I’ll be away for two weeks hiking the Hundred Mile Wilderness and Mount Katahdin in northern Maine. In the meantime, here is a repost of one of my favourite posts:

Every year, The Edge Foundation asks some of the smartest people in the world a question. A couple of my favourites from the past were “What have you changed your mind about and why?” and “What is your dangerous idea?”

This year’s question is the best yet and was put forth by linguist and Montrealer Stephen Pinker: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s scientific toolkit?” There’s one idea in there that I’m really happy about, although the person who said it kind of surprised me.

Richard Dawkins thinks that the scientific concept everyone should be familiar with is the “double-blind control experiment” which is the gold standard of medical research (and, I think, the gold standard for a lot of non-medical research as well). Well, not quite. He should have said–and maybe meant to say–double-blind randomized control experiment. Medical researchers don’t just randomize patients for fun. It’s pretty important.

I tried to find a good quick explanation on the internet. First I came across this video, but quickly realized the explanation is in American Sign Language. I thought I meant be able to decode it already knowing the most important parts of the double-blind RCT (as they’re known). I couldn’t. But I did enjoy some of the gestures.

Then I found this:

Not bad. The voice is a little bland and there are some mistakes in there like not every RCT has a group receiving a placebo or control because sometimes it’s not ethical to withhold treatment for the sake of a study. Also the blindfolds are a little misleading. They explain it the right way but I wish it was clearer that blinding doesn’t mean blindfolding. Although, it creates a hilarious visual of blindfolded researchers and patients walking around trying to conduct a study while the statisticians run their analyses without being able to see what they’re doing. If that was the epitome of science, it might actually be a little more popular.

Dawkins has five reasons why learning about double-blind RCTs could help:

1. We would learn not to generalise from anecdotes.

2. We would learn how to assess the likelihood that an apparently important effect might have happened by chance alone.

3. We would learn how extremely difficult it is to eliminate subjective bias, and that subjective bias does not imply dishonesty or venality of any kind. This lesson goes deeper. It has the salutary effect of undermining respect for authority, and respect for personal opinion.

4. We would learn not to be seduced by homeopaths and other quacks and charlatans, who would consequently be put out of business.

5. We would learn critical and sceptical habits of thought more generally, which not only would improve our cognitive toolkit but might save the world.

I like numbers 3 and 5. I think convincing people not to do numbers 1 and 4 will require more explanation than how a double-blind RCT works. Number 2 requires knowledge of statistics (knowledge that I think could be simple to teach too), not just knowledge of RCTs.

I wonder what a difference it would make if every single high-school student was exposed to a few weeks of learning about double-blind RCTs in grade 9 or 11 or whatever grade you learned biology in. I actually think it would be a low cost-high reward intervention. Although we wouldn’t know how effective an intervention it was until we did an RCT on it.