work, you just need reliance on a Power greater than yourself. You can use a "group of drunks" or "the Moscow Police Department" if you want.

"Power greater than yourself" is still being told how to think and what to believe, and is a term still universally interpreted to mean "God". It is requiring non-believers to conform and blend in with someone they do not want to, no different from telling them to just say the school prayer and shut up about it.

Seems unconstitutional to ever legally require someone to take AA.

You don't have to believe in "God" to not believe in free will. "God" is just the corruption of a label that some cultures slap on to the idea of the universe being a whole system. If you're a miniscule gear in a machine, than the machine is clearly a higher power than you. That's the point of the whole "power greater than yourself" bit, unless you're capable of changing the past you have absolutely no control over the present moment. That means that right here, right now, is inevitable, blameless. The point is to change your approach to the moment in order to change how you respond to it.

Since all reality is merely my perception of reality (exists only in my head insofar as I know), I am unable to genuinely believe in any power greater than myself. In fact, I am unable to believe anything exists outside of myself at all.

And let's not even get started on whether I exist.

Am I supposed to take this seriously? Flaunting a functionally lacking philosophy as a reason why you can't change or comprehend only supports my claim that how you approach effects how you respond.

Oh, I never said I could not change, just that I am completely and utterly unwilling to acknowledge a higher power because it is against my constitutionally protected philosophical beliefs. My 12th step would be acknowledging that all the people I perceive also have needs and feelings equal to my own that I perceive, and their being imaginary does not make them any less real or important than me. By this token, for all the lives they have touched and the presence they have in people's hearts, I would argue that fictional characters are at least psychologically/emotionally real.

How is my belief that reality is unconfirmable any more ridiculous from a legal standpoint than the existence of God?

If you carry it all the way through and everyone else only exists in my head, then hurting others is hurting myself, and why would I want to do that? Everyone's suffering then becomes my suffering. I see a lack of belief in distinct reality as the ultimate form of universal empathy and love.

I don't need anyone else to see it that way. It really don't matter if they do or not. But for my day to day functioning, it is much easier if people accept me for what I am and allow me to do the same for them.

Yeah, I'm just gonna stop it here.

I am sorry my life philosophy bothers you. Should I just not ever mention it again?

I honestly do not understand what I have done wrong, but I feel like you are implying I am supposed to change for some reason and refusing to do so.

I will never not be confused by whatever just happened here.