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Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

But it could also make for an interesting paper, “We tried putting healing crystals above cancer patients but it didn’t seem to make any difference.”

But then you have competing bad outcomes:

The cancer patients aren’t given any other treatment, so you’re effectively harming them through lack of action/treatment
The cancer patients are given other (likely real) treatments, meaning your paper is absolutely meaningless

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tias@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Some people will refuse other treatments regardless, so you’re not changing the outcome.

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whosepoopisonmybuttocks@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There’s certainly a lot to discuss, relative to experimental design and ethics. Peer review and good design hopefully minimizes the clearly undesirable scenarios you describe as well as other subtle sources of error.

I was really just trying to explain what we’re looking at on op’s graph.

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