Dragons Need Balance - Two Dragon's Den Pitches Uncomfortably Familiar to Power Balance

I used to watch the CBC show Dragon's Den when it first came out and enjoyed it quite a bit. I even played soccer with someone that was on the show which was kinda neat, shout out to Wonton Crunch. With that, it is disappointing that my attention has been drawn to two pitches from the show's 12th Season that each makes the claim that they can instantly improve your balance. Those companies are Neuro Reset and New Age Performance (Seriously that's the name...with that name you're getting lucky to get away with simply not being more balanced for $50, I'd expect  'New Age Performance' to sell you an $1199 dollar pair of cleats that shock your feet and realign your charkras).

Both pitches are of the same nature and make the same claim. People come out, talk about having a product that improves balance by adjusting something, one of the dragons has their balance tested and they are shakey, the product is used and instantly the dragon's balance is now perfect. The dragons are amazed and compete with each other to become partners with the people making the pitch.

For those around for the momentary craze that was Power Balance (I actually wrote a post about Kingston Police selling them in a fundraising campaign)  both pitches seem a little too familiar, as they all involve a balance test, a change that doesn't seem to have an impact on balance, and then instantaneously after the product is used the person's balance has dramatically improved.

How is this done? Well, Brian Brushwood over at Scam School documents a variety of ways that it could be done and explainings the trick of instantaneous improvement in balance. Brian does such a good job that from watching the video once I've now been able to perform the trick on other people and explain how it was done. It's pretty easy to do, and I could see how someone could trick themselves into thinking that something else was the cause of the change in balance. The way to invalidate the balance test so that a person feels off balance in the first test and then when tested again feels that they have much more balance is pretty simple. When you want a person to be off balance push or pull that person at an angle that is away from their center of gravity (pretty much at any an angle away from where their feet are) and if you want them to feel more balanced push/pull towards the center of gravity (towards where their feet are works well). If you watch the Dragon's Den clips you can see that change taking place.

See a difference? 

Look at the direction of the wrist 

When Power Balance was required to show that their claims we different from the trick described above it resulted in a lost court case and a 57 million dollar settlement. Now, those bracelets have to make their claims in the vague way that Q-Ray bracelets do after they too lost a lawsuit involving unsubstantiated claims which resulted in the company having to return 87 million dollars.

With that background, the specific companies and the scientific backing for their claims can be examined, as each has company has a page dedicated to 'science'.

Neuro Reset is said to work through a "subtle energy pattern that wakes up the sensory nerve receptors", That pattern effect is said to be the product of 7 years of clinical research...which doesn't seem to be time well spent because that research wasn't even worth publishing on Neuro Resets's own "The Science" page explaining how it worked, let alone being research published in an academic journal.

This one is more obvious 

Check out his fingers and wrist 

Further, it is interesting that a technology that could improve the function of joints in the back and spine is being marketed to golfers and isn't being used to help people with medical issues that could be resolved if the claims being made were true. 

Neuro Reset even does the classic woo tactic of using the word 'quantum' as a justification in a way that doesn't make any sense, as the device's communication is said to work through quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is complicated, and I won't do it justice here, but it can be broken down into the understanding that when two particles are entangled and the same measurement is made on those particles the result will be the same regardless of the distance between those two particles in what was measured. What is important here is that entanglement shows no way to effect neuropathways in their functioning, and the No-Communication Theorem points out that there is probably no communication between the entangled particles.

On the other hand what is encouraging is that, despite its name, New Age Performance does have a legitimate science page and makes a plausible, non-quantum, claim. The page even has a few real published studies about how bite alignment improves athletic performance and a double-blinded study that found significant results for the New Age Performance style mouthguard. This science page was night and day from Neuro Resets mumbo jumbo, unfortunately, even if those tests were correct none of those tests remotely demonstrated the balance affect seen on Dragon's Den. That test was misleading, unethical and unnecessary, because if the product worked in the way that is documented on companies science page it wasn't needed.

Yet it doesn't seem that the evidence on the side of New Age Performance. While the studies linked on their webpage are positive, there are many negative follow up studies that are ignored, 1 (although it did have an effect on the hight of jumps), 2 (no positive effects), 3 (no positive effects), 4  (no positive effects), 5 (positive effects with power, but otherwise negative), 6 (no positive effects).

It seems that the study into the theory of jaw alignments effect on performance is much more negative than positive, and this isn't just my conclusion it was also the conclusion of the British Advertising Authority. The BAA reviewed similar claims made by Underarmour Performance Mouthware and despite Underarmour having a similar science page to New Age Performance, it was ruled that on multiple claims their ads were misleading and lacked substantiation.

I think the major lesson is that if something is claimed to immediately change your balance through a mechanism that seems strange or is hard to understand then it is likely taking advantage of a balance trick. That said can't the Dragons Den get one Marc Cuban style shark that displays a smidgen of skepticism? They did say it sounded 'too good to be true' it's a disapointed that the questioning stopped there and only further disapointment that each of those companies got offered deals and were legitimized by the whole process. 

Humans Are Naturally Poor at Gauging Probability

Hi again, I hope everyone had a good long weekend or has a good long weekend coming up. Thanks for the upvotes on Reddit, and I'll try to keep the posts coming. I still have a lot of future topics in mind, so I don't anticipate any long delays between posts. If anyone has some additional information to any of my posts that they think would be interesting for me to read, just add it in a comment and I'll check it out.

Now that those issues are out of the way, I'm going to bring up a topic that has long been on my mind, but I have yet to really talk about it. The idea for this post came to me one day when I was playing crib (a card came), with my aunt. We were dealt a hand where I got three 5's and she also got a 5 (There being 6 cards in each hand). She thought that this was miraculous and complained that the deck wasn't shuffled properly, or that something that shouldn't have happened did indeed happen. There is a mistake in this belief that, if not already apparent, will become apparent quite soon, but first I will talk about three examples I know that are semi-akin to this way of thinking, and I think it shows how people are naturally poor at judging probability.

The first one comes from a great webshow, which I will unabashedly endorse, called Scam School with Brain Brushwood.  I forget which episode it comes from (I found it on youtube), but it is a scam that involves my favorite prop, a deck of cards. The other person can shuffle the deck and you just bet them for a drink that after they are done shuffling that two of the same cards will be side by side. There is no trick to this, it is just that the odds are that two of the same card will be beside each other.

Well here is an example of my research leading me to find out my beliefs were wrong. The odds of the same card being beside each other seems to be about 48%, which while higher then I suspect people would think it would be, is actually a little too low to be betting for, although it wouldn't be a bad bet at a casino. Anyone can take my word for it or read this and find out what I did (I also verified it from other sources). So Brain was wrong here, but I still like his show.

Anyway that leads me two my second, and hopefully more correct example of the coin flip example. This one is an interesting example where a teacher asks his math students to either do their homework or fake it. The homework is to flip a coin 200 times and record heads or tails for those flips. At a glance the professor can tell whether the student faked the flips or really did their work. The reason the professor can tell is that people are poor at judging probability. In a trial of 200 coin flips there is what is described as an overwhelming chance that there will be a run of six of the same outcome. Most people, including the students that faked their tests, would think that 6 heads or tails in a row would be unlikely and created results that reflected that. Even the math students were poor a judging probability. If you want to read more about it and learn about something close to this idea named Benford's Law just click here.  

My third example is the one that you are most likely to have heard previously because recently it has been making its rounds around the internet. It is what is referred to as the Monty Hall Problem, named from the Game show Lets Make a Deal, which had the host Monty Hall. The set up is there are 3 doors to choose from and you have to pick a door. After you have picked a door you have the option of keeping the door you picked or switching to the only other unopened door. This is where peoples horrible appreciation for probability comes in. Now it seems like it is a 50/50 proposition because there is one prize and two doors, but in reality, but taking a door away and offering you a door he is giving you two doors for the price of one. The reason is that there is only one prize, and he won't revile a door where the main prize is, so you are getting the chance of the two doors combined, even though the one door has been show to have a fake prize. Switching gives you a 2/3 chance and sticking with your first choice leaves you at the 1/3 you had before a door was revealed. I know this sounds counter intuitive, and people have had many problems with this, but wikipedia does a good job in explaining why that is if you didn't understand my explanation. 

What these three examples show is how easily people error in judging the odds for something, and I don't think I'm in anyway different. I had to look up the information about 2 of the same cards (any pair) being beside each other, and even Brain Brushwood, who was putting his wallet where his mouth was, was getting the odds wrong. It just goes to show why the lottery and casino's can make so much money, people have a really hard time calculating the odds of something, and that is when they are unclouded of beliefs that would lead them to think that they are 'lucky' or that they are 'due'.

Anyone should be able to see the problem in my Aunts logic now. It is the same mistake that people were making when they were faking their coin flips, they don't judge the probability correctly and think that anything like 6 heads in a row or all the 5's being dealt out is something that shouldn't happen, no matter how many flips are done or hands are dealt out. This is the belief that something 1 in a million should never happen, even if that thing is done a million times.

I'm sure people have some interesting stories about people misreading the odds so feel free to post them in the comments, thanks for reading.

- The Moral Skeptic