What I learned gathering nootropic ratings (2022)

> 5 - 9 means strong effects, definitely not placebo.

It’s impossible for anyone to say this convincingly about their own experience. If it were easy to tell whether an effect was due to placebo, we wouldn’t need blinded trials!

Actually, a lof of blind trials are hard to run precisely because it's so obvious if you're not on the placebo side.

Like...nobody could ever take a macro dose of LSD or mushrooms and not know it.

That's because it's obvious due to effects other than the one you're trying to observe. Which is of course the case when you're dealing with psychedelics (and of course many other drugs).

I'm still in doubt about the effectiveness of parachutes, there's never been a large double blind trial.

I'm stealing this one instead of using "it was revealed to me in a dream."

We certainly shouldn't accept subjective evaluations as proof of effectiveness, but that does not give it zero value. The more subtle the effect or the more invested the subject is in establishing the effectiveness of an intervention (or any of many other confounders) the less likely it is to represent proof.

But it is evidence. Think of this as more observational science rather than experimental science; we have to do some work to determine whether it is worth trying to do blinded experiments to validate an effective, and this is that work.